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YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

• scythe 6y ago
  An amusing casualty. Newsweek states: >David Icke, Man Behind Coronavirus 5G Conspiracy Can this be true? Does David Icke have a following that isn't just laughing along with it? I remember his reptilian shapeshifter theory being a running joke from back when I was in high school in 2005! Surely, someone else must have started the whole 5G conspiracy theory, right? Icke just latched on to it?
  • p1necone 6y ago
    My friend group were joking about it before we knew it was an actual conspiracy theory. This stuff is extremely predictable - Anti-5g, Anti-vaxx, Anti-whatever people will claim that everything bad is caused by the thing they're worried about - it was inevitable for the two to get linked imo.
    • covidSurvivor19 6y ago
      Let me guess. Public schooling for you?
  • DonHopkins 6y ago
    They're knowingly laughing along with the fact that he SAYS "reptiles" but MEANS "Jews".
  • mrkeen 6y ago
    > Does David Icke have a following that isn't just laughing along with it? I thought the same thing about flat earth a while ago.
    • p1necone 6y ago
      I like flat earth because it's relatively harmless, while also being wacky as all hell. Of course it attracts a bunch of people who are into other, actually harmful conspiracy theories too. I miss when it was all flat earth and aliens and bigfoot, rather than white supremacy and denying the validity of a global pandemic that's actually killing people.
• ryankemper 6y ago
  I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), but that's different from saying that we as a society should want our private platforms to engage in such censorship and suppression. Booting people off of platforms merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them. COVID-19 has added the additional element of this new concept of "disinformation". The argument is seductively simple: "being exposed to this information could lead you to engage in patterns of behavior that harm society. Therefore we can conceptualize this speech as being an indirect form of violence/negligence and therefore we have a moral obligation to remove such content". Many may disagree, but I think we need to throw out this concept of "disinformation" entirely. I don't believe in fighting "bad ideas" by suppressing them, I believe in shining a light on them. Let the truth fight for itself. (And of course now comes the classic counter-argument: that the evils of disinformation possess a virality that makes them spread far more easily than the truth, being that truth is nuanced and difficult to acquire whereas bad information is seductively simple. I won't address that argument here but personally I think it's a very dangerous way of thinking)
  • clarkmoody 6y ago
    The very nature of scientific inquiry is to question conventional wisdom. Often those new ideas are heretical. That is not to say that all ideas are valid forms of scientific inquiry. But suppressing all but the "blessed" opinions of the WHO goes against the scientific process.
    • zentiggr 6y ago
      Suppressing blatantly false, inflammatory ideas isn't "all but the 'blessed'". It is taking the man on the corner who is shouting "Ducks are responsible for your failure!" and "Letting the blacksmith build a second shack will cause insanity in all the children!" off to a quiet room where he no longer causes people to throw stones at the blacksmith, or shoot ducks on sight. Icke was that special kind of conspiracy nut who wouldn't dare fact check his own bile because he'd find his whole worldview based on nothing. Slippery slope questions aside, we tend to put controls on things like schizophrenic rambling and people having psychotic breaks... I consider him in that same category. He should be isolated for his own protection and those around him.
• anctualprzn 6y ago
  While I generally agree that censorship is not ideal, I think one big issue here is that YouTube is already in the business of influencing what is watched on their platform. Popular content is recommended more. In effect, content becomes click bait that's meant to invoke emotions. I think some blame can be put on YouTube for driving people to listen to fanatics, so this seems like an effort to right that wrong. I'm not a fan of popularity-driven recommendations unless they're from a community like HN that has a high-bar for useful content.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• techntoke 6y ago
  How can they remove David Icke before George Webb and Jason Goodman?
• Gatsky 6y ago
  I don’t understand the free speech arguments here. Youtube is an advertising platform. They can do what they want with their platform. If I own a billboard, and someone wants to advertise their bags for dead kittens, I can say no. There needs to be some sense of proportionality. If the government bashed down Icke’s door and smashed his computer then sure, we should worry about free speech. But getting banned from Youtube?
  • floatingatoll 6y ago
    The argument is that people’s individual freedom to speak anything should be held in higher regard than the welfare of society, regardless of what harmful outcomes may come from that speech. It’s a core tenet of American racists and fascists (and, I suspect, conspiracy theorists), because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to convert others to their cause without being silenced by their platforms.
    • giantDinosaur 6y ago
      You could have applied those arguments to all social progressive movements of the 20th century. Gay rights? Those were considered fundamentally abhorrent perversions, suitable for prison & physical elimination. The 'welfare of society'? We define that as much after the fact as anything else. At one point, that was down to censoring anti-slavery positions. How can you possibly consistently make that determination without censoring, at various points, everything good we've worked for? If you're pro abortion, are you 'converting to the cause' of nihilistic extremism, or are you making reasonable arguments? Who determines that, government censors? Private corporations with effective monopolies on communication channels? That only sounds good if they're run by the people you agree with. They will not always be run by people you agree with.
      • floatingatoll 6y ago
        It’s always possible to make an incorrect decision in service of the greater good, but that’s no excuse to give up concern for the greater good forever. Your argument also neatly contradicts personal gun ownership: “Someone was shot yesterday by their neighbor during an argument, so we should ban individual possession of weapons since guns have been used to enforce disagreeable opinions on others.”
• ordinarydev 6y ago
  If spreading misinformation is a valid means to shut down a channel then why do channels like Spirit Science remain? They got about 900k subs and spend the whole time spouting the most insane claims you could possibly think of with absolutely no evidence to back it up and yet they continue to remain.
  • Igelau 6y ago
    Are you trying to tell me that charging my crystals is a waste of time?!
  • untog 6y ago
    At a guess: the level of danger the misinformation poses to the public would be a deciding factor.
  • aantthony 6y ago
    I think the censorship is for political reasons rather than for misinformation. David Icke has been spreading misinformation for years (e.g. lizard people) but that isn't political. COVID-19 is.
• catalogia 6y ago
  David Icke has been a kook for as long as I can remember. People laughed at him, they didn't fear him. Now he's deplatformed, now he's feared. Has our society become so fragile that once harmless kooks are now considered a threat to civil order?
• cecja 6y ago
  In threads like this I am usually thinking I am taking crazy pills. All this talk about freedom of speech of the neutrality of the platform. No, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter are not the "town square" they are the theater or the pub and every owner has the right to kick your ass out. If you really want to have it as public space have them regulated call your rep and push for it. It is crazy that in the land of free everyone has the right on their own property but not big tech companies. Especially because these companies can't make laws themselves, they have a responsibility to their shareholders and if advertising money takes a hit because there are crazy people on their platform doing crazy shit. They have to act and they can act until they are regulated or taken over by the state.
• imgabe 6y ago
  I'm not going to shed a tear for David Icke, but this quote is very concerning: > YouTube has clear policies prohibiting any content that disputes the existence and transmission of Covid-19 as described by the WHO [World Health Organization] and the NHS [the U.K's healthcare system] [emphasis added] The WHO at least has been flat out wrong several times during this pandemic, such as telling people not to wear masks. Anointing one agency as the sole source of truth and censoring anything that contradicts it is not going to lead to a good outcome. People need to be able to question authorities.
  • knzhou 6y ago
    Do you have a standard in mind that's better than the WHO? Would you prefer content prohibited on the basis of whether it sounds right or wrong to a random Google employee?
    • imgabe 6y ago
      I would prefer content not to be prohibited at all. Content is not a problem. Actions are a problem. Watch all the videos you like telling you to burn down a cell tower. Once you do burn down a cell tower, then you go to jail. Perhaps we should also then hold the people telling people to burn down cell towers responsible, criminally and civilly, for the people who listen to them. David Icke might not be so cavalier about telling people to burn down cell towers if he could be sued and/or jailed after people took him up on it. As a general principle, I think we should focus on actual consequences, not imagined, potential consequences. This has the effect of also encouraging useful dissent. If you disagree with WHO and you turn out to be right, you can be properly credited with it. You are not automatically punished for the crime of daring to disagree with the WHO, and we all benefit from having more accurate, useful information.
      • knzhou 6y ago
        > Content is not a problem. Actions are a problem. This is an absurd standard that would excuse literally Hitler. When the Nazi party was coming to power, he never fired a shot himself -- he just talked a lot.
• colinplamondon 6y ago
  Especially right now, communication is moving more and more online. Online communication is increasingly mediated by corporations. If our speech is mediated by corporations, and those corporations tell us what we can and cannot say, what good is freedom of speech? Companies like YouTube take advantage of their economies of scale to offer video services for free. To be able to do that, they had to dump services at a loss for years funded by venture capital. How can you build a meaningful paid platform, while a VC-backed company spends tens of millions on R&D at a loss? The argument thus far is that this is in the consumer's interest - free services at a high quality. That dumping being good for the consumer is contingent on the business being able to monetize with advertising. If YouTube couldn't make money with ads, they'd have to charge for their services - opening them up to competition. VC backed businesses offering consumer products for free is most certainly dumping. So far, that dumping has been to consumer's benefit. YouTube's behavior is reversing that benefit. There's also a lot of other options they could go with, all of which would be far less un-American. 1) A Reddit-like quarantine system, and eat the cost of hosting (like Reddit does) 2) Require Ickes to pay for his own hosting on YouTube, at YouTube's favorable pricing and peering contracts. 3) Enable a separate ad ecosystem for quarantined content.
• runawaybottle 6y ago
  If Youtube really believes this is the right course of action, why doesn’t it’s sister company Google remove those items from search as well? If this is really a principled action, then let’s see some follow through. They’d never do that because that is the very definition of internet censorship as we know it today. That’s how close Youtube is with this dangerous game.
  • throwaway122378 6y ago
    Google already modifies it’s search results. Try searching for “Clinton Epstein” and see if the first page of results gives you unbiased sources from all viewpoints.
  • Talanes 6y ago
    You see no difference in their role as a content-host and a content-aggregator?
    • runawaybottle 6y ago
      Why would a content aggregator allow disinformation on their site during a global pandemic? And now we enter the semantics game.
• Proven 6y ago
  1) YouYoube has the right to practice censorship on their own Web property. We may not like it but that's how it is and how it should be 2) Icke should have expected this and primed their accounts on alternative sites Fxxx YouTube, Google and the rest of their globalist friends.
• toofy 6y ago
  This really comes down to whether or not all ideas should be _promoted_ equally. Do we think all ideas–even if they are demonstrably untrue-deserve to be boosted to the same level of provable truths. Should they all be promoted equally and considered equally and taught equally, forever? Do we allow demonstrably false claims to remain at the top to be treated equally, forever? To forever waste time? Every single provable untruth? Millions of them? Forever? I personally see no problem with demoting ideas which have been considered already. I however would have a problem if these peddlers of demonstrably untrue ideas couldn’t easily go set up their own websites or print on their own paper. This is why I’m not running around flapping my arms dancing in a panic circle. At this point, people can still: - easily make their own websites at a cost which is a tiny fraction compared to history - ideas can still printed and pushed the same as they always could through print - people can still stand on a corner and yelp out whatever ideas just as they always could. This is really about how much promotion into consideration these ideas deserve and for how long. How much of our very limited time/energy reserves do every idea get?
  • kyle_martin1 6y ago
    I elect to demote your ideas. How does that feel?
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• mrfusion 6y ago
  Just some food for thought. If youtube was around in the past and doing this stuff they could have deleted videos in support of the following: (these all started as fringe beliefs(1)) Interracial marriage Gay marriage Smoking causes lung cancer (1) interesting topical read and it has sources for these at the end https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/09/american-brain.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/09/american-brain.html
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • quietbritishjim 6y ago
    Those are ideological beliefs. Yes, at one time they were very widely and strongly held. But they were never remotely comparible to spreading factually incorrect information about something biological. A simple demonstration to this: even the reverse of these (e.g. "I believe gay marriage is morally wrong") can't reasonably be argued against with "that is factually incorrect". It's fair to believe that private companies like YouTube shouldn't be censoring speech like this. But these comparisons are bogus and only weaken your point.
    • fantyoon 6y ago
      > But they were never remotely comparible to spreading factually incorrect information about something biological. > Smoking causes lung cancer
      • quietbritishjim 6y ago
        The parent comment was comparing against YouTube banning videos that claimed smoking does cause lung cancer, back before the link was proven, in some steampunk world where YouTube existed 100 years ago. That is not comparible because initially there were at least some scientific studies, or even a vague possible link to a rational doctor, between smoking and lung cancer. There is nothing like a possible link between 5G and coronavirus to anyone that understands what a virus is.
    • 6y ago
• mrfusion 6y ago
  This is a good read that made me think twice about what youtube is doing. https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/09/american-brain.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/09/american-brain.html
• awinder 6y ago
  Contagion really nailed this whole thing even down to the opportunistic asshole peddling misinformation on the web. Well done.
• kyrieeschaton 6y ago
  So glad the people who a couple months ago were pushing "bro, don't wear a mask, just spit directly in your neighbor's mouth" as an epidemiological best practice are now in charge of evaluating not just the long term effects of every emerging technology, but the extent to which they can even be discussed.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• herdodoodo 6y ago
  good. right wing conspiracy theorist nutjobs have no place at the table for rational discussion. and their channels should absolutely not be discoverable on the world's most used video streaming platform.
  • all2 6y ago
    > right wing conspiracy theorist nutjobs This kind of language is not acceptable in this platform. > have no place at the table for rational discussion David Icke is a citizen of the United States. His speech, rational or not, is free. YouTube is a company founded and operated within the United States. I argue that his rights to speak however he damn well pleases should not be infringed on a "platform". If YouTube wishes to be considered something other than a platform (a publisher!), then they can promote/limit whatever they please. As of now, they continue to insist they are a "platform" and are therefore not responsible for what is posted (unless it displeases the advertisers). Discussion of irrational speech is how Marxism and other broken ideologies are seen for what they are. Rather than tell the man to disappear, why not address what he says using the "rational discussion" you mentioned? That's exactly why we have rational discussion.
    • DonHopkins 6y ago
      >> right wing conspiracy theorist nutjobs >This kind of language is not acceptable in this platform. Correction: Right wing conspiracy theorist nutjobs are not acceptable in this platform. >David Icke is a citizen of the United States. He is? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Icke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Icke >David Vaughan Icke (/ˈdeɪvɪd vɔːn aɪk/; born 29 April 1952) is an English conspiracy theorist, and former footballer and sports broadcaster. He is the author of over 20 books and has lectured in over 25 countries. Where and when did you hear that David Icke became a US citizen? Citations, please. Are you a citizen of the US? I ask, because you obviously don't understand what the First Amendment actually says.
    • Talanes 6y ago
      >YouTube is a company founded and operated within the United States. Which grants them a personhood and free speech rights of their own. They can not be forced into speech they do not approve of.
• pdog 6y ago
  The website that accounts for a huge chunk of global internet traffic censoring 5G videos feels a little too on the nose to me.
• endgame 6y ago
  I see no way that this power, first applied to uncontroversially-bad information, will ever be misused. What happened to "organise _the world's_ information, and make it _accessible_ and useful"?
  • gameswithgo 6y ago
    what happened is the trolls and insane people got all the clicks and it made the public dumber.
    • evv555 6y ago
      Would that have happened if these platforms "organised _the world's_ information, and made it _accessible_ and useful" instead of using engagement driven filter bubbles?
      • kbrwn 6y ago
        Facebook would be #1 in online advertising and we'd be using Bing on our Windows Phones.
      • knzhou 6y ago
        Yes. This inevitably results in all mass-adopted systems, even messaging services where people just talk to each other. It's not the systems, it's the people.
  • criddell 6y ago
    Just because that power can be misused doesn't mean they should never use it.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• sunseb 6y ago
  I despise David Icke but I think platforms like YouTube or Facebook should remain neutral. It's not their job to tell us what people should be looking at or not. Then what? We end up like China where we can only browse government propaganda?
  • ctrl-j 6y ago
    I don't believe slippery slope applies in this situation. For the most part Youtube has been fairly lenient as to which accounts get heavily moderated and/or removed. I may revise my opinion if it is ever shown that they become more aggressively restrictive to what is hosted on their platform - but for the most part you seem to be given a wide berth to upload what you wish. The worst I've seen so far is that their video promotion algorithm can be used to "shadow ban".. but I personally believe they have every right to decide how their internal advertisements work. There is also still the free and open internet as a general platform. Torrents and direct downloads are available as a distribution method if there is truly no other platform willing to host your media.
    • colejohnson66 6y ago
      > For the most part Youtube has been fairly lenient as to which accounts get heavily moderated and/or removed. Ah yes, because people have never had their entire Google account terminated because they posted one too many emojis in a chat... https://9to5google.com/2019/11/09/google-account-bans-youtube-emote-spam-markiplier/ https://9to5google.com/2019/11/09/google-account-bans-youtub...
    • CapricornNoble 6y ago
      Nobody complains when the most blatant kooks get disappeared (Alex Jones), but it's absolutely affecting more mainstream content creators, who can't even produce opinion pieces reporting on related news without their videos getting deleted or forced into Private. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO4cPAm7QkQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO4cPAm7QkQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30g_pIVUGpQ&t=814s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30g_pIVUGpQ&t=814s
  • krapp 6y ago
• brenden2 6y ago
  IMO censorship is wrong. To quote someone smarter than me: > I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/01/defend-say/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/01/defend-say/
  • rajup 6y ago
    It's not censorship by any means; YouTube isn't the government. David Icke and his ilk should feel free to take their lunatic fringe theories to the lunatic fringe corners of the Internet like Breitbart etc. They won't be "censored" there.
    • brenden2 6y ago
      YouTube is a de facto public utility at this point. IMO if they want it to be a closed ecosystem, they should not allow public access the way they currently do. There's no good alternative to YouTube (yet) but I hope there is some day. Pushing people to the fringes just breeds more hatred, outrage, misinformation, and extremists. Imagine if there was just one phone company and they only let people who they agree with have phones.
      • beart 6y ago
        Terrible analogy. YouTube is not the only video host. Video hosts are not the only way to share or consume content.
      • montroser 6y ago
        Nope, it's not. The whole rest of the Internet is flush with video content -- it's no monopoly like the phone company used to be. YouTube is an offshoot of an ad company. A private, for-profit enterprise that uses video content from its users to sell adverts. Now, if you want to say the Internet is a public utility -- that's getting closer. And if the Internet writ large somehow managed to block certain content, that would be of great concern. That would require government intervention, like you see in China and some other places. But that is not what it's happening here.
• pcurve 6y ago
  While channels with extreme stance that have public health repercussion are easy enough for them to shut down, I worry more about amateur channels with conspiracy-oriented bating materials that polarize people to either extreme.
• kalium-xyz 6y ago
  I predict a near future update from David on how the Lizard people plotted against our enlightenment once again by blocking him from us. Fear not, he has found new ways to make us aware of the consciousness field, saturn, and 5G its emotion affecting effects.
• Zenst 6y ago
  Yay another extremist swept under the digital carpet, problem solved - well NO. This will just shift this extremist content to other unregulated and unmonitored platforms that will not engage in debate, but blindly accept such things. After all, if people believe this kinda stuff, cutting of the head won't stop them believing, just shifts the problem out of the public glare, at least on the surface.
  • barrkel 6y ago
    It's not a binary. The more places extremists can find like-minded people, the more their worldview is normalized and validated. The fewer places, the higher the probability that they realize (or be continuously confronted by) how far out their views are, and the less extremist a position they'll end up taking. I genuinely don't think universal free speech is the answer, because people aren't confronted with the counterargument until they seek it out. If you could guarantee that argument, it would be much safer. But I don't think it's possible with today's media; people exist in a bubble of both their own choosing and algorithmic choosing, and aren't challenged.
    • Zenst 6y ago
      Agreed it is a hard balance, all gets down to how responsible the average person is and working around that aspect. Universal free speech as it stands, allows racism and with that, you are not wrong. Free speech within some moral boundaries, though free debate, that is the aspect of free speech to provide balance that is equally important.
    • runawaybottle 6y ago
      When you ban these people you erode something we all hold dear in Western countries, and that’s free speech. Even those who are not aligned with you share that ideal, and we have integrity on this one issue because there’s proof of it - you don’t get censored. When you do start censoring them, we will all start losing faith in our values as we don’t apply it across the board. If you look at other non free countries, the average person doesn’t really believe that you have the right to express your views. Take the Muhammad cartoons for example, a vast majority of Muslims in non-western countries think that’s a no go from a rights perspective ( as in, you shouldn’t even have the right to draw it). That kind of thinking extends and extends to all kinds undermining of individual rights. If you look at China, the vastness of inaction to their Internet being censored is another key example of this. It takes a lot to get a society to value it, and we worked pretty hard to get those values ingrained in our culture. There might be some absolutely abhorrent people in our country, but even they cannot deny that they do have the right to express themselves here. We lose that baseline integrity of our values when we start withering it away, until we ourselves can’t even recognize ourselves anymore, where suddenly we have all these caveats to a principle that defines our society.
• dntbnmpls 6y ago
  Fine, if youtube is going to censor conspiracy then they should censor all conspiracy disinformation channels. Haven't there been a bunch of conspiracies peddled by CNN, MSNBC, Foxnews, NYTimes, WaPo, [enter almost every major news outlet] just within the past few years alone? What about politicians, government employees, business people, celebrities, late night hosts, etc who peddle conspiracy? Will they be censored? So according to youtube, only the wealthy connected elites are allowed to espouse conspiracy?
• Barrin92 6y ago
  he deserved to be kicked off for his virulent antisemitism and Holocaust denial a long time ago, guess the pandemic conspiracies did him in. Good riddance.
• centimeter 6y ago
  I'd previously dismissed him as a quack, but hey, now I'm thinking maybe he's onto something.
  • cecja 6y ago
    You are right there was no holocaust, 5G spreads COVID19 and there are aliens in your government. Maybe you can talk about the moon landing at the next listener meet and greet. That you seriously typed that comment and maybe even believed yourself is really terrifying.
• imode 6y ago
  I see a lot of people not wanting to offer alternative solutions to the treatment of this particular individual's content: if you're not in favor of removal, then what? This content can't be allowed to stand as-is. I'm sure you'd complain about any measure other than leaving this individual alone. If so, you deserve to be angry, because you're part of the overall problem. Edit: To remind all of you, downvotes should be reserved for things that are strictly disruptive or not contributing to discussion. Unless we're free to disregard the rules, now.
  • chii 6y ago
    > if you're not in favor of removal, then what? This content can't be allowed to stand as-is. have youtube put on a warning saying that this content is misinformation/wrong. But not censored because censoring "wrong" content just gives those who blindly believe it to feel that they're being targeted - it doesn't change their mind. Censoring it is just promoting it to other underground channels that are more difficult to censor.
    • detaro 6y ago
      > censoring "wrong" content just gives those who blindly believe it to feel that they're being targeted - it doesn't change their mind. And having warnings slapped on it doesn't?
      • chii 6y ago
        it looks less conspiratorial. if you see a warning, but you have the freedom to view it, you won't get emotionally triggered to think that you're being attacked. it's like banning books, vs putting a warning out about it, but continue to allow it to be sold and read.
  • karatestomp 6y ago
    We could not tie hosting and media discovery and ad sales all together. No “social” crap or “you might also like” bubble-prompting algos on the site hosting the video and also selling the ads. That’d be a good start. Same as “it sure sucks that Facebook has to abuse low-paid workers with gore porn but what else can we do?” I mean. We could not? Allow sites that require doing that to exist? Just a thought. [edit] my point is that we look at these problems through a very narrow lens that excludes solutions that serious harm the profits of Internet giants. I think that’s silly. If their business model causes awful things maybe it shouldn’t be possible to have that business model.
• deleted 6y ago
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• IIAOPSW 6y ago
  I'm going to paste here something I wrote a while ago. This is an technological thought experiment and an allegory for fake news and modern propaganda. I use a technological hypothetical to remove the question of if people have any agency in falling for it and the question of if it is necessary to put up with fake news as a form of free speech. With those two questions settled in the premise, we can think clearly about the core issue of the threat of effective propaganda to democracy. Suppose neuroscientists and neural network researchers found an adversarial image which worked on humans. Not all humans, but at least 15% of them. The technology is developed such that by including a specially crafted banner ad image next to an article you could put an arbitrary thought in the persons mind. This opens up a very serious hack in a democracy. The technology is hard to build, but a nation state actor like China or Russia could easily replicate the technology themselves and use these banner ad images to sway elections. Like a psychological atom bomb, it is just a matter of time before every major player has it. 15% of the population is larger than the margin on nearly every election ever. A democracy which wants to survive only has two choices: 1. Criminalize the adversarial images and censor them from the web. Congrats. You are now in an arms race with one side making better adversarial image detectors and the other making better hidden adversarial images. In the mean time you've built an insanely good machine learning based censorship apparatus which sits on top of all internet traffic. Eventually the technology gets to a point where the cognitive basilisk isn't obvious to the unaffected and people are worried that some images are being censored for their substance. The adversaries intentionally hide the patches in posts / ads about wedge issues like guns or abortion so that taking it down looks like political censorship. While everyone agrees censoring the thought breaking images is necessary, people are rightfully scared about this apparatus being abused. Maybe the cognitive basilisks are de facto censored in the sense of being de-platformed by the media (both traditional and social variants). Maybe they are state-capitalism censored in the sense of de-platforming under threat of regulation if they aren't. Maybe we go full China with it and have a top level federal internet censor. The only real difference between these mechanisms is the technical issue of legality. For our purposes the implementation does not matter. 2. Don't let people in the 15% vote. People are again rightfully scared that it could easily expand beyond 15%. A very small, very educated, very detached from the average class of people (neuroscientists) is now trusted to decide who gets to vote. All of the 15% (and quite a few in the 85%) are suspicious of them abusing this power to forward their personal political preferences. Disenfranchising people based on inherited neurological traits is extremely contentious. The question of if it is the right thing to do becomes the defining social issue of a generation. A political fissure opens up. Some people prefer option 1 because they don't consider the adversarial patches to be "speech" and thus don't think there's a free speech risk in censoring them. Some people prefer option 2 because they don't think it is possible to win the arms race in the first case and so long as we don't let the disenfranchisement expand beyond 15% the sin is forgivable. At the very least they think option 2 is a less slippery slope than option 1. Some people like option 1 and 2 at the same time because just do whatever it takes to fix the problem as fast as possible. The people in the 15% think the cognitive basilisks are just a made up conspiracy by the elites. Of course they think this because the cognitive basilisks told them so. Then comes the disingenuous part of the fissure. Some people like option 2 but their unstated reason is because they looked at how the 15% currently votes and they think disenfranchisement will finally lead to their political party winning. Some people secretly want to keep the exploit in place because their political party happened to benefit from interference in the last election. They don't actually have a solution but instead constantly remind you how risky and undemocratic the two options are and insist we do neither. None of the disingenuous advocates are ever moved by any arguments because their purported beliefs were always just a fig leaf over their unstated wants. The debate over how to deal with this technology takes on an impassioned, repugnant, culture-war tone that we have all grown to recognize by now. What happens next I don't know. What I am proposing is that if cognitive basilisk's exist then there is a contradiction of wants within Democracy. You must pick at most 2: -Everyone gets to vote. -Nothing is ever censored. -The internet has no borders. The only remaining question is do fake news and AstroTurfing bots count as cognitive basilisks?
• sjwalter 6y ago
  Man, this comment thread is really harshing my buzz. So many folks here seem real eager to hype their systems and methods for ensuring all this oh-so easily identifiable misinformation has no route to most, which when implemented would stop this huge threat to our civilization. Typing up their clever ideas, full of good intentions (not being sarcastic, my default presumption is you all mean well), each author implicitly assumes their superiority over the masses who are so easily duped into believing awful and dangerous mistruths based on a few headlines boosted on Twitter. The mindset, stripped of all the complications and rhetoric and real positive intent, boils down to this: "These poor fools are completely lost, already in a world of hurt, and their naivety threatens all we hold dear, and so we must protect them from themselves." Already in this thread, all the usual quibbles & arguments for & against this particular form of censorship are being studiously re-litigated. I feel strongly enough to write internet comments about very few issues and my feelings in favour of free speech fundamentalism are making it difficult to stay out of the fray. But I will restrain myself--not because it's a bad thing to do, but just because the ROI on everyone's time is so low, considering the tiny likelihood that all these words spilled out here will change even one mind. Instead, I will ask a question that thus far has not been raised, and that I think is fundamental to this issue: Q: What problems are we trying to solve here? It seems that somewhere in the recent past (if I had to ballpark it, I'd say this all began to rise sometime around 8 Nov 2016) basically everyone in society came to the agreement that misinformation is running rampant, so rampant it may be the #2 item trafficked on the web, King Porn secure in his crown. Not only do we all seem to agree that misinformation is everywhere, but we all seem to also agree that this misinformation's impact is a massive threat to our society--the camel's legs are shaking under the strain, and Zuck's machine just keeps throwing straw. This seems quite bizarre to me. Can someone here who's proposed one of these Democracy Protection Apparatuses tell me what it is y'all're trying to fix? Make no mistake--I am quite aware that basically every public communications channel, not just the web but every channel, is under pressure from a constant flood of messaging aimed at literally changing minds, changing what and how we all think about this concern or that. I am quite well apprised of how the anti-vaxxers spread their wild, unbelievable propaganda, leveraging facebook moms' groups and instagram knitting forums to spread their evil & subversive messages. I know all about how the wily Ruskies have become the world's greatest social media influencers imaginable, who can take a shoestring budget that couldn't cover a major campaign's one day hotel spend and swing the most important election on earth. Of course, as with the printing press and radio and television and fax machines and even pagers, I completely believe, based on solid evidence, that power factions attempt to leverage all broadly-adopted comms channels to their own selfish ends. I'm not denying that. But can anyone here clearly identify what problem is right now such a huge concern that we should cheer on a corporation--one that wields power over our lives like no other ever has--as it unilaterally decides what we can and cannot here? I mean, Susan's big reason here has been laid out explicitly: The 'rony pandemic is of such great concern that our ears should be blocked off from any sound that doesn't emanate from Official Authority, in this case, the WHO, an organization which five months ago nobody cared about at all and now everyone knows is about as credible as The National Enquirer (todo: insert BatBoy joke). I mean, to me it is clearly obvious that accepting censorship is a huge risk. I'm not crazy, I don't think there should be literally zero restriction on free speech. The world would be a mess of scams were fraud permissible, for instance. But the risks censorship brings are huge and asymmetric--only us little people suffer when the surveillance and enforcement mechanisms censorship requires are abused. The wealthy and connected will always have more access to information than we do. When the abuse happens, it will always be to their benefit, because they either are the censors themselves or they control the censors. As we stand to lose the most when censorship is abused, we should have an extremely high bar for any justification for it. (Just think about that phrase, "dangerous information," for a second--we're not talking nuclear launch codes, we're talking questioning public policy, this is what Susan thinks is dangerous. Clearly she thinks very little of us.) Censorship is power. Actually, censorship is the root of the power hierarchy. It's the most important tool in the shed, as a tractor is to a farmer so is censorship to Team Elite. They want to control our minds. And many people in here are cheering them on.
• predictmktegirl 6y ago
  bye
• christiansakai 6y ago
  I used to naively believe that education and more information will fix a lot of things in the world. People will want to study and think and they will be enlightened. I don't believe that anymore. For one reason, studying is hard, critical thinking is hard. Even with given free time and privilege (hello UBI?), most people will not prefer studying or thinking critically. They'd rather parrot things from the internet and the media around them.
  • battery_cowboy 6y ago
    It kinda makes me scared that we'll never figure out how to prevent the most ignorant of us from destroying us all.
    • thinkingemote 6y ago
      If it makes you feel any better and it shouldn't, right now and in the past many people have figured out how to effectively deal with "the ignorant". It basically involves death or camps, reeducation, exile, eugenics etc. The problem is not "idiots", the problem is thinking that other people are the problem.
      • battery_cowboy 6y ago
        True, division is the real enemy of the people and it's hard to remember that fact everyday with the assault to your senses from the media about how people are doing bad stuff. Thanks for reminding me.
• charred_toast 6y ago
  @imgabe says it well in this comment section: > YouTube has clear policies prohibiting any content that disputes the existence and transmission of Covid-19 as described by the WHO [World Health Organization] and the NHS [the U.K's healthcare system] [emphasis added] The WHO at least has been flat out wrong several times during this pandemic, such as telling people not to wear masks. Anointing one agency as the sole source of truth and censoring anything that contradicts it is not going to lead to a good outcome. People need to be able to question authorities.
• pnako 6y ago
  YouTube is trying very hard to become the new MTV.
• p1necone 6y ago
  The entire text of the first amendment, seeing as it seems like a lot of people like to reference it without actually knowing (or pretending not to know) what it says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
  • dgellow 6y ago
    Isn’t David Ivke from the UK? How is a part of the US constitution relevant here?
• rukittenme 6y ago
  I, for one, welcome corporate censorship of the public discourse. Because if there's anyone I can trust its my local, multi-national brand. I love you brand!
  • rukittenme 6y ago
    Also, spare me the asinine "you're free to speak on public property" responses. Public discourse has de-facto moved into private custody. There is no "escaping it".
• jasonlingx 6y ago
  Interesting. Private companies have now become the moral arbitrators and censors of the global social media platforms they control vs in China where the government takes on this role. Wonder which is more dystopian.
• JSavageOne 6y ago
  I have no familiarity with David Icke, but I wonder how much of his "popularity" was fueled by the Youtube algorithm recommending his gullible viewers more and more of the same kind of conspiracy content. I remember speaking to a Flat-Earther once (yes, they actually exist), and it seemed he basically became a flat-earther because he watched one flat-earth video and Youtube kept recommending him more similar content until he became convinced. He also believed in basically every other conspiracy theory (eg. anti-vaxxing) due to spending a considerable amount of time in this Youtube rabbit-hole. Perhaps instead of simply blaming and deleting individual accounts, Youtube should accept responsibility for the dark side of its recommendation algorithms and stop feeding people the same kind of one-sided content espousing the same conspiracy theories.
  • Andrex 6y ago
    They've already done this, and it's already been effective: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/03/905565/youtube-halved-conspiracy-theory-videos-recommends/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/03/905565/youtube-h... Half is a good starting point, but obviously I think YouTube wants to push that higher. This article is from two months ago, also.
  • whywhywhywhy 6y ago
    He was prolific in the conspiracy space and famous in the UK long before YouTube even existed. He doesn't need YouTube to get his opinions out there.
  • RobertKerans 6y ago
    As sibling commenter said, was well known in UK, but anecdotally (from talking to other FB conspiracy theorists, also including a flat earther, and from having a few close acquaintances of that bent) this seems spot on. Literally all of them do the same thing, following YT recs, often sitting for hours. Specifically re Icke, I've talked to otherwise reasonable people who will watch him _despite knowing_ who he is because he comes across as reasonable (and much of what he says fits a certain worldview -- note this isn't left or right specific). He is a good speaker, which you would expect given he was a presenter before he decided to demonstrate he was absolutely batshit crazy live on TV. For people unaware of this, this demonstration was why he was well known in the UK - he went on the biggest talkshow on TV to proclaim that he was the son of god and that the world is controlled by a cabal of lizard people (and was going to be consumed by tidal waves etc etc). The lizard people cabal idea may seem at first glance to be a fairly obvious crude antisemitic trope, but he seems to be absolutely serious about everything, he literally means lizards.
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  Why You Should Oppose The Censorship Of David Icke (Hint: It’s Got Nothing To Do With Icke) https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/why-you-should-oppose-the-censorship-of-david-icke-hint-its-got-nothing-to-do-with-icke-4cb72d19481c https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/why-you-should-oppose-the... > A truly free being does not need an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to protect their mind from David Icke. A truly free being does not want an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to exert any control whatsoever over what ideas they are permitted to share and what thoughts they are permitted to think. A truly free being opposes with all their might any attempt to lock in a paradigm where human communication (and thereby thought) is controlled by vast unaccountable power structures which benefit from the absence of dissent. > Be a truly free being. Oppose this intrusion into your mental sovereignty.
• qiaoliang89 6y ago
  It is like fun control isn't it? You can own firearms for self defence. But if you murder someone else cause other negative consequences, you need to take responsibility. Free! = irresponsible.
• danieltillett 6y ago
  Isn’t the real problem that YouTube is basically a utility service, but one that makes a loss for the parent company. The discussion we should be making is not if YouTube should censor people, but if it should be turned into a regulated utility like a phone or electricity company. Of course if this is decision we make don’t be surprised if Google shuts down the service.
  • Andrex 6y ago
    YouTube contributed 10% to Google's revenue last year ($15 billion.) https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-alphabet-earnings-revenue-first-time-reveal-q4-2019 https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al... YouTube has been break-even since 2014-2015[1]. The myth that YouTube is still somehow unprofitable needs to die. 1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-for-youtube-1424897967 https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-f...
    • danieltillett 6y ago
      Yes YouTube may well be profitable as it is run now, but it may not be profitable if it was run as a utility.
      • Andrex 6y ago
        It shouldn't be run as a utility then. The web is open; another video site can be established by anyone. YouTube proves the model can be profitable. I'm not sure I'd treat YouTube's "monopoly" on internet video the same way as actual utilities have physical monopolies on their industries.
        • danieltillett 6y ago
          Internet video appears to be a natural monopoly given no one can even close to competing against Google.
• tibbydudeza 6y ago
  Come on really ???. He is a paranoid delusional who once claimed to be Jesus and believe that Lizard people are real ... he needs medical help. No freedom of speech issue here.
• t0ughcritic 6y ago
  Been saying this a long time. The top tech companies aka FANGs are too big and just booting people off regardless of if they agree with msg is is not right. This was happening with apps before, now videos and WhatsApp msg throttling. Soon it will be email filtering and then we can say we officially have the great freedom firewall of America. Any means of discovery and communication digitally is now strictly controlled under the guise of fake news. Content was already being ghosted or shadow banned and now it is simply booted. No one should attempt to build any company unless they are heavily funded on these platforms. Add trailers, preview content on them and if possible self host.
• intended 6y ago
  Inevitably on a moderation question on HN People will argue for “truth” to fight with misinformation. Please know that this stopped working the moment we went past the artisanal era of content moderation - which was before the Cable news cycle effect. At the scale we operate at now, not moderating content guarantees that malformed information Packets that take advantage of neural and social weaknesses will proliferate over “truth”.
• busymom0 6y ago
  Don't agree with much with Icke but we are on the wrong path.
• busymom0 6y ago
  “As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.” - Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
• friendlybus 6y ago
  The case for a free and open web is terminal. Assange, christchurch, numerous political commentators. Liberty is deflating into traditional culture and we are all being pinned down into our most basic identities for the sake of the coming command economy in the 2040s. Sic transit gloria mundi.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• dwardu 6y ago
  It all started with Alex Jones, and everyone cheered... YouTube is a private company, and yes it can choose who it wants on its platform. On the other hand of the argument. When do we determine that a company's platform has become so big, that it is a public space and it should just "maintain" the platform and make it as inclusive as possible? For example, we had Alexandra Ocasio Cortez blocking people on twitter, and it is a private platform that a public figure is using, however it was deemed illegal, I'm not sure if it is the same thing that happened with Trump and a few others. I'm not an US citizen, and I don't live in there, however it's so important to see people's views, no matter how stupid or ridiculous it can be. I want to be able to make up my own mind, some views may be terrible and we should be able to hear them. Be curious in pursuing these things. David Icke, from the little I know is crazy, and says some ridiculous things, but he should have be allowed to voice them.
  • DanBC 6y ago
    > and make it as inclusive as possible? This argument would be stronger if it mentioned all the people chased off these platforms by the virulent toxic supporters of Icke and Jones.
    • dwardu 6y ago
      Irrespective of if they are right or wrong, and if others think it's stupid. Everyone is free has the right to speak their mind, and they must also understand that they must be accountable for what they say. People who want to cancel others because they have a dissenting thought they want to say are ultimately terrible human beings.
• NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
  Although I welcome deletion of David Icke account, I am afraid that now he will play on a card of suppression, scoring even more points for his conspiracy theories, fueling even more flame of fear and hatred.
• throwaway05041 6y ago
  Throwaway. I worked at an event David did many years ago. I used to be a big fan. My wife and I watched his 3 hour interview last night after hearing about these bans and discussed this a fair bit. For those that didn't watch, he categorically denies the existence of Covid-19, calls the entire thing a hoax and said that Gates is a psychopath who wants to vaccinate the entire world with nanobots that will eventually enslave us. 5G doesn't cause Covid-19, because it doesn't exist, but 5g can activate the nanobots and at 60ghz can cause respiratory problems similar to what we're seeing. This is orchestrated by a shadowy group called The Cult. We should rise up against our governments and the 'technocrats' of silicon valley (the 1%) to solve this. It may sound ridiculous, but he mixes in enough truth (often in the form of things you will have seen on the Internet) and cleverly spun arguments to make the 'lies' believable. He does this over a long enough time period (yesterday 3 hours, but his talks are often far longer), that you come away believing what he's said, that's he incredibly clever, and that he's fighting for the "real man on the street" against the 1% and a government that's done nothing for you. Social media has been very dangerous in this respect. A few days ago I saw someone on twitter saying that rather than deplatform, Icke should just be beaten in debate. The problem is you can't beat Icke in debate without making his followers dig in further. Like any conspiracist, the retort is "that's what they'd want you to say". It's similar to arguing with someone about the existence of God. You can't prove there is no God, I continue to believe and tell you he exists. My wife just thinks it's all ridiculous. I think with the vaccinations, it's dangerous. But then I have kids now, both are vaccinated. The concept of censoring people scares me, but the idea of throwing away a hundred years of science and medicine because people are worried about being being controlled by Gates's nanobots scares me even more.
  • leonvv 6y ago
    The root of the problem seems to be the inability of people to correctly judge the likeliness of David's arguments to be true. This is not a problem that we're going to solve by banning David's content.
    • krapp 6y ago
      >This is not a problem that we're going to solve by banning David's content. Ok. How are we going to solve it by guaranteeing that his content proliferates as widely as possible, or even as some have suggested, by having governments force platforms to host it against their will, in the name of absolute free speech? The principle that we can debate the merit of ideas only so long as we never prevent any idea from spreading only renders debate meaningless. It's implied in the concept of a marketplace of ideas that some ideas will have value over others. And so it seems implicit to the concept of free speech that one should have the freedom to accept or reject an idea, or try to disabuse someone of an idea you deem fallacious.
• patti3000 6y ago
  Rebel Wisdom has done some great reporting on this: David Icke & London Real, an Investigation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDM1wTGOjOw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDM1wTGOjOw Why was David Icke been banned from YouTube? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omiD6WkTKak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omiD6WkTKak
• ryankrage77 6y ago
  I see a lot of comments suggesting YouTube is a large & monopolistic enough platform that they have to be held to a different standard than a private company, more like a public utility. YouTube is a private company, and they're hosting exabytes of video content for free. You don't need to pay (with money) to upload terabytes of video and have it streamed to millions of people. Just 20 years ago that would have been unimaginable. Even today I think it's taken for granted a little too much. If YouTube did what we want, I reckon they'd be out of business pretty fast as they get overrun with the kind of content they currently don't allow.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• gerland 6y ago
  The reason why we cannot get the right balance between freedom of speech and the right to silence the "abusers" is that by trying to do that we are uncovering an inconvenient truth. It would not be a problem to let the conspiracy theory people or ultra-left, ultra-right people speak freely if an average person would have healthy mechanism to counter the disinformation. Unfortunately those mechanisms were dismantled by the classical media in an conscious effort in the last 7+ decades. Face it - the average person is taught how he should think not by the educational system, but by the media. Our current predicament is only due to information centers hoarding power that they should never get. Not saying that the educational system is great, I think it's even worse to some degree, but we have given up the control for convenience. Instead of creating a basis from science, we created a system in which the buzzwords spat out from "journalists" mouths are underlying the whole social discourse. We cannot get the balance in the "new media" right, because now everybody is granted the power that no one should have in the first place. We are trying to optimize the wrong parameters.
• Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago
  There seems to be quite a few YouTube videos of charging phones in microwaves. Are these videos being removed from YouTube too? And I've heard stories that some people indeed believed that and broke their phones. Can YouTube be held responsible for damages?
• Traster 6y ago
  To be honest there's a lot of talk about freedom of speech here, and the dynamic of freedom of speech vs private corporations right to determine what they allow on their site. Personally I think that this issue is not actually as important as people think, and this problem is just one of several that emerges from a different problem. Our real problem is a lack of competition. There are a tiny number of social media sites that exist at scale: There's Youtube, there's Facebook, and then Twitter. If we had 15 social media platforms, it really wouldn't be much of a problem for them to make decisions about who they wanted on their platform - whether that be through Terms of Service or crappy DMCA implementations. And that's not even taking into consideration the fact that they're all run by the same handful of people who bump into each other at the local Whole Foods. The problem isn't censorship, it's the fact that we've got Standard Oil and no one sees it as a problem.
  • krapp 6y ago
    Googling "social media sites" gives me far more than 15 alternatives to Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. You're like people arguing that Youtube has a monopoly because no "serious" competition exists, only the weasel-words you're using are "at scale" to pretend the entire rest of the social media ecosystem doesn't exist. Wasn't it a meme not long ago that young people didn't even use Facebook anymore, that it was turning into the "old people's social network?" How does that happen if Facebook is Standard Oil and no competition is possible? I guess all of those other sites and apps simply aren't operating "at scale?" The discussion of whether and how social media affects political and cultural discourse, and especially how the gamification and incentives of social media do, is worth having. But the tendency of arguments to depend on slippery slope fallacies which assume the entire web beyond three or four popular sites simply doesn't exist or doesn't matter is incorrect.
• baybal2 6y ago
  I find this a little bit strange when they allow outright scam pseudoscience ads. I think, I counted at least 4 "magic cure" ads on youtube today.
• polytronic 6y ago
  I completely align with this: "When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives." Robert A. Heinlein
• chantelles 6y ago
  Icke's Conspiracy theories are displacement of class discontent 2005: The Reptoid Hypothesis. In this context, Google has just silenced a form of dissent or at least evidence of dissent building. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20718709?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20718709?seq=1
• mdszy 6y ago
  Free speech does not mean that anyone is required to host your content.
• rurban 6y ago
  What he says reminds me a lot on religious teachings. They are still allowed to spread their bullshit. Esp. it reminds me on Scientology. Which is allowed in many countries to teach the very same bullshit. Censorship is violating fundamental rights. Somebody should fight them, Facebook, Google, Twitter, in court, but nobody will for these nutcases.
• cgiles 6y ago
  The question I am not seeing addressed in the many, many comments below is: why is there such a large pool of people willing to believe, and act on, ideas like "5G causes COVID-19 symptoms", "vaccines are harmful", anything by Alex Jones, etc? It is because people are afraid, and because there is a breakdown of trust in Authorities and Experts to tell the truth and keep people safe. Governments and intelligence agencies lied about Iraq and beyond. Large corporations were the only ones saved in 2008. There is a reproducibility crisis in science, which it pays lip service, and lip service only, to solving. Newspapers have become partisan, ad-driven shills. Corporations buy politicians, and together they invent truths as needed to further the bottom line. This is the context in which people are increasingly skeptical of Authorities. "5G causes coronavirus", I think, like flat-earth belief, is less an actual belief a person could actually have, than an almost symbolic statement of distrust in Experts. The specific belief is completely unfounded, but the feeling behind it is not. In this context, I fail to see how corporate censorship could possibly be the answer. At the very best, it is a band-aid. The necessary solution is for our institutions to regain their credibility. The first in many steps will be for them to show some humility and acknowledge that they have failed us badly. Until that credibility is re-established, they need to use a softer touch, rather than doubling down on the obviously false idea that their words are the Infallible Truth.
• zaro 6y ago
  The thought police strikes again.