8 ms·

>Where we live, due to local laws, we are now obliged to wear a mask to go shopping. Can one discuss that on YouTube, or would one be contradicting the WHO? Ex

>Where we live, due to local laws, we are now obliged to wear a mask to go shopping. Can one discuss that on YouTube, or would one be contradicting the WHO? Examples like these are frivolous. There's a heartland of obvious, flagrant misinformation that is indisputably worth banning and for which a moral case exists to ban immediately: '5g caused corona, this home remedy will cure it!' etc. The go-to move of internet commenters craving debates is to look past the 99.9999% of cases that will get taken down and to tie everyone up in debates about hypotheticals. Instead of telling me about your special what-if edge case, tell me whether you think the example you are bringing forward represents the heartland of content that is being targeted by this policy. Be clear about what percentage of cases you think are represented by your special example.

grawprog 7y ago
Since when am I beholden to the WHO? I don't remember voting for any of them or agreeing for them to represent me in any way. They are not my elected government, why should I give the slightest fuck what they tell me to do?
- adatavizguy 7y ago
  I hate to be the one to have to explain this to you. A private entity is deciding what content is and is not allowed to be hosted on their private servers using their private services. This is very different from government officials that you vote for censoring free speech. Anyone who doesn't like YouTube's policies are welcome to post their content on Facebook to share with their friends, on Twitter, stream it live on Twitch, or, host it themselves on their own servers.
  - AlchemistCamp 7y ago
    > I hate to be the one to have to explain this to you. A private entity is deciding... YouTube is part of a gigantic, public company with more power than many world governments. In a very real sense, Alphabet is more powerful than a hypothetical Standard Oil that also owned one of the most popular two newspapers in every single city in the US. Their ability to shape markets, public opinion and even elections in 100+ countries is unprecedented and very easy to use with plausible deniability. Facebook is a similar sort of entity. In aggregate, the two control more personal communications than the postal service. The notion that only a government can be a threat to free speech is outdated and naive.
    - anigbrowl 7y ago
      Almost seems like the problem is monopoly capitalism, doesn't it?
  - alentist 7y ago
    > Anyone who doesn't like YouTube's policies are welcome to ...criticize them on HackerNews.
  - jshevek 7y ago
    >I hate to be the one to have to explain this to you. Your snarky condescending tone is not helpful. Just because a person reaches a different conclusion than you doesn't mean that they lack information like this. I think it's dangerous to society to give corporations that have as much power as YouTube a pass simply because they are not government entities.
  - thu2111 7y ago
    Anyone who doesn't like YouTube's policies are welcome to post their content on Facebook to share with their friends, on Twitter, stream it live on Twitch, or, host it themselves on their own servers You mean the Facebook that just banned WhatsApp message forwarding, despite their service supposedly being end-to-end encrypted? It didn't take long for that little sham to collapse did it? Sure, go self publish and watch as the self appointed guardians of the galaxy do everything in their power to stop you speaking. We're not debating Google here. Not really. We're debating the whole ethos of Silicon Valley liberals which has become, "we're smarter than you and will ensure you think what we want you to think". Except they're not smarter. Having worked there for years I can confidently say that whilst there might have been some merit to that argument a long time ago within the scope of computer science, but years of endless hiring has now made them distinctly average groups of people with no edge over the rest of the world. Yet they continue to believe merely being a part of a particular organisation allows them to instantaneously decide the correctness of any argument.
- organsnyder 7y ago
  Perhaps because their mission is to keep the world's inhabitants healthy? Of course, they have no legal authority over you, but listening to them is generally a good idea.
  - nv-vn 7y ago
    I'm sure it doesn't seem like that to the citizens of Taiwan who are basically told to go fuck themselves by the WHO
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - vkou 7y ago
      I did not realize that the WHO's job is to get involved in arguments over borders. I always thought that their job was to get involved in arguments over public health.
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        Public health is the problem with them ignoring data from Taiwan.
        vkou 7y ago
        1. What part of that statement makes you think that they ignored data from Taiwan? It was quite obviously a dodge of a politically sensitive question. 2. Both Taiwan and China claim to be China, so that statement wasn't even factually wrong.
        dependenttypes 7y ago
        > 2. Both Taiwan and China claim to be China, so that statement wasn't even factually wrong. Taiwan nowadays is kinda forced by China to claim to be China actually.
- bad_user 7y ago
  WHO currently represents the scientific consensus. No, they don't tell you what to do, it is your government that does that, or in this case a private entity. But anybody with a brain would go for the scientific consensus. (Even though, just to be clear, I don't agree with what YouTube is doing here)
  - grawprog 7y ago
    Since when is science about consensus? I seem to recall learning more about falsification being the primary driver behind the scientific method, which tends to revolve around a rigorous process of trying to prove everything wrong until you just can't any more. Sure haven't seen a whole lot of that. Sure have seen a whole lot of, listen to us because this is what we say, without a whole lot of correctly collected data (emphasis on the correctly collected because data are worthless unless correctly collected, i've personally had to throw out hours of work because of sampling errors)to back anything up. Yet, I'm being told to accept lockdowns, police searches of homes and a whole host of human rights violations on the whims of some vague international appointed entity in the name of public safety. Any voice speaking against this is to be silenced on the public platforms of the day.
    - anigbrowl 7y ago
      Yes, ignore all the overwhelmed hospitals and the sudden jump in mortality in Italy and Spain that made them decide to lock everything down after they already had a crisis on their hands. Rail more about a transnational organization with a long though often imperfect record of epidemiological expertise. Those bureaucrats in Geneva are personally ruining your life.
      - jshevek 7y ago
        >Yes, ignore all the overwhelmed hospitals and the sudden jump in mortality in Italy and Spain that made them decide to lock everything down after they already had a crisis on their hands. Rail more about a transnational organization with a long though often imperfect record of epidemiological expertise. Those bureaucrats in Geneva are personally ruining your life. Not one of these statements reflects any stated positions of the parent. All are hyperbolic mis-characterizations.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Since its establishment by treaty and your sovereign nation of origin becoming a signatory to said treaty. Surely you can make the same point about your skepticism of transnational organizations without all the emotional theatrics, perhaps by researching the topic you aver to care about and highlighting what you believe to be its constitutional inadequacies.
  - grawprog 7y ago
    https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/transcripts/who-audio-emergencies-coronavirus-press-conference-full-30mar2020.pdf?sfvrsn=6b68bc4a_2 https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/transcr... >Now we need to go and look in families to find those people who may be sick and remove them and isolate them in a safe and dignified manner so that's what I was saying previously; the transition from movement restrictions and shut-downs I believe unlawfully removing people from their homes and restricting their movement is against the constitutions of several countries, mine for sure. According to this transcript directly from the WHO, this is what they advocate and recommend. Speaking out against this falls under directly contradicting the WHO.
autokad 7y ago
do you think someone at google is saying: 'hmmm, I analyzed all the points and did fact checking and this video should be flagged'. They'll have some lazily built ML algorithm that flags the whole channel with a video that mention 'corona' and demonitize them so they can collect money and benefit from the videos but not have to do any payout.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- judge2020 7y ago
  Your scenario has already been playing out for about two months, except it's completely per-video and just a mention of corona seems to no longer cause a demonetization. > so they can collect money and benefit from the videos but not have to do any payout. No ads show on demonetized videos.
  - alexis_fr 7y ago
    Youtube still profits from free content.
    - Cpoll 7y ago
      As far as I know, free content costs Youtube. I remember reading their profit margins aren't great even on monetized content, and hosting and bandwidth isn't free.
OrderlyTiamat 7y ago
I agree with the conclusion that you should be clear about what percentage of content is on the side of reasonable, and which is not. Let me however disagree strongly with your claims that this concerns 99.99999% of cases, and that the other commenter was talking about "what ifs" and "hypotheticals". That last claim seems to me to just be untrue: we know in fact that local laws, for example several american states, contradict WHO. Their point is valid. This could be a problem. Now you have done well to state your belief of proportion clearly: only 1 in a million of the cases that will be removed should not have been removed, the rest are indisputably worth of banning. I think you now need to go a step further: Why do you think that all but one out of a million cases will be justified? And do you really think that a discussion about edge cases is so unnecessary? Given YouTube's history with copyright trigger happiness, I wouldn't be so sure of these proportions, myself. And I think that it is actually very healthy that the introduction of (increased) censoring should go hand in hand with public scrutiny and discussion, in fact I'd be very worried if we'd all just accept all of it uncritically. Your point is, in general, well taken. I think you're right to point out commentators can blow fringe issues out of proportions. I am however unconvinced in this particular case.
- glenstein 7y ago
  The 99.99999% case scenario concerns videos that are saying '5g caused coronavirus', and meanwhile you're trying to tie up everybodies attention with special cases that don't represent the majority of cases. People get disoriented with special cases and trick questions. Let me put it this way. If you're not just pointing to the mask example as a tentative, academic exercise, and sincerely believe that they constitute some non-trivial percentage of videos that will really get taken down, you should come out and say so. And if you don't want to commit to that, I have a hard time understanding what, other than frivolous internet contrarianism, motivates you to emphasize those examples. >do you really think that a discussion about edge cases is so unnecessary? Yes.
  - OrderlyTiamat 7y ago
    Well, than I don't know what to say to you. I have already explained my view on the proportions, I have already given argument and explanation for it, and you seem to be intent on not supporting your own conclusions apart from a rather lame "you're a contrarianist" argument. Why not actually defend your arguments and attack mine instead of circling about the issue with "this actual real life example is a what if hypothetical" and hastily drawn up dichotomies? (Particularly this hammering that these are contrived examples is bordering on the ridiculous: we know this is true!) You've lost your benefit of the doubt with this comment.
bobcostas55 7y ago
The WHO has been spreading misinformation from the start, including claims that covid does not spread from human to human after it was abundantly clear that it does[0], claims that travel bans would be unnecessary to halt its spread[1], and claims that people should not wear masks[2]. These are not mere edge cases. We have structured our public organizations in a way that gives credentialed "experts" enormous amounts of power, but without making sure they are _actually good at what they do_. This move by youtube further enshrines credentials on top of the grave of competence. This is how you end up with the FDA banning covid tests for more than a month, how you end up with a completely ineffective CDC, or (to return to the topic at hand) the WHO spreading nonsense. The fact of the matter is that the twitter shitposters I follow were far ahead of all the major health organizations on this topic, but if they mention covid in a tweet they'll get their account suspended now. This censorship is not about censoring bad info, it's about censoring any "non-official" info regardless of its veracity. [0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUN7LIXUMAY_2DI.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUN7LIXUMAY_2DI.jpg [1]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVCIDfoWAAc-mq0.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVCIDfoWAAc-mq0.jpg [2]: https://www.who.int/images/default-source/health-topics/coronavirus/masks/masks-2.png https://www.who.int/images/default-source/health-topics/coro...
- glenstein 7y ago
  So far as I can tell, your extremely confident, categorical interpretations of your own citations are basically mistaken, across the board. As I read [0] it is not, in fact, a blanket declaration about transmissibility. As I read [1] it is not in any way an inaccurate statement (see [3]). When read [2] it's clear that it is not a blanket declaration not to wear masks. Meanwhile Youtube is going to take down videos claiming 5g caused the coronavirus, which are obviously wrong and obviously causing harm. And instead of looking at cases of obvious misinformation the policy targets, you would rather we go down a rabbit hole of idiosyncratic disputes about the the meaning of WHO statements, all while keeping up blatantly inaccurate misinformation. Tying ourselves up in that frivolous debate would let misinformation flourish. [3] https://www.vox.com/2020/1/23/21078325/wuhan-china-coronavirus-travel-ban https://www.vox.com/2020/1/23/21078325/wuhan-china-coronavir...
  - 7y ago
jdavis703 7y ago
The problem is they give one body the ultimate authority on what is truth. Science, epidemiology & politics is more complex than that. For example some in the Chinese government think coronavirus was released by the US Army while some in the US intelligence community think coronavirus leaked from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan. Another example, some US government officials think chloroquine is a COVID cure, while others disagree or remain undecided. Google should instead have a list of allowed sources (e.g. WHO, CDC, NHS, etc) and explicitly disallowed sources (states owned media organizations, politicians and intelligence agencies).
- mirimir 7y ago
  > The problem is they give one body the ultimate authority on what is truth. Science, epidemiology & politics is more complex than that. That's an excellent point. > Google should instead have a list of allowed sources (e.g. WHO, CDC, NHS, etc) and explicitly disallowed sources (states owned media organizations, politicians and intelligence agencies). Well, isn't the BBC at least government affiliated? And yes, I'm aware that it's supposedly entirely independent. And about intelligence agencies, the NSA has contributed hugely to computer security. It's true that they're arguably the world's greatest hackers, but that actually increases their credibility. Except for the backdoors that they hide ;)
- canjobear 7y ago
  > explicitly disallowed sources (states owned media organizations, politicians and intelligence agencies). If the intelligence agencies are any good then they do not release information under their own name.
toohotatopic 7y ago
>There's a heartland of obvious, flagrant misinformation If it is obvious, why does it need banning? The bigger problem is that many people haven't learned how to process information properly. It's frivolous to just demand banning. Banning should only be a first step among many to spread media competence. How can google ban corona misinformation but just recently has made ads and links almost indistinguishable on its result page?

grawprog 7y ago

Since when am I beholden to the WHO? I don't remember voting for any of them or agreeing for them to represent me in any way. They are not my elected government, why should I give the slightest fuck what they tell me to do?

adatavizguy 7y ago
I hate to be the one to have to explain this to you. A private entity is deciding what content is and is not allowed to be hosted on their private servers using their private services. This is very different from government officials that you vote for censoring free speech. Anyone who doesn't like YouTube's policies are welcome to post their content on Facebook to share with their friends, on Twitter, stream it live on Twitch, or, host it themselves on their own servers.
- AlchemistCamp 7y ago
  > I hate to be the one to have to explain this to you. A private entity is deciding... YouTube is part of a gigantic, public company with more power than many world governments. In a very real sense, Alphabet is more powerful than a hypothetical Standard Oil that also owned one of the most popular two newspapers in every single city in the US. Their ability to shape markets, public opinion and even elections in 100+ countries is unprecedented and very easy to use with plausible deniability. Facebook is a similar sort of entity. In aggregate, the two control more personal communications than the postal service. The notion that only a government can be a threat to free speech is outdated and naive.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    Almost seems like the problem is monopoly capitalism, doesn't it?
- alentist 7y ago
  > Anyone who doesn't like YouTube's policies are welcome to ...criticize them on HackerNews.
- jshevek 7y ago
  >I hate to be the one to have to explain this to you. Your snarky condescending tone is not helpful. Just because a person reaches a different conclusion than you doesn't mean that they lack information like this. I think it's dangerous to society to give corporations that have as much power as YouTube a pass simply because they are not government entities.
- thu2111 7y ago
  Anyone who doesn't like YouTube's policies are welcome to post their content on Facebook to share with their friends, on Twitter, stream it live on Twitch, or, host it themselves on their own servers You mean the Facebook that just banned WhatsApp message forwarding, despite their service supposedly being end-to-end encrypted? It didn't take long for that little sham to collapse did it? Sure, go self publish and watch as the self appointed guardians of the galaxy do everything in their power to stop you speaking. We're not debating Google here. Not really. We're debating the whole ethos of Silicon Valley liberals which has become, "we're smarter than you and will ensure you think what we want you to think". Except they're not smarter. Having worked there for years I can confidently say that whilst there might have been some merit to that argument a long time ago within the scope of computer science, but years of endless hiring has now made them distinctly average groups of people with no edge over the rest of the world. Yet they continue to believe merely being a part of a particular organisation allows them to instantaneously decide the correctness of any argument.
organsnyder 7y ago
Perhaps because their mission is to keep the world's inhabitants healthy? Of course, they have no legal authority over you, but listening to them is generally a good idea.
- nv-vn 7y ago
  I'm sure it doesn't seem like that to the citizens of Taiwan who are basically told to go fuck themselves by the WHO
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - vkou 7y ago
    I did not realize that the WHO's job is to get involved in arguments over borders. I always thought that their job was to get involved in arguments over public health.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      Public health is the problem with them ignoring data from Taiwan.
      - vkou 7y ago
        1. What part of that statement makes you think that they ignored data from Taiwan? It was quite obviously a dodge of a politically sensitive question. 2. Both Taiwan and China claim to be China, so that statement wasn't even factually wrong.
        dependenttypes 7y ago
        > 2. Both Taiwan and China claim to be China, so that statement wasn't even factually wrong. Taiwan nowadays is kinda forced by China to claim to be China actually.
bad_user 7y ago
WHO currently represents the scientific consensus. No, they don't tell you what to do, it is your government that does that, or in this case a private entity. But anybody with a brain would go for the scientific consensus. (Even though, just to be clear, I don't agree with what YouTube is doing here)
- grawprog 7y ago
  Since when is science about consensus? I seem to recall learning more about falsification being the primary driver behind the scientific method, which tends to revolve around a rigorous process of trying to prove everything wrong until you just can't any more. Sure haven't seen a whole lot of that. Sure have seen a whole lot of, listen to us because this is what we say, without a whole lot of correctly collected data (emphasis on the correctly collected because data are worthless unless correctly collected, i've personally had to throw out hours of work because of sampling errors)to back anything up. Yet, I'm being told to accept lockdowns, police searches of homes and a whole host of human rights violations on the whims of some vague international appointed entity in the name of public safety. Any voice speaking against this is to be silenced on the public platforms of the day.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    Yes, ignore all the overwhelmed hospitals and the sudden jump in mortality in Italy and Spain that made them decide to lock everything down after they already had a crisis on their hands. Rail more about a transnational organization with a long though often imperfect record of epidemiological expertise. Those bureaucrats in Geneva are personally ruining your life.
    - jshevek 7y ago
      >Yes, ignore all the overwhelmed hospitals and the sudden jump in mortality in Italy and Spain that made them decide to lock everything down after they already had a crisis on their hands. Rail more about a transnational organization with a long though often imperfect record of epidemiological expertise. Those bureaucrats in Geneva are personally ruining your life. Not one of these statements reflects any stated positions of the parent. All are hyperbolic mis-characterizations.
anigbrowl 7y ago
Since its establishment by treaty and your sovereign nation of origin becoming a signatory to said treaty. Surely you can make the same point about your skepticism of transnational organizations without all the emotional theatrics, perhaps by researching the topic you aver to care about and highlighting what you believe to be its constitutional inadequacies.
- grawprog 7y ago
  https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/transcripts/who-audio-emergencies-coronavirus-press-conference-full-30mar2020.pdf?sfvrsn=6b68bc4a_2 https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/transcr... >Now we need to go and look in families to find those people who may be sick and remove them and isolate them in a safe and dignified manner so that's what I was saying previously; the transition from movement restrictions and shut-downs I believe unlawfully removing people from their homes and restricting their movement is against the constitutions of several countries, mine for sure. According to this transcript directly from the WHO, this is what they advocate and recommend. Speaking out against this falls under directly contradicting the WHO.

autokad 7y ago

do you think someone at google is saying: 'hmmm, I analyzed all the points and did fact checking and this video should be flagged'. They'll have some lazily built ML algorithm that flags the whole channel with a video that mention 'corona' and demonitize them so they can collect money and benefit from the videos but not have to do any payout.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
judge2020 7y ago
Your scenario has already been playing out for about two months, except it's completely per-video and just a mention of corona seems to no longer cause a demonetization. > so they can collect money and benefit from the videos but not have to do any payout. No ads show on demonetized videos.
- alexis_fr 7y ago
  Youtube still profits from free content.
  - Cpoll 7y ago
    As far as I know, free content costs Youtube. I remember reading their profit margins aren't great even on monetized content, and hosting and bandwidth isn't free.

OrderlyTiamat 7y ago

I agree with the conclusion that you should be clear about what percentage of content is on the side of reasonable, and which is not. Let me however disagree strongly with your claims that this concerns 99.99999% of cases, and that the other commenter was talking about "what ifs" and "hypotheticals". That last claim seems to me to just be untrue: we know in fact that local laws, for example several american states, contradict WHO. Their point is valid. This could be a problem. Now you have done well to state your belief of proportion clearly: only 1 in a million of the cases that will be removed should not have been removed, the rest are indisputably worth of banning. I think you now need to go a step further: Why do you think that all but one out of a million cases will be justified? And do you really think that a discussion about edge cases is so unnecessary? Given YouTube's history with copyright trigger happiness, I wouldn't be so sure of these proportions, myself. And I think that it is actually very healthy that the introduction of (increased) censoring should go hand in hand with public scrutiny and discussion, in fact I'd be very worried if we'd all just accept all of it uncritically. Your point is, in general, well taken. I think you're right to point out commentators can blow fringe issues out of proportions. I am however unconvinced in this particular case.

glenstein 7y ago
The 99.99999% case scenario concerns videos that are saying '5g caused coronavirus', and meanwhile you're trying to tie up everybodies attention with special cases that don't represent the majority of cases. People get disoriented with special cases and trick questions. Let me put it this way. If you're not just pointing to the mask example as a tentative, academic exercise, and sincerely believe that they constitute some non-trivial percentage of videos that will really get taken down, you should come out and say so. And if you don't want to commit to that, I have a hard time understanding what, other than frivolous internet contrarianism, motivates you to emphasize those examples. >do you really think that a discussion about edge cases is so unnecessary? Yes.
- OrderlyTiamat 7y ago
  Well, than I don't know what to say to you. I have already explained my view on the proportions, I have already given argument and explanation for it, and you seem to be intent on not supporting your own conclusions apart from a rather lame "you're a contrarianist" argument. Why not actually defend your arguments and attack mine instead of circling about the issue with "this actual real life example is a what if hypothetical" and hastily drawn up dichotomies? (Particularly this hammering that these are contrived examples is bordering on the ridiculous: we know this is true!) You've lost your benefit of the doubt with this comment.

bobcostas55 7y ago

The WHO has been spreading misinformation from the start, including claims that covid does not spread from human to human after it was abundantly clear that it does[0], claims that travel bans would be unnecessary to halt its spread[1], and claims that people should not wear masks[2]. These are not mere edge cases. We have structured our public organizations in a way that gives credentialed "experts" enormous amounts of power, but without making sure they are _actually good at what they do_. This move by youtube further enshrines credentials on top of the grave of competence. This is how you end up with the FDA banning covid tests for more than a month, how you end up with a completely ineffective CDC, or (to return to the topic at hand) the WHO spreading nonsense. The fact of the matter is that the twitter shitposters I follow were far ahead of all the major health organizations on this topic, but if they mention covid in a tweet they'll get their account suspended now. This censorship is not about censoring bad info, it's about censoring any "non-official" info regardless of its veracity. [0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUN7LIXUMAY_2DI.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUN7LIXUMAY_2DI.jpg [1]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVCIDfoWAAc-mq0.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVCIDfoWAAc-mq0.jpg [2]: https://www.who.int/images/default-source/health-topics/coronavirus/masks/masks-2.png https://www.who.int/images/default-source/health-topics/coro...

glenstein 7y ago
So far as I can tell, your extremely confident, categorical interpretations of your own citations are basically mistaken, across the board. As I read [0] it is not, in fact, a blanket declaration about transmissibility. As I read [1] it is not in any way an inaccurate statement (see [3]). When read [2] it's clear that it is not a blanket declaration not to wear masks. Meanwhile Youtube is going to take down videos claiming 5g caused the coronavirus, which are obviously wrong and obviously causing harm. And instead of looking at cases of obvious misinformation the policy targets, you would rather we go down a rabbit hole of idiosyncratic disputes about the the meaning of WHO statements, all while keeping up blatantly inaccurate misinformation. Tying ourselves up in that frivolous debate would let misinformation flourish. [3] https://www.vox.com/2020/1/23/21078325/wuhan-china-coronavirus-travel-ban https://www.vox.com/2020/1/23/21078325/wuhan-china-coronavir...
- 7y ago

jdavis703 7y ago

The problem is they give one body the ultimate authority on what is truth. Science, epidemiology & politics is more complex than that. For example some in the Chinese government think coronavirus was released by the US Army while some in the US intelligence community think coronavirus leaked from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan. Another example, some US government officials think chloroquine is a COVID cure, while others disagree or remain undecided. Google should instead have a list of allowed sources (e.g. WHO, CDC, NHS, etc) and explicitly disallowed sources (states owned media organizations, politicians and intelligence agencies).

mirimir 7y ago
> The problem is they give one body the ultimate authority on what is truth. Science, epidemiology & politics is more complex than that. That's an excellent point. > Google should instead have a list of allowed sources (e.g. WHO, CDC, NHS, etc) and explicitly disallowed sources (states owned media organizations, politicians and intelligence agencies). Well, isn't the BBC at least government affiliated? And yes, I'm aware that it's supposedly entirely independent. And about intelligence agencies, the NSA has contributed hugely to computer security. It's true that they're arguably the world's greatest hackers, but that actually increases their credibility. Except for the backdoors that they hide ;)
canjobear 7y ago
> explicitly disallowed sources (states owned media organizations, politicians and intelligence agencies). If the intelligence agencies are any good then they do not release information under their own name.

toohotatopic 7y ago

>There's a heartland of obvious, flagrant misinformation If it is obvious, why does it need banning? The bigger problem is that many people haven't learned how to process information properly. It's frivolous to just demand banning. Banning should only be a first step among many to spread media competence. How can google ban corona misinformation but just recently has made ads and links almost indistinguishable on its result page?