9 ms·

How YouTube converted people to flat Earth

55 points by stuartmemo 7y ago

pcunite 7y ago
company says it's taking action to prevent conspiracy videos from reaching large numbers of people I'm not afraid of conspiracies. Are you?
- sabertoothed 7y ago
  Yes. People are remarkably dumb and gullible.
  - mattigames 7y ago
    It's mostly a fault of the education system, countries with better education such as Japan do not have it this many gullible people (per capita), USA and other countries do not teach even the most basic skepticism going as far as teaching completely ridiculous things such as creationism inside the schools themselves under the guise of "tolerance" and "teach both sides".
    - tombert 7y ago
      Back up, before you crap all over American schools, public schools don't teach creationism, and the attempt to do so resulted in court case ruling it unconstitutional. Also, do you have any direct evidence in your claim that Japanese are more skeptical? The Aum Shinrikyo death cult got almost 10% of the vote in the mid-90's.
      - mattigames 7y ago
        The amount of studies about skeptisim and gullibility around the world are near none, but there is some data about US highschoolers consider true and it shows dangerous trends such as 1 every 4 students believing astrology is real: https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-148278044/skepticism-in-the-classroom-a-high-school-science https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-148278044/skepticism-in...
        tombert 7y ago
        I would need to see comparisons with the rest of the world before that has any relevance to my point. Kids will believe lots of stupid things. According to todayifoundout, US schools aren't nearly as bad as the meme likes to portray them [1]. [1] https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/01/kids-get-summer-school/ https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/01/kids-get-su...
        mattigames 7y ago
        The thing is that we don't know how related the other areas of education are with skepticism; if I would have to guess I would say reading and science are the most related but that's just a guess, the best path forward would be to actually measure skepticism, stuff like how good are people at spotting fake news from the real ones and such.
    - brigandish 7y ago
      I live in Japan and I'm shocked at how many people here believe in patently absurd nonsense. I wouldn't be surprised if someone mentions to me, for example, that they saw a ghost recently, or went to a fortune teller.
      - mattigames 7y ago
        At least for the ghosts thing, belief in ghosts, demons and spirits has been deep-rooted in Japanese folklore throughout history[0]. Also there is different kinds of "believe", for example if some Japanese lady said a ghost got her pregnant I think nobody would believe her, my guess is that they believe to a point but not to the point to spark risky behavior from it (e.g. antivaxxers) [0] http://www.asianart.com/articles/rubin/ http://www.asianart.com/articles/rubin/
        brigandish 7y ago
        You don't believe modern Japanese believe in absurdities from the past because it's part of folklore but it's not okay for Americans to believe in absurdities from the past because… the Japanese have a better education system? (Which I'd also count as an absurd belief because I only hear complaints about it.) And are you really going to give lessons on the mythology of Japan to people who live in Japan? That's perhaps a tad presumptuous, especially considering it's like telling people living in Britain that witches are part of British folklore. I mean, please.
        mattigames 7y ago
        You miss-represented all the points, AND skipped the one where I said they don't take such superstitions as seriously as their American counterparts.
        brigandish 7y ago
        An anecdote: A friend of a friend's son was very sick in the stomach. She went to see a fortune teller to ask what was wrong. The fortune teller took her money, did a reading, and told her she needed to take her son to a doctor. I found that amusing. I have tons of these, most of them amuse me. Try living here and (among the many other notions you have of the place that are no doubt wrong) you'll see there's a huge amount of superstition, regardless of education level. If you can't afford to come, https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/ https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/ is a good resource. It's amazing how much that sounds absurd is true.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I think flat eartherism is stupid but I really don’t want YouTube start censoring stuff. That’s a dangerous path.
  - ss2003 7y ago
    They already effectively censor via algorithm. They are a monopoly that should be broken up.
    - MBCook 7y ago
      How, exactly, would you ‘break up’ YouTube? How do you divide the whole into reasonable parts?
      - pwinnski 7y ago
        You start by separating it from Google, so that it needs to compete with other video-sharing sites on a more-level playing field.
        MBCook 7y ago
        YouTube is the 900lb gorilla. How would breaking apart from Google (which is not what was suggested) help other video sites? YouRube is FAR past critical mass. It IS online video. And I can’t think of anything you could do short of shutting the site down that would fix that and give competitors a level playing field.
        pwinnski 7y ago
        A big chunk of YouTube's dominance comes from Google's other lines of business including online search and online ads. See the other post today from a former competitor[0] for an example. The reasoning is that stripping YouTube of Alphabet's deep pockets from advertising would give competitors a chance to monetize as well as YouTube, without fearing that Google will choke off their air supply to preserve YouTube's dominance. It might not be enough, but it would be a start. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20472351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20472351
- RandomTisk 7y ago
  And frankly, I'm not convinced it's gaining any kind of new followers at all. 20 years ago it was virtually unheard of to encounter a flat earth believer, but thanks to Youtube and the Internet at large all kinds of fringe beliefs are brought to the masses' consciousness. That doesn't mean that those beliefs are finding new adherents. It doesn't give fascists license to crack down on anyone's beliefs either. Google/Youtube censoring anyone over this is literally doing more harm than good in every conceivable way.
  - scrollaway 7y ago
    But it is. No matter how stupid you think a belief is, giving it an audience does give it new followers. The more stupid it is, the more of an audience it needs to gain significant amounts of new followers… but thanks to youtube, you can have hundreds of thousands of people watching a video and that's a drop in the ocean. And it's not flat-earth BS that's actually harmful, it's the spread of other kinds of political propaganda which radicalizes people. For some reason, it's not controversial to say "we're banning ISIS propaganda videos which radicalize young muslims", but it is controversial to say "we're banning political propaganda videos which radicalize young americans". Young or old, actually.
    - transreal 7y ago
      I spoke to a flat earther once. Trying to convince her via science - explaining how GPS works, showing her images from space, etc, was not convincing her. So I tried to understand her mindset, and just talked about her life. Turned out she was abused by a parent who was "doing it for her own good" - it was a horrible story. Her whole childhood was a lie, she was trained by the parent not to trust her instincts, and to believe something false so the parent could benefit. My takeaway was that her childhood experience taught her that you can't trust people and that "big lies" are possible, and so she latched onto the flat earth thing due to that.
      - brigandish 7y ago
        This reminds me of something I read of Thich Nhat Hanh's - don't answer the question, answer the questioner. The belief they're espousing is really secondary to the attitude that leads them to buy into it. I find your approach as not only more likely to effect positive change with that, it's just more compassionate and respectful. There's an almost palpable element of dehumanisation among those ridiculing them and wanting to silence them, as if holding on to untruths makes them unworthy to exist in our society.
- tombert 7y ago
  I don't want to get too political here, but the propagation of Alex-Jones-esque conspiracy can be very influential to a larger-than-it-should-be percentage of the population, who will vote in demagogues who perpetuate these narratives.
  - bijsv 7y ago
    The opposite of Alex Jones is not virtue and knowledge, but Alex-Jones-of-the-opposing-political-side
    - bastawhiz 7y ago
      Sorry, what's the opposing-political-side of "Sandy Hook was a hoax"? Or "Hillary Clinton is a pedophile operating out of the basement of a pizza restaurant"? The notion that all speech has an opposite but equally-biased counterpart is simply not correct.
      - bijsv 7y ago
        I'm not American but I've read laughable things like "trump is a russian agent", "children are being kept in concentration camps at the border", and more I can't be bothered to remember. You have to understand that these beliefs (the ones you and I have described) are held by almost nobody. And only very crazy people are going to act violently about them. And they would eventually find any other excuse to act violently.
        fzeroracer 7y ago
        Except we literally are holding children in squalid conditions at our borders. This is well documented. Whether or not they're concentration camps depends on how strongly you feel about child abuse.
  - FakeComments 7y ago
    The argument is legitimate media is no better: - Supporting Jussie Smollett - Supporting the Antifa ambushes on Andy Ngo and ICE in the NW - Defaming the Covington kids All cases in recent history, where the media has either supported terrorism or been reckless in their reporting. You want to talk about conspiracy theories, while the media perpetuates racist hoaxes and armed terrorism? Why shut down Alex Jones, and his nutty claims, just to support that kind of media? Who gets to decide that Alex Jones should be an unperson, but beating Andy Ngo is okay? Is it Google? The traditional media? Whatever harm the conspiracies cause, fighting against the social engineering lies from traditional media is a higher priority.
- i_am_proteus 7y ago
  It's easy for scientifically-minded people who inhabit communities of similar thinkers to underestimate the power of propaganda. Human psychology hasn't changed, though, and propaganda is still powerful.
- brigandish 7y ago
  I'm afraid of real conspiracies, but the main stream media seems far less interested in them than this nonsense that I've yet to be convinced is any more harmful than any other weird hobby.
mruts 7y ago
It’s almost like there’s a conspiracy theory to censor information and manipulate public discourse. Hmmm... The current centralized structure of the web is broken. Any person who believes in classical liberalism should find this disgusting.
tjansen 7y ago
If you censor conspiracy videos, you're validating them. It looks like you're trying to hide the truth. There is just no way of getting rid of them, unless you want to censor all of the internet.
- SquareWheel 7y ago
  They will feel validated regardless. That is the nature of conspiracy theorists. It's still advantageous to discourage the spread of misinformation. Nobody is obligated to host that content, and certainly not make it readily accessible on their platforms.
  - tjansen 7y ago
    I think demonetizing them is a better solution. It discourages their production, but creates less attention.
  - loudtieblahblah 7y ago
    >They will feel validated regardless. That is the nature of conspiracy theorists. What are you going to define as a conspiracy theory? Should we not talk about the JFK assassination possibilities? The Gulf of Tolkien incident? MK Ultra? The Business Plot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot) Where are you going to draw the line between conspiracy theories that are probably false and ones worth exploring? Who's the arbiter of that? is the fact that Trump may have raped a 13 year old sex slave a conspiracy theory? Or do we only use that term with Alex Jones rants about false flags?
    - SquareWheel 7y ago
      There is no need for an arbiter. However, statistically, the majority of conspiracy theories are going to be invalid. As they grow in scale the likelihood of being real also goes down. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35411684 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35411684 If there is strong evidence for such a conspiracy, then it's gone beyond theory (colloquially) at that point. By that definition the term is like "alternative medicine". If it worked, it'd be called medicine. Additionally, it's worth pointing out that the existence of a previous conspiracy being true is not actually evidence that later conspiracies are also true. MK Ultra and co are the exception rather than the norm.
camjohnson26 7y ago
Behind the Curve is a great documentary about the strange resurgence of flat earth theory in the last few years. It covers a few of the major YouTube personalities. I think flat earth’s comeback is actually a good thing and YouTube is making a mistake. It’s true that nobody 30 years ago believed the earth was flat but they probably couldn’t articulate why they believed that. People who are brave enough today to re-examine their beliefs should be admired, not ridiculed. Of course flat earthers are wrong, but the coolest part of the documentary is when members of the movement start spending thousands of dollars to conduct experiments to prove their theory. At the end one of them gets a contradictory result to what he expected, and you can see the doubt start to form in his eyes as he smiles and just says something like “Oh, that’s interesting, that’s very interesting.” YouTube has given nonconformists a platform where they can be honest and be themselves, and it’s unfortunate they look to be trying to take that away. Of course some people on there will hold views that are frankly stupid, but I’d say it’s better than having everyone believing the same thing out of a sense of conformity.
- dejawu 7y ago
  HBomberguy's "Flat Earth: A Measured Response" [0] is also an interesting look into the present-day flat earth "community". [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gFsOoKAHZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gFsOoKAHZg
- Kaveren 7y ago
  you can say the same thing about hypothetical people who assert 2 + 2 = 5. there's nothing cool about it, or people experimenting and starting to doubt that 2 + 2 = 5. nothing would be lost if nobody believed the earth was flat. this is not admirable.
  - wongarsu 7y ago
    But people who believe that earth is flat will always exist, it's just a question of how to deal with them. Letting people doubt and experimentally prove fundamental ideas is healthy (and how many a revolution in physics started). We just have to ensure these people don't get shut in echo chambers.
sascha_sl 7y ago
This totally can't be applied to ironic fascism. People like PewDiePie are totally not playing into that.
- corndoge 7y ago
  People converted themselves to flat Earth. YouTube videos don't represent anything special except that some of them occupied the side of the spectrum corresponding to what people already wanted to hear. Ditto fascism. It is not anybody's job to curate content to prevent weak minded people from believing the "wrong" things - that is called censorship and censorship is worse than some weak minded people becoming couch-potato fascists.
- mopsi 7y ago
  > This totally can't be applied to ironic fascism. People like PewDiePie are totally not playing into that. And him playing "Papers, please" while wearing a hat with hammer and sickle[1] is a secret plot to convert the youth of America into commies, right? I'm baffled to see such McCarthyism. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsWQfZl-Xtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsWQfZl-Xtc
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
typenil 7y ago
This push to censor wrong ideas instead of compete with them is misguided at best. And then there's the nerve to pretend like there isn't some kind of intentional social engineering going on with internet platforms. If the kinds of policies I see journalists pushing for on YouTube were in place before the Snowden leaks, they would've been suppressing any videos talking about the NSA's spying on American citizens. But we can't risk letting people try different ideas. They might disagree with us. They're not smart enough to make their own decisions. Better step in.
- tzs 7y ago
  > This push to censor wrong ideas instead of compete with them is misguided at best I don't think countering wrong ideas by competing with them works well any more. It used to, but technology changes over the last few decades have given a big advantage to the wrong ideas. This comment, from a thread a few months ago, goes into more detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19772300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19772300
  - loudtieblahblah 7y ago
    The ethical problems of having "truth arbiters" seems pretty simple when it comes to flat earth stuff. Or anti-vaxx stuff. Or maybe even climate change. But once established - the power to control society we're handing over to a handful of corporations is immense and it will bleed into subjects that are a lot murkier. It's worth it to compete. B/c centralizing and handing over authority to a handful of tech companies to determine what is and what isn't allowed to be said .. this is something that goes way beyond all the freedom of speech stuff where people are merely offended. This is dangerous territory. And it's more dangerous than allowing idiots to spin their wheels with their stupid ideas.
    - krapp 7y ago
      No one is handing the power to control society or authority over what is and isn't allowed to be said at that scale to Google or any "handful of corporations." What is said on Youtube or any other large social media platform is not the limitations of what is said in society, nor can Youtube control society beyond its own platform. It makes no more sense to argue that Youtube trying to enforce some standards, however arbitrary or biased, amounts to "the power to control society" than it would have to argue that having three television stations meant those networks "controlled society," or that the Encyclopedia Britannica controlled the English language.
tobsmagoats 7y ago
If you go looking far enough to validate an opinion that you have you will find "evidence". Awful clickbait title BBC for shame!
ngngngng 7y ago
I LOVE the flat earth theory. Obviously It's wrong, but it's so fun to think about how people convince themselves of it. They claim that it's all about empirical evidence. But spend a few minutes on their site and you'll realize that's bogus. Such as their reasoning for why the sun sets. What they're really saying is "Only trust what you can see, but also you can't trust what you can see"
- buildzr 7y ago
  I suppose when you put it that way, it's basically a conspiracy version of "Reflections on Trusting Trust". https://www.archive.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf https://www.archive.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p7...
- wool_gather 7y ago
  I also have a strange enjoyment for learning about the elaborate revisions people try to make to the world of facts. If you haven't tried reading any pyramidology, I recommend checking it out. Christopher Dunn is particularly good; he's a trained mechanical engineer and uses that expertise in his arguments.
sunseb 7y ago
How do you explain lunar eclipses (the Earth's shadow is round)? How do you explain retrograde motions of planets? These 2 simple observations explain why we live on a round Earth that revolves around the Sun. (That said, I am against censorship of any kind. People should be free to believe whatever they want.)
- imglorp 7y ago
  Not to mention going outside and LOOKING at man made items like satellites and space stations as they pass overhead. How does your GPS work? Get yourself an RTL-SDR and watch the traffic yourself, read the ephemeris, and correlate with your observations. Build your own Focault pendulum, and explain the observations. And hundreds of other phenomena you can observe and measure yourself. There are 18 spacefaring nations. There are hundreds of spacecraft companies with about 3,000 satellites and thousands more launches, spending hundreds of billions $$. If ANY of this was made up, it would involve about a half million people keeping a secret in the conspiracy. (edit - that's just space industry. astronomers, cosmologists, LIGO, EHT, etc, geologists, including the oil companies.. add another million maybe?) So we're either talking about willfull trolling, ignorance, and illness, or malice. I would be more inclined to believe malice, in the form of that family spending millions [1] to spread antivax propaganda. Perhaps it's a more general anti-science thrust to control the populace. There, it's a conspiracy in the opposite direction. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/meet-the-new-york-couple-donating-millions-to-the-anti-vax-movement/2019/06/18/9d791bcc-8e28-11e9-b08e-cfd89bd36d4e_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/meet-...
  - JaimeThompson 7y ago
    The FE community basically refuses to do any radio based research. If you ask them why the radio emissions of the Sun go away after it sets they get upset and delete your comments because it goes against their idea that the Sun is just moving away from us and not setting.
- ulucs 7y ago
  I don't need to, people before Galileo already did :^) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle Just goes to show that with enough variables, you can fit any data you have into any shape you want
EventH- 7y ago
A few concerns with this story: 1. How big is this 'flat earth movement' really? The video claims it 'caught fire around 2015-16' but gives no specifics. This is unfortunately typical for these sort of 'we need to do something' arguments—no sense of the magnitude of the problem is given. 2. This argument for censorship is often made without a limiting principle, as it is here. "Books are a disturbing platform for conspiracy theories" works just as well. 3. There always have been and will be conspiracy theories, whether 9/11, Moon Landing, JFK, Illuminati or a thousand others. We don't seem to be very concerned with these. Why should we care about flat eartherism, especially as it seems rather benign in comparison? 4. Isn't the obvious response to make a point-by-point refutation to their most convincing claims? The well-argued truth is going to be more convincing than a silly hypothesis.
- komali2 7y ago
  > The well-argued truth is going to be more convincing than a silly hypothesis. Flat Earthers are regularly presented with well argued truth and are not convinced, so this point is incorrect.
  - buildzr 7y ago
    That's true of anyone who believes something with the utmost conviction - but we're talking about the general population here, not just those already into flat earth.
BitwiseFool 7y ago
Does it really matter if someone believes the earth is flat? What practical effect does that actually have on society? I can't help but think most flat-earthers are just after attention and the desire to correct them is a feedback loop.
- pjc50 7y ago
  This is the non-political version. There are lots of far more political videos that cause real problems, such as the Alex Jones ones, pizzagate, QAnon etc. The underlying point is that Youtube's reccomendation algorithm has a significant effect on society as a whole, and this effect can be very negative.
icxa 7y ago
Really this should be "how the proliferation of disinformation enabled by the internet converted people to flat Earth." Also not helped by the (warranted) declining trust in legacy media sources.
JaimeThompson 7y ago
There are a lot of comments talking about how Youtube should not censor flat Earth but something that people need to keep in mind is how much the Flat Earth youtube community censors. If you point out their errors, their mistakes, or basically anything that goes against what they know to be true they ban you and delete your comments. As a group censorship doesn't appear to bother them just as long as they are the ones in control of the censoring.
tehabe 7y ago
It seems to me, that most flat earthers already believed in some conspiracy theories so, they just add another one. What puzzles me the most about flat earther is, how much the shape of the earth is part of their identity. I mean for my daily life the shape of the earth doesn't matter. So for me personally it doesn't matter if the earth is round, flat, or shaped like a banana. it just happened that the earth is round.
rchaud 7y ago
> "One researcher found that of attendees at a flat Earth conference, nearly all said they first came to the idea through the video-sharing platform." Aside from shilling time shares, MLM schemes and recruiting for a cult of some sort, I can't think of anything that would necessitate a "Flat Earth conference". I'm convinced the the only reason these hoaxes exist is to identify high quality leads for obvious snake-oil products. It's similar to how the ye olde Nigerian prince scams are made to sound as absurd as possible, so you know that people who respond to them have a high likelihood of converting.
helen___keller 7y ago
It's more than just flat earth too. There's many strains of conspiracy holes on youtube - you can spend all day watching people predict the rapture is coming (this year for real this time!), of course there's the standard political extremism strains of youtube if you're into that, and so on. The problem is that people learn to trust personalities, and then those personalities can spread ideas regardless of their merit. If you start by denouncing the brainwashing of the mainstream consensus, just about any idea can be rationalized with enough effort. And to top it all off, Youtube and other online platforms offer a profit model for personalities who can garner attention (not to mention the softer connections to money and fame that come with being an "influencer") Do so many of these personalities actually believe in a flat earth? Personally, I've had my doubts from the beginning. I follow a few communities on Twitch, for example, and you see personalities pop up all the time, often by being controversial. I've seen people pop up, often leveraging flat earth or anti-vax as a tool to make themselves more edgy. Sometimes they make it too obvious that they're just trying to be controversial and it gives away the act - one personality on twitch trying to make his debut, for example, claimed that his childhood best friend grew gills and swam away in the river after a vaccine. To his credit, it worked in the short term and the show brought him back for a few more segments. Frankly, I hope we as a society will come to learn sooner rather than later that public personalities on the internet can't be trusted. For some reason, people have learned this lesson for public personalities on TV, on the radio, and so on - who really trusts the mainstream news these days? - and yet these same folks turn into their favorite strain of youtube conspiracy to learn on the daily what the world has been hiding from them and what truth the mainstream has buried like a treasure, only to be found on youtube.

55 points by stuartmemo 7y ago

company says it's taking action to prevent conspiracy videos from reaching large numbers of people I'm not afraid of conspiracies. Are you?

sabertoothed 7y ago
Yes. People are remarkably dumb and gullible.
- mattigames 7y ago
  It's mostly a fault of the education system, countries with better education such as Japan do not have it this many gullible people (per capita), USA and other countries do not teach even the most basic skepticism going as far as teaching completely ridiculous things such as creationism inside the schools themselves under the guise of "tolerance" and "teach both sides".
  - tombert 7y ago
    Back up, before you crap all over American schools, public schools don't teach creationism, and the attempt to do so resulted in court case ruling it unconstitutional. Also, do you have any direct evidence in your claim that Japanese are more skeptical? The Aum Shinrikyo death cult got almost 10% of the vote in the mid-90's.
    - mattigames 7y ago
      The amount of studies about skeptisim and gullibility around the world are near none, but there is some data about US highschoolers consider true and it shows dangerous trends such as 1 every 4 students believing astrology is real: https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-148278044/skepticism-in-the-classroom-a-high-school-science https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-148278044/skepticism-in...
      - tombert 7y ago
        I would need to see comparisons with the rest of the world before that has any relevance to my point. Kids will believe lots of stupid things. According to todayifoundout, US schools aren't nearly as bad as the meme likes to portray them [1]. [1] https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/01/kids-get-summer-school/ https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/01/kids-get-su...
        mattigames 7y ago
        The thing is that we don't know how related the other areas of education are with skepticism; if I would have to guess I would say reading and science are the most related but that's just a guess, the best path forward would be to actually measure skepticism, stuff like how good are people at spotting fake news from the real ones and such.
  - brigandish 7y ago
    I live in Japan and I'm shocked at how many people here believe in patently absurd nonsense. I wouldn't be surprised if someone mentions to me, for example, that they saw a ghost recently, or went to a fortune teller.
    - mattigames 7y ago
      At least for the ghosts thing, belief in ghosts, demons and spirits has been deep-rooted in Japanese folklore throughout history[0]. Also there is different kinds of "believe", for example if some Japanese lady said a ghost got her pregnant I think nobody would believe her, my guess is that they believe to a point but not to the point to spark risky behavior from it (e.g. antivaxxers) [0] http://www.asianart.com/articles/rubin/ http://www.asianart.com/articles/rubin/
      - brigandish 7y ago
        You don't believe modern Japanese believe in absurdities from the past because it's part of folklore but it's not okay for Americans to believe in absurdities from the past because… the Japanese have a better education system? (Which I'd also count as an absurd belief because I only hear complaints about it.) And are you really going to give lessons on the mythology of Japan to people who live in Japan? That's perhaps a tad presumptuous, especially considering it's like telling people living in Britain that witches are part of British folklore. I mean, please.
        mattigames 7y ago
        You miss-represented all the points, AND skipped the one where I said they don't take such superstitions as seriously as their American counterparts.
        brigandish 7y ago
        An anecdote: A friend of a friend's son was very sick in the stomach. She went to see a fortune teller to ask what was wrong. The fortune teller took her money, did a reading, and told her she needed to take her son to a doctor. I found that amusing. I have tons of these, most of them amuse me. Try living here and (among the many other notions you have of the place that are no doubt wrong) you'll see there's a huge amount of superstition, regardless of education level. If you can't afford to come, https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/ https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/ is a good resource. It's amazing how much that sounds absurd is true.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
I think flat eartherism is stupid but I really don’t want YouTube start censoring stuff. That’s a dangerous path.
- ss2003 7y ago
  They already effectively censor via algorithm. They are a monopoly that should be broken up.
  - MBCook 7y ago
    How, exactly, would you ‘break up’ YouTube? How do you divide the whole into reasonable parts?
    - pwinnski 7y ago
      You start by separating it from Google, so that it needs to compete with other video-sharing sites on a more-level playing field.
      - MBCook 7y ago
        YouTube is the 900lb gorilla. How would breaking apart from Google (which is not what was suggested) help other video sites? YouRube is FAR past critical mass. It IS online video. And I can’t think of anything you could do short of shutting the site down that would fix that and give competitors a level playing field.
        pwinnski 7y ago
        A big chunk of YouTube's dominance comes from Google's other lines of business including online search and online ads. See the other post today from a former competitor[0] for an example. The reasoning is that stripping YouTube of Alphabet's deep pockets from advertising would give competitors a chance to monetize as well as YouTube, without fearing that Google will choke off their air supply to preserve YouTube's dominance. It might not be enough, but it would be a start. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20472351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20472351
RandomTisk 7y ago
And frankly, I'm not convinced it's gaining any kind of new followers at all. 20 years ago it was virtually unheard of to encounter a flat earth believer, but thanks to Youtube and the Internet at large all kinds of fringe beliefs are brought to the masses' consciousness. That doesn't mean that those beliefs are finding new adherents. It doesn't give fascists license to crack down on anyone's beliefs either. Google/Youtube censoring anyone over this is literally doing more harm than good in every conceivable way.
- scrollaway 7y ago
  But it is. No matter how stupid you think a belief is, giving it an audience does give it new followers. The more stupid it is, the more of an audience it needs to gain significant amounts of new followers… but thanks to youtube, you can have hundreds of thousands of people watching a video and that's a drop in the ocean. And it's not flat-earth BS that's actually harmful, it's the spread of other kinds of political propaganda which radicalizes people. For some reason, it's not controversial to say "we're banning ISIS propaganda videos which radicalize young muslims", but it is controversial to say "we're banning political propaganda videos which radicalize young americans". Young or old, actually.
  - transreal 7y ago
    I spoke to a flat earther once. Trying to convince her via science - explaining how GPS works, showing her images from space, etc, was not convincing her. So I tried to understand her mindset, and just talked about her life. Turned out she was abused by a parent who was "doing it for her own good" - it was a horrible story. Her whole childhood was a lie, she was trained by the parent not to trust her instincts, and to believe something false so the parent could benefit. My takeaway was that her childhood experience taught her that you can't trust people and that "big lies" are possible, and so she latched onto the flat earth thing due to that.
    - brigandish 7y ago
      This reminds me of something I read of Thich Nhat Hanh's - don't answer the question, answer the questioner. The belief they're espousing is really secondary to the attitude that leads them to buy into it. I find your approach as not only more likely to effect positive change with that, it's just more compassionate and respectful. There's an almost palpable element of dehumanisation among those ridiculing them and wanting to silence them, as if holding on to untruths makes them unworthy to exist in our society.
tombert 7y ago
I don't want to get too political here, but the propagation of Alex-Jones-esque conspiracy can be very influential to a larger-than-it-should-be percentage of the population, who will vote in demagogues who perpetuate these narratives.
- bijsv 7y ago
  The opposite of Alex Jones is not virtue and knowledge, but Alex-Jones-of-the-opposing-political-side
  - bastawhiz 7y ago
    Sorry, what's the opposing-political-side of "Sandy Hook was a hoax"? Or "Hillary Clinton is a pedophile operating out of the basement of a pizza restaurant"? The notion that all speech has an opposite but equally-biased counterpart is simply not correct.
    - bijsv 7y ago
      I'm not American but I've read laughable things like "trump is a russian agent", "children are being kept in concentration camps at the border", and more I can't be bothered to remember. You have to understand that these beliefs (the ones you and I have described) are held by almost nobody. And only very crazy people are going to act violently about them. And they would eventually find any other excuse to act violently.
      - fzeroracer 7y ago
        Except we literally are holding children in squalid conditions at our borders. This is well documented. Whether or not they're concentration camps depends on how strongly you feel about child abuse.
- FakeComments 7y ago
  The argument is legitimate media is no better: - Supporting Jussie Smollett - Supporting the Antifa ambushes on Andy Ngo and ICE in the NW - Defaming the Covington kids All cases in recent history, where the media has either supported terrorism or been reckless in their reporting. You want to talk about conspiracy theories, while the media perpetuates racist hoaxes and armed terrorism? Why shut down Alex Jones, and his nutty claims, just to support that kind of media? Who gets to decide that Alex Jones should be an unperson, but beating Andy Ngo is okay? Is it Google? The traditional media? Whatever harm the conspiracies cause, fighting against the social engineering lies from traditional media is a higher priority.
i_am_proteus 7y ago
It's easy for scientifically-minded people who inhabit communities of similar thinkers to underestimate the power of propaganda. Human psychology hasn't changed, though, and propaganda is still powerful.
brigandish 7y ago
I'm afraid of real conspiracies, but the main stream media seems far less interested in them than this nonsense that I've yet to be convinced is any more harmful than any other weird hobby.

mruts 7y ago

It’s almost like there’s a conspiracy theory to censor information and manipulate public discourse. Hmmm... The current centralized structure of the web is broken. Any person who believes in classical liberalism should find this disgusting.

tjansen 7y ago

If you censor conspiracy videos, you're validating them. It looks like you're trying to hide the truth. There is just no way of getting rid of them, unless you want to censor all of the internet.

SquareWheel 7y ago
They will feel validated regardless. That is the nature of conspiracy theorists. It's still advantageous to discourage the spread of misinformation. Nobody is obligated to host that content, and certainly not make it readily accessible on their platforms.
- tjansen 7y ago
  I think demonetizing them is a better solution. It discourages their production, but creates less attention.
- loudtieblahblah 7y ago
  >They will feel validated regardless. That is the nature of conspiracy theorists. What are you going to define as a conspiracy theory? Should we not talk about the JFK assassination possibilities? The Gulf of Tolkien incident? MK Ultra? The Business Plot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot) Where are you going to draw the line between conspiracy theories that are probably false and ones worth exploring? Who's the arbiter of that? is the fact that Trump may have raped a 13 year old sex slave a conspiracy theory? Or do we only use that term with Alex Jones rants about false flags?
  - SquareWheel 7y ago
    There is no need for an arbiter. However, statistically, the majority of conspiracy theories are going to be invalid. As they grow in scale the likelihood of being real also goes down. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35411684 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35411684 If there is strong evidence for such a conspiracy, then it's gone beyond theory (colloquially) at that point. By that definition the term is like "alternative medicine". If it worked, it'd be called medicine. Additionally, it's worth pointing out that the existence of a previous conspiracy being true is not actually evidence that later conspiracies are also true. MK Ultra and co are the exception rather than the norm.

camjohnson26 7y ago

Behind the Curve is a great documentary about the strange resurgence of flat earth theory in the last few years. It covers a few of the major YouTube personalities. I think flat earth’s comeback is actually a good thing and YouTube is making a mistake. It’s true that nobody 30 years ago believed the earth was flat but they probably couldn’t articulate why they believed that. People who are brave enough today to re-examine their beliefs should be admired, not ridiculed. Of course flat earthers are wrong, but the coolest part of the documentary is when members of the movement start spending thousands of dollars to conduct experiments to prove their theory. At the end one of them gets a contradictory result to what he expected, and you can see the doubt start to form in his eyes as he smiles and just says something like “Oh, that’s interesting, that’s very interesting.” YouTube has given nonconformists a platform where they can be honest and be themselves, and it’s unfortunate they look to be trying to take that away. Of course some people on there will hold views that are frankly stupid, but I’d say it’s better than having everyone believing the same thing out of a sense of conformity.

dejawu 7y ago
HBomberguy's "Flat Earth: A Measured Response" [0] is also an interesting look into the present-day flat earth "community". [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gFsOoKAHZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gFsOoKAHZg
Kaveren 7y ago
you can say the same thing about hypothetical people who assert 2 + 2 = 5. there's nothing cool about it, or people experimenting and starting to doubt that 2 + 2 = 5. nothing would be lost if nobody believed the earth was flat. this is not admirable.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  But people who believe that earth is flat will always exist, it's just a question of how to deal with them. Letting people doubt and experimentally prove fundamental ideas is healthy (and how many a revolution in physics started). We just have to ensure these people don't get shut in echo chambers.

sascha_sl 7y ago

This totally can't be applied to ironic fascism. People like PewDiePie are totally not playing into that.

corndoge 7y ago
People converted themselves to flat Earth. YouTube videos don't represent anything special except that some of them occupied the side of the spectrum corresponding to what people already wanted to hear. Ditto fascism. It is not anybody's job to curate content to prevent weak minded people from believing the "wrong" things - that is called censorship and censorship is worse than some weak minded people becoming couch-potato fascists.
mopsi 7y ago
> This totally can't be applied to ironic fascism. People like PewDiePie are totally not playing into that. And him playing "Papers, please" while wearing a hat with hammer and sickle[1] is a secret plot to convert the youth of America into commies, right? I'm baffled to see such McCarthyism. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsWQfZl-Xtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsWQfZl-Xtc
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

typenil 7y ago

This push to censor wrong ideas instead of compete with them is misguided at best. And then there's the nerve to pretend like there isn't some kind of intentional social engineering going on with internet platforms. If the kinds of policies I see journalists pushing for on YouTube were in place before the Snowden leaks, they would've been suppressing any videos talking about the NSA's spying on American citizens. But we can't risk letting people try different ideas. They might disagree with us. They're not smart enough to make their own decisions. Better step in.

tzs 7y ago
> This push to censor wrong ideas instead of compete with them is misguided at best I don't think countering wrong ideas by competing with them works well any more. It used to, but technology changes over the last few decades have given a big advantage to the wrong ideas. This comment, from a thread a few months ago, goes into more detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19772300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19772300
- loudtieblahblah 7y ago
  The ethical problems of having "truth arbiters" seems pretty simple when it comes to flat earth stuff. Or anti-vaxx stuff. Or maybe even climate change. But once established - the power to control society we're handing over to a handful of corporations is immense and it will bleed into subjects that are a lot murkier. It's worth it to compete. B/c centralizing and handing over authority to a handful of tech companies to determine what is and what isn't allowed to be said .. this is something that goes way beyond all the freedom of speech stuff where people are merely offended. This is dangerous territory. And it's more dangerous than allowing idiots to spin their wheels with their stupid ideas.
  - krapp 7y ago
    No one is handing the power to control society or authority over what is and isn't allowed to be said at that scale to Google or any "handful of corporations." What is said on Youtube or any other large social media platform is not the limitations of what is said in society, nor can Youtube control society beyond its own platform. It makes no more sense to argue that Youtube trying to enforce some standards, however arbitrary or biased, amounts to "the power to control society" than it would have to argue that having three television stations meant those networks "controlled society," or that the Encyclopedia Britannica controlled the English language.

tobsmagoats 7y ago

If you go looking far enough to validate an opinion that you have you will find "evidence". Awful clickbait title BBC for shame!

ngngngng 7y ago

I LOVE the flat earth theory. Obviously It's wrong, but it's so fun to think about how people convince themselves of it. They claim that it's all about empirical evidence. But spend a few minutes on their site and you'll realize that's bogus. Such as their reasoning for why the sun sets. What they're really saying is "Only trust what you can see, but also you can't trust what you can see"

buildzr 7y ago
I suppose when you put it that way, it's basically a conspiracy version of "Reflections on Trusting Trust". https://www.archive.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf https://www.archive.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p7...
wool_gather 7y ago
I also have a strange enjoyment for learning about the elaborate revisions people try to make to the world of facts. If you haven't tried reading any pyramidology, I recommend checking it out. Christopher Dunn is particularly good; he's a trained mechanical engineer and uses that expertise in his arguments.

sunseb 7y ago

How do you explain lunar eclipses (the Earth's shadow is round)? How do you explain retrograde motions of planets? These 2 simple observations explain why we live on a round Earth that revolves around the Sun. (That said, I am against censorship of any kind. People should be free to believe whatever they want.)

imglorp 7y ago
Not to mention going outside and LOOKING at man made items like satellites and space stations as they pass overhead. How does your GPS work? Get yourself an RTL-SDR and watch the traffic yourself, read the ephemeris, and correlate with your observations. Build your own Focault pendulum, and explain the observations. And hundreds of other phenomena you can observe and measure yourself. There are 18 spacefaring nations. There are hundreds of spacecraft companies with about 3,000 satellites and thousands more launches, spending hundreds of billions $$. If ANY of this was made up, it would involve about a half million people keeping a secret in the conspiracy. (edit - that's just space industry. astronomers, cosmologists, LIGO, EHT, etc, geologists, including the oil companies.. add another million maybe?) So we're either talking about willfull trolling, ignorance, and illness, or malice. I would be more inclined to believe malice, in the form of that family spending millions [1] to spread antivax propaganda. Perhaps it's a more general anti-science thrust to control the populace. There, it's a conspiracy in the opposite direction. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/meet-the-new-york-couple-donating-millions-to-the-anti-vax-movement/2019/06/18/9d791bcc-8e28-11e9-b08e-cfd89bd36d4e_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/meet-...
- JaimeThompson 7y ago
  The FE community basically refuses to do any radio based research. If you ask them why the radio emissions of the Sun go away after it sets they get upset and delete your comments because it goes against their idea that the Sun is just moving away from us and not setting.
ulucs 7y ago
I don't need to, people before Galileo already did :^) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle Just goes to show that with enough variables, you can fit any data you have into any shape you want

EventH- 7y ago

A few concerns with this story: 1. How big is this 'flat earth movement' really? The video claims it 'caught fire around 2015-16' but gives no specifics. This is unfortunately typical for these sort of 'we need to do something' arguments—no sense of the magnitude of the problem is given. 2. This argument for censorship is often made without a limiting principle, as it is here. "Books are a disturbing platform for conspiracy theories" works just as well. 3. There always have been and will be conspiracy theories, whether 9/11, Moon Landing, JFK, Illuminati or a thousand others. We don't seem to be very concerned with these. Why should we care about flat eartherism, especially as it seems rather benign in comparison? 4. Isn't the obvious response to make a point-by-point refutation to their most convincing claims? The well-argued truth is going to be more convincing than a silly hypothesis.

komali2 7y ago
> The well-argued truth is going to be more convincing than a silly hypothesis. Flat Earthers are regularly presented with well argued truth and are not convinced, so this point is incorrect.
- buildzr 7y ago
  That's true of anyone who believes something with the utmost conviction - but we're talking about the general population here, not just those already into flat earth.

BitwiseFool 7y ago

Does it really matter if someone believes the earth is flat? What practical effect does that actually have on society? I can't help but think most flat-earthers are just after attention and the desire to correct them is a feedback loop.

pjc50 7y ago
This is the non-political version. There are lots of far more political videos that cause real problems, such as the Alex Jones ones, pizzagate, QAnon etc. The underlying point is that Youtube's reccomendation algorithm has a significant effect on society as a whole, and this effect can be very negative.

icxa 7y ago

Really this should be "how the proliferation of disinformation enabled by the internet converted people to flat Earth." Also not helped by the (warranted) declining trust in legacy media sources.

JaimeThompson 7y ago

There are a lot of comments talking about how Youtube should not censor flat Earth but something that people need to keep in mind is how much the Flat Earth youtube community censors. If you point out their errors, their mistakes, or basically anything that goes against what they know to be true they ban you and delete your comments. As a group censorship doesn't appear to bother them just as long as they are the ones in control of the censoring.

tehabe 7y ago

It seems to me, that most flat earthers already believed in some conspiracy theories so, they just add another one. What puzzles me the most about flat earther is, how much the shape of the earth is part of their identity. I mean for my daily life the shape of the earth doesn't matter. So for me personally it doesn't matter if the earth is round, flat, or shaped like a banana. it just happened that the earth is round.

rchaud 7y ago

> "One researcher found that of attendees at a flat Earth conference, nearly all said they first came to the idea through the video-sharing platform." Aside from shilling time shares, MLM schemes and recruiting for a cult of some sort, I can't think of anything that would necessitate a "Flat Earth conference". I'm convinced the the only reason these hoaxes exist is to identify high quality leads for obvious snake-oil products. It's similar to how the ye olde Nigerian prince scams are made to sound as absurd as possible, so you know that people who respond to them have a high likelihood of converting.

helen___keller 7y ago

It's more than just flat earth too. There's many strains of conspiracy holes on youtube - you can spend all day watching people predict the rapture is coming (this year for real this time!), of course there's the standard political extremism strains of youtube if you're into that, and so on. The problem is that people learn to trust personalities, and then those personalities can spread ideas regardless of their merit. If you start by denouncing the brainwashing of the mainstream consensus, just about any idea can be rationalized with enough effort. And to top it all off, Youtube and other online platforms offer a profit model for personalities who can garner attention (not to mention the softer connections to money and fame that come with being an "influencer") Do so many of these personalities actually believe in a flat earth? Personally, I've had my doubts from the beginning. I follow a few communities on Twitch, for example, and you see personalities pop up all the time, often by being controversial. I've seen people pop up, often leveraging flat earth or anti-vax as a tool to make themselves more edgy. Sometimes they make it too obvious that they're just trying to be controversial and it gives away the act - one personality on twitch trying to make his debut, for example, claimed that his childhood best friend grew gills and swam away in the river after a vaccine. To his credit, it worked in the short term and the show brought him back for a few more segments. Frankly, I hope we as a society will come to learn sooner rather than later that public personalities on the internet can't be trusted. For some reason, people have learned this lesson for public personalities on TV, on the radio, and so on - who really trusts the mainstream news these days? - and yet these same folks turn into their favorite strain of youtube conspiracy to learn on the daily what the world has been hiding from them and what truth the mainstream has buried like a treasure, only to be found on youtube.