11 ms·

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 existenc

by imgabe 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
    - imgabe 7y ago
      I have no idea how you managed to misconstrue what I said so badly that you came to that conclusion, but that is not the case at all. The people in the concentration camps did not get talked to death. They died because of actions that people took.
      - throwaway2048 7y ago
        But under your logic, Hitler was not the problem, and should have been free to say whatever he liked, correct?
        imgabe 7y ago
        People are responsible for their own actions. "Hitler told me to" or "David Icke told me to" do not excuse anything someone does. I believe we established particularly after WWII that "I was just following orders" is not a valid defense to committing atrocities. You might also want to remember that one of the first things Hitler did after getting power was to outlaw any opposition parties and violently break up meetings of any dissenters, then arrest and torture anyone who was promoting anything other than the Nazi party line. Hmm, sound familiar?
        quazeekotl 7y ago
        So Hitler was guilty of no crimes then? It would have been a good, or at least morally obligated thing that nobody stopped him, yes?
        imgabe 7y ago
        Is giving a speech a crime? Which speeches are crimes? Who is going to determine that? You? More importantly, who would you like to put in charge of determining whether your speech is a crime? Contrary to what is expressed above, Hitler did much more than give speeches. He also gave orders which is a different thing entirely. Saying "Gee I wish so-and-so were dead" is not a crime in any reasonable democracy. Telling your subordinate "I order you to go and kill so-and-so" is. Do you see the difference? The person following and the person giving the order are both responsible. Are you arguing that the people who physically pulled the triggers or shoved prisoners into gas chamber do not bear any responsibility? At any point, all that was necessary to stop Hitler was for people to not listen to him. What would help that is providing an environment of healthy dissent, not stifling it. I also mentioned above specifically that we should hold people accountable for the actual consequences of their speech. How you get from that to "Hitler did nothing wrong" is completely beyond me. Actual consequences mean real things that occur in reality. Not "I think something might possibly happen because of this" or "You dared to contradict an authority so you must be silenced".
  - ashtonkem 7y ago
    If you’re worried about freedom of speech, then giving more people standing to sue David Icke for taking his dumb advice would be far more stifling than allowing YT to ban people. This would basically allow anyone with deep enough pockets to police speech using the courts.
    - zimpenfish 7y ago
      > This would basically allow anyone with deep enough pockets to police speech using the courts. Which, tbf, the US and UK already have to some degree.
      - ashtonkem 7y ago
        Which is what I was thinking of. But there is a big difference between the U.K. and America here; in the U.K. if you lose a litigation, you have to pay your opponents legal bills. In America the cases where the loser must pay are very limited with high bars to clear. This means that it’s absolutely possible to bankrupt someone in America with frivolous lawsuits, so long as those lawsuits aren’t bad enough to trigger the limited exceptions.
    - imgabe 7y ago
      If you're going to give people advice, you should be prepared to take at least partial responsibility for what happens when they take that advice. If a lawyer, doctor, accountant, engineer, or any professional gives you bad or malicious advice, they expose themselves to liability for the results of it. If you want to present yourself as an expert on some topic and expect people to listen to you, put some skin in the game and stand behind what you say. If you can't do that, you shouldn't be advising people on anything.
  - jfoster 7y ago
    They could even keep the content available but give it a ranking penalty. This way they stop short of full on censorship, but also prevent the spread of terrible quality information.
- colordrops 7y ago
  No, there should not be a standard of truth, that's the point. It's a market place of free ideas.
  - longtom 7y ago
    But then we'd learn about all those oligarchs, abuses of the system, tax evasion, astroturfing, propaganda, opposition gate-keepers, distractions, fake conspiracies etc. ;)
  - knzhou 7y ago
    It's not a "marketplace of ideas", in practice it's a used car dealership. Just about anybody with the slightest bit of cleverness and free time can convince any trusting person of anything whatsoever, no matter how horrible, given enough exposure.
    - colordrops 7y ago
      But it is, assuming you are in the US. That is how the legal framework is laid out. It is extremely difficult and near impossible to restrict speech in public forms.
    - koheripbal 7y ago
      So the alternative is to create "oracles of truth" that cannot be questioned? That's just the opposite idiotic extreme.
      - knzhou 7y ago
        Who said that? The range of bullshit information you can find at a moment's whim remains extremely high, in fact higher than it ever has been in history.
        ThomPete 7y ago
        so what?
- throwaway122378 7y ago
  WHO, CDC, hospitals, universities, doctors
- 6nf 7y ago
  Nobody should be above scrutiny, that's the point!
- koheripbal 7y ago
  NIH? CDC? Their statements were more accurate.
  - Leary 7y ago
    The same CDC that to this day says masks don't prevent the wearer from getting infected?
    - downerending 7y ago
      Yes, but the effect of this CDC stance is far worse than it sounds. Because of the CDC policy that masks have not been proven to be useful, many health workers have been forbidden to wear them. (source: someone close to me)
- pnako 7y ago
  Right now in France one doctor (professor Didier Raoult) has been mostly right about the whole thing (in my view), and he became popular thanks to YouTube. Yet his views are in radical opposition to both the French government and the WHO. Should his videos be removed? He's one of the most published expert on infectious diseases, so who in YouTube has authority to decide that he is more wrong than the minister of health, who is mostly a politician?
  - knzhou 7y ago
    Nobody is talking about banning people like Didier Raoult. If you can't tell the difference between a professor and a guy who gives spittle-flecked rants about the lizard people, this discussion will not be productive. For example, we all know he did a terrible job with the hydroxychloroquine study, but of course he retains his position.
    - triyambakam 7y ago
      You've really missed the point
  - zimpenfish 7y ago
    > (professor Didier Raoult) has been mostly right about the whole thing Can you cite some sources? Everything I've seen about him has pointed out how bad his study was, how he has a track record of just plain making stuff up, etc. Here's a good example (with extra links) that pretty much demolishes his claims: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/03/29/more-on-cloroquine-azithromycin-and-on-dr-raoult https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/03/29/mo...
    - pnako 7y ago
      The main source would be the website of his own research center https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/en/ https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/en/ (but it's mostly the content in French that's interesting) He had a lengthy interview on French media last week. As far as I'm concerned he got pretty much every part of that epidemic right from the beginning and the facts are now vindicating him. But that's not really the point anyway. My point is: he went against the WHO and the French government. And at least some people, like me, find value in what he is saying. So who is to judge whether or not he should be allowed to spread his ideas?
longtom 7y ago
The WHO seems to have been embarrassingly wrong or overconfident on many accounts: 1. Global air travel does not need to be stopped. 2. There is no evidence of human-to-human transmission. 3. There is still a "window of opportunity". 4. Masks don't work (but health workers need them!). 5. The CFR is like 4%.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  > Global air travel does not need to be stopped. This isn't what the WHO said. They said bans on air from specific places (especially those that disrupt supply chains) are bad. This is true. Banning all air travel to/from china would have hurt medical supply chains in the US, with very little benefit. > 2. There is no evidence of human-to-human transmission. When this claim was made (in early january), there was not clear evidence of human to human transmission. It was revised a few days later when there was. > 4. Masks don't work (but health workers need them!). This isn't what was said. They said that random people shouldn't go out of their way to acquire medical PPE (save it for medical personnel) > 5. The CFR is like 4%. Depending on the country, the CFR varies between 1.5% and like 15%. 4% seems like a reasonable estimate there. Unless you rely on the unfounded belief that there are large completely undetected swaths of the population that are infected but entirely asymptomatic, (which would have been found in South Korea, for example), the WHO's estimate is reasonable.
  - koheripbal 7y ago
    Having watched their briefings each day in Jan and Feb, this is absolutely not what the said. If you're going to misquote them, at least provide sources.
  - factsaresacred 7y ago
    > They said bans on air from specific places (especially those that disrupt supply chains) are bad. This is true. The idea that bans on travel are 'bad' is nonsense. There's a global ban on civilian travel precisely because it is effective. > There is no evidence of human-to-human transmission. Sending out a message only to contradict it days later is poor communication and management. > They said that random people shouldn't go out of their way to acquire medical PPE No they said masks were not effective: ‘very little evidence of widespread benefit from masks use outside of these clinical settings’. Study after study contradicts this. Additionally, as a cynical example of subterfuge, their Director-General made up some lies about Taiwan being racist while at the same time, in mainland China, Africans were being banned from shopping malls and evicted from their homes. The WHO messed up, repeatedly. And now their word is apparently sacrosanct on social media by threat of deletion which is simply outrageous.
rasengan 7y ago
They are doing this with the intention to stop you and all of us from questioning authorities. The internet has proven to be way too powerful.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  It's a lot simpler than that, really. YouTube is not "the internet", it's just someone else's computer. That someone wants to be regarded by the general public as a trusted source free of "fake news" (whatever those might be) and as a free and open platform for anyone to post to if they want. That's just not going to work, of course. What's really going to happen is anyone's guess.
Kiro 7y ago
How do you know they are wrong about masks? In Sweden the scientific consensus is still that masks for the broad public are unnecessary.
RIMR 7y ago
I agree with your concern, but I would actually need some examples of YouTube enforcing this rule without nuance. Questioning the validity of WHO's changing mask guidelines I can't imagine would get anyone banned. Telling business owners to defy state orders and re-open nightclubs on vacuous constitutional grounds absolutely should get you booted. If that's how YouTube is enforcing things, I don't see a problem with it. Icke's suspension isn't exactly the opportunity to call YouTube out, because this wasn't a questionable suspension. Until I see a questionable suspension, I don't feel compelled to complain much about YouTube's strategy here.

by imgabe 7y ago

knzhou 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
  - imgabe 7y ago
    I have no idea how you managed to misconstrue what I said so badly that you came to that conclusion, but that is not the case at all. The people in the concentration camps did not get talked to death. They died because of actions that people took.
    - throwaway2048 7y ago
      But under your logic, Hitler was not the problem, and should have been free to say whatever he liked, correct?
      - imgabe 7y ago
        People are responsible for their own actions. "Hitler told me to" or "David Icke told me to" do not excuse anything someone does. I believe we established particularly after WWII that "I was just following orders" is not a valid defense to committing atrocities. You might also want to remember that one of the first things Hitler did after getting power was to outlaw any opposition parties and violently break up meetings of any dissenters, then arrest and torture anyone who was promoting anything other than the Nazi party line. Hmm, sound familiar?
        quazeekotl 7y ago
        So Hitler was guilty of no crimes then? It would have been a good, or at least morally obligated thing that nobody stopped him, yes?
        imgabe 7y ago
        Is giving a speech a crime? Which speeches are crimes? Who is going to determine that? You? More importantly, who would you like to put in charge of determining whether your speech is a crime? Contrary to what is expressed above, Hitler did much more than give speeches. He also gave orders which is a different thing entirely. Saying "Gee I wish so-and-so were dead" is not a crime in any reasonable democracy. Telling your subordinate "I order you to go and kill so-and-so" is. Do you see the difference? The person following and the person giving the order are both responsible. Are you arguing that the people who physically pulled the triggers or shoved prisoners into gas chamber do not bear any responsibility? At any point, all that was necessary to stop Hitler was for people to not listen to him. What would help that is providing an environment of healthy dissent, not stifling it. I also mentioned above specifically that we should hold people accountable for the actual consequences of their speech. How you get from that to "Hitler did nothing wrong" is completely beyond me. Actual consequences mean real things that occur in reality. Not "I think something might possibly happen because of this" or "You dared to contradict an authority so you must be silenced".
- ashtonkem 7y ago
  If you’re worried about freedom of speech, then giving more people standing to sue David Icke for taking his dumb advice would be far more stifling than allowing YT to ban people. This would basically allow anyone with deep enough pockets to police speech using the courts.
  - zimpenfish 7y ago
    > This would basically allow anyone with deep enough pockets to police speech using the courts. Which, tbf, the US and UK already have to some degree.
    - ashtonkem 7y ago
      Which is what I was thinking of. But there is a big difference between the U.K. and America here; in the U.K. if you lose a litigation, you have to pay your opponents legal bills. In America the cases where the loser must pay are very limited with high bars to clear. This means that it’s absolutely possible to bankrupt someone in America with frivolous lawsuits, so long as those lawsuits aren’t bad enough to trigger the limited exceptions.
  - imgabe 7y ago
    If you're going to give people advice, you should be prepared to take at least partial responsibility for what happens when they take that advice. If a lawyer, doctor, accountant, engineer, or any professional gives you bad or malicious advice, they expose themselves to liability for the results of it. If you want to present yourself as an expert on some topic and expect people to listen to you, put some skin in the game and stand behind what you say. If you can't do that, you shouldn't be advising people on anything.
- jfoster 7y ago
  They could even keep the content available but give it a ranking penalty. This way they stop short of full on censorship, but also prevent the spread of terrible quality information.
colordrops 7y ago
No, there should not be a standard of truth, that's the point. It's a market place of free ideas.
- longtom 7y ago
  But then we'd learn about all those oligarchs, abuses of the system, tax evasion, astroturfing, propaganda, opposition gate-keepers, distractions, fake conspiracies etc. ;)
- knzhou 7y ago
  It's not a "marketplace of ideas", in practice it's a used car dealership. Just about anybody with the slightest bit of cleverness and free time can convince any trusting person of anything whatsoever, no matter how horrible, given enough exposure.
  - colordrops 7y ago
    But it is, assuming you are in the US. That is how the legal framework is laid out. It is extremely difficult and near impossible to restrict speech in public forms.
  - koheripbal 7y ago
    So the alternative is to create "oracles of truth" that cannot be questioned? That's just the opposite idiotic extreme.
    - knzhou 7y ago
      Who said that? The range of bullshit information you can find at a moment's whim remains extremely high, in fact higher than it ever has been in history.
      - ThomPete 7y ago
        so what?
throwaway122378 7y ago
WHO, CDC, hospitals, universities, doctors
6nf 7y ago
Nobody should be above scrutiny, that's the point!
koheripbal 7y ago
NIH? CDC? Their statements were more accurate.
- Leary 7y ago
  The same CDC that to this day says masks don't prevent the wearer from getting infected?
  - downerending 7y ago
    Yes, but the effect of this CDC stance is far worse than it sounds. Because of the CDC policy that masks have not been proven to be useful, many health workers have been forbidden to wear them. (source: someone close to me)
pnako 7y ago
Right now in France one doctor (professor Didier Raoult) has been mostly right about the whole thing (in my view), and he became popular thanks to YouTube. Yet his views are in radical opposition to both the French government and the WHO. Should his videos be removed? He's one of the most published expert on infectious diseases, so who in YouTube has authority to decide that he is more wrong than the minister of health, who is mostly a politician?
- knzhou 7y ago
  Nobody is talking about banning people like Didier Raoult. If you can't tell the difference between a professor and a guy who gives spittle-flecked rants about the lizard people, this discussion will not be productive. For example, we all know he did a terrible job with the hydroxychloroquine study, but of course he retains his position.
  - triyambakam 7y ago
    You've really missed the point
- zimpenfish 7y ago
  > (professor Didier Raoult) has been mostly right about the whole thing Can you cite some sources? Everything I've seen about him has pointed out how bad his study was, how he has a track record of just plain making stuff up, etc. Here's a good example (with extra links) that pretty much demolishes his claims: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/03/29/more-on-cloroquine-azithromycin-and-on-dr-raoult https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/03/29/mo...
  - pnako 7y ago
    The main source would be the website of his own research center https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/en/ https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/en/ (but it's mostly the content in French that's interesting) He had a lengthy interview on French media last week. As far as I'm concerned he got pretty much every part of that epidemic right from the beginning and the facts are now vindicating him. But that's not really the point anyway. My point is: he went against the WHO and the French government. And at least some people, like me, find value in what he is saying. So who is to judge whether or not he should be allowed to spread his ideas?

longtom 7y ago

The WHO seems to have been embarrassingly wrong or overconfident on many accounts: 1. Global air travel does not need to be stopped. 2. There is no evidence of human-to-human transmission. 3. There is still a "window of opportunity". 4. Masks don't work (but health workers need them!). 5. The CFR is like 4%.

joshuamorton 7y ago
> Global air travel does not need to be stopped. This isn't what the WHO said. They said bans on air from specific places (especially those that disrupt supply chains) are bad. This is true. Banning all air travel to/from china would have hurt medical supply chains in the US, with very little benefit. > 2. There is no evidence of human-to-human transmission. When this claim was made (in early january), there was not clear evidence of human to human transmission. It was revised a few days later when there was. > 4. Masks don't work (but health workers need them!). This isn't what was said. They said that random people shouldn't go out of their way to acquire medical PPE (save it for medical personnel) > 5. The CFR is like 4%. Depending on the country, the CFR varies between 1.5% and like 15%. 4% seems like a reasonable estimate there. Unless you rely on the unfounded belief that there are large completely undetected swaths of the population that are infected but entirely asymptomatic, (which would have been found in South Korea, for example), the WHO's estimate is reasonable.
- koheripbal 7y ago
  Having watched their briefings each day in Jan and Feb, this is absolutely not what the said. If you're going to misquote them, at least provide sources.
- factsaresacred 7y ago
  > They said bans on air from specific places (especially those that disrupt supply chains) are bad. This is true. The idea that bans on travel are 'bad' is nonsense. There's a global ban on civilian travel precisely because it is effective. > There is no evidence of human-to-human transmission. Sending out a message only to contradict it days later is poor communication and management. > They said that random people shouldn't go out of their way to acquire medical PPE No they said masks were not effective: ‘very little evidence of widespread benefit from masks use outside of these clinical settings’. Study after study contradicts this. Additionally, as a cynical example of subterfuge, their Director-General made up some lies about Taiwan being racist while at the same time, in mainland China, Africans were being banned from shopping malls and evicted from their homes. The WHO messed up, repeatedly. And now their word is apparently sacrosanct on social media by threat of deletion which is simply outrageous.

rasengan 7y ago

They are doing this with the intention to stop you and all of us from questioning authorities. The internet has proven to be way too powerful.

zozbot234 7y ago
It's a lot simpler than that, really. YouTube is not "the internet", it's just someone else's computer. That someone wants to be regarded by the general public as a trusted source free of "fake news" (whatever those might be) and as a free and open platform for anyone to post to if they want. That's just not going to work, of course. What's really going to happen is anyone's guess.

Kiro 7y ago

How do you know they are wrong about masks? In Sweden the scientific consensus is still that masks for the broad public are unnecessary.

RIMR 7y ago

I agree with your concern, but I would actually need some examples of YouTube enforcing this rule without nuance. Questioning the validity of WHO's changing mask guidelines I can't imagine would get anyone banned. Telling business owners to defy state orders and re-open nightclubs on vacuous constitutional grounds absolutely should get you booted. If that's how YouTube is enforcing things, I don't see a problem with it. Icke's suspension isn't exactly the opportunity to call YouTube out, because this wasn't a questionable suspension. Until I see a questionable suspension, I don't feel compelled to complain much about YouTube's strategy here.