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Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with

Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". Just a no win situation. It's too easy for bad characters to screw up an entire system with little effort (look at trolls, spammers, etc). Either you moderate everyone and slippery slope down into censorship where the tools used to police are used on good actors, or you do nothing and watch the bad actors poison your entire ecosystem.

mariodiana 5y ago
"Misinformation" should not be combatted by anything other than better, more persuasive information.
- ookblah 5y ago
  Great in theory, but if you've ever debated someone who is not acting in good faith online it's near impossible. Their energy input is an order of magnitude lower than yours. And yes, in this specific context it IS misinformation, disinformation, or just flat out false.
  - vibrato2 5y ago
    I haven't seen any serious attempt to address the concerns with the "vaccines". Only ostracism and censorship. Plus a healthy dose of disinformation about the safety and efficacy profiles of these therapies. If the science is so clear, why not give an anti vaxxer a huge prime time platform and embarrass them in debate?
    - JaimeThompson 5y ago
      Which concerns do you have?
      - vibrato2 5y ago
        With these specific therapies: 1) Myocarditis (long term heart damage) 2) general inflammation and clot risk 3) long term risks of brand new mRNA technology For myself and other young athletes, my research leads me to understand that the vaccine is higher risk than the infection. My greatest concern is the totalitarianism behind vaccine passports. At this point even if the shot cured cancer I wouldn't take it because of how it's pushed.
        paulryanrogers 5y ago
        > For myself and other young athletes, my research leads me to understand that the vaccine is higher risk than the infection. As someone with a pre-existing heart condition I'd like to read that research. Do you have any links?
        rwcarlsen 5y ago
        You are not alone. The authoritarian threat and government overreach problems are IMO orders of magnitude more important and concerning than the virus. I will almost certainly be taking a stand and be terminated by my employer over this within the next few weeks.
        suzzer99 5y ago
        Here's a good study about the risk of myocarditis (it's very low). https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110475 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110475 There's a lot of misleading information out there about myocarditis that makes the risk sound much worse than it is. Yes adverse myocarditis reaction is a risk. But it's something like 1 in 17,000. 1 in 500 Americans have died from covid. Even if you're young and healthy, we have no idea the long term risks of contracting a serious case of covid. You have to factor that into the risk equation.
        spectramax 5y ago
        > But it's something like 1 in 17,000. 1 in 500 Americans have died from covid. This is true but misleading. You need to account for age as the primary factor that determines the risk exposure. Edit: Surprised that someone downvoted this. Care you explain what you disagree here? I am simply pointing out that it is not straight forward to compare risk levels because they are highly dependent on age.
    - ookblah 5y ago
      Why not give a flat earther a huge prime time platform? I mean that in of itself proves nothing. There have been many attempts and even in my own circles and in the end the it has nothing to do with the facts and all about fear and badly calculating risk. I can understand the mentality if you're hesitant of the vaccines being new and want to wait, but just understand that the current data shows you're taking a higher risk by not taking it. Your choice in the end, though. People who are full anti-vax are a different thing altogether.
      - musingsole 5y ago
        > Why not give a flat earther a huge prime time platform? They did. It happened, and the dude died in the rocket as it crashed to Earth. And following that, I stopped hearing so many murmurs about if a lake surface was flat or convex.
        bena 5y ago
        He died last year. He also had successful launches previously. And those didn't halt anything. The world, collectively, has been a bit busy with other stuff since last year. If anything COVID conspiracy stuff has pushed out all other conspiracies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Hughes_(daredevil) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Hughes_(daredevil)
        musingsole 5y ago
        > If anything COVID conspiracy stuff has pushed out all other conspiracies. Conjecture is as conjecture does
        bena 5y ago
        As opposed to generalizing from self doing as it does? You didn't see it so it must not exist?
    - unethical_ban 5y ago
      Dozens of books have been written documenting the absolute, unmitigated travesty of the Trump administration. 70 million people still voted for him, and a majority of those did so as a positive review of his performance! I'm not sure what to do, but I know now that "mountains of evidence" does not stop alluring stupidity.
      - Nemrod67 5y ago
        https://youtu.be/lw2BVI9OhC4 https://youtu.be/lw2BVI9OhC4
        unethical_ban 5y ago
        Useless.
    - depaya 5y ago
      It's not possible to embarrass someone with no shame. It's easy to lie and debate dishonestly[1]. Engaging in such a debate would only legitimize a position that may have no legitimacy to begin with. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - criddell 5y ago
      > If the science is so clear, why not give an anti vaxxer a huge prime time platform and embarrass them in debate? That doesn't work. It didn't work for climate change and it won't work for vaccines.
    - krageon 5y ago
      > If the science is so clear, why not give an anti vaxxer a huge prime time platform and embarrass them in debate? Neonazis clamor that they need a platform all the time. Now that we can see what that's like (the US, in case it is not clear) we can see that this is a terrible idea.
    - mcguire 5y ago
      Pro tip: if you declare any and all "serious attempts to address the concerns" as "disinformation", then the only thing left is ostracism and censorship. BTW, ever heard of Duane Gish?
      - vibrato2 5y ago
        Pro tip: If you make a strawman argument, the only thing illustrated is masturbation. And No. never heard of him.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    I have and I still think so. First of all, it is not realistic to assume that you will convince everyone; you won't. Second, practice is necessary and bad faith counterparts will help you get better. It is not my impression that "energy input of people spreading X is an order of magnitude lower". On the other hand, they obsess over such topics and spend a lot of time spreading their views - that is why they are visible.
- seqastian 5y ago
  Too bad that is not how humans work. If the good information is complicated and scary, we will go for easy and pleasing every time.
- ramses0 5y ago
  You’re wrong, several Oxford and Harvard studies show that misinformation is best fought with more misinformation. Either that, or your own personal beliefs, which are _way_ more true than something studied for years by ivory tower academics who are always changing their mind. Like and subscribe to my podcast and buy my T-Shirts……
- jhedwards 5y ago
  Good luck explaining to the mob that "there in fact is no fire", as they charge out of the theater. I typically agree with you, and it was justice Louis Brandeis who said it so well: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” On the other hand, the one exception to this is when the speech is question causes a clear and present danger. We are facing a rather perverse crisis in the world right now with respect to vaccine misinformation. I'm not saying I know the answer, but I know we did not get here through a lack of quality, persuasive information.
  - peteradio 5y ago
    I think people are talking completely passed each other. The conservative crowd will debate the severity of the existing pandemic and whether the cure is worse than the illness. The vaccinate all crowd well just wants everyone to be vaccinated, the severity of the crisis is a forgone conclusion. I think both points of view have strong merit but its hard to mend the two views together they just don't really mix. The whole thing ends up being labelled "misinformation" because we aren't even on the same page. I find myself in the conservative camp which is a rare occurrence for me. But I can't for the life of me understand how people can be so enchanted with the heads of our federal organizations when the data behind their words does not stack up. Misleading the importance of data, stretching and inverting the burden of proof we should expect from our government ultimately makes me see them as liars. Watching liars speak is one thing but to see a whole populace see positive meaning, smiling nodding and go on to shout down anyone who tests the rhetoric, its blind fanaticism.
    - jhedwards 5y ago
      I think the crux of the issue is that "the cure is worse than the illness" is objectively false, as the vaccine has been proven to be safe, and bodies from COVID deaths continue to pile up. I try not to listen to politicians for the reasons you mentioned, but just looking at the data it seems like an awfully simple problem to me.
- kgwxd 5y ago
  If the hare never takes a nap, the tortoise will never catch up.
  - account42 5y ago
    If the hare never takes a nap it will die of sleep deprivation.
- atty 5y ago
  This is an outmoded concept based on the idea that humans are purely rational creatures, which we already know is false. Just providing better information does not sway individuals. People are far more swayed by information from their “tribe”, even if that information is patently false, than they are by quantitatively better information, because it makes them feel good. That’s why actions like this seem to be necessary.
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
  Why do we always assume that it's "misinformation" and that if people were told or shown better, they would want better. Many times, people actually want the bad thing. I can't help but see the "Free Speech" alarmism on HN originating from the fact that the market of ideas is no longer participating in arguments about right-wing viewpoints, but is actively moving against them and taking them off the shelf.
- mtberatwork 5y ago
  Related: "Why Science Can't Settle Political Disputes" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693269
- krageon 5y ago
  Better information is not more persuasive.
  - the_optimist 5y ago
    If this is correct, then why would you believe you've ascertained truth? The very hallmark of truth as we know it is that 'better' information, meaning more and more clarified data consistently resolve on the same conclusion.
    - bashinator 5y ago
      You’re conflating “correct” and “persuasive”.
      - the_optimist 5y ago
        You're assuming reasoning that defies communication.
        lovich 5y ago
        The reasoning behind understand that “correct” and “persuasive” are two adjectives that aren’t synonyms and describe different values is fairly simple to communicate
        krageon 5y ago
        No, nobody is doing that. Because we weren't talking about that at all.
- enraged_camel 5y ago
  Nah. Brandolini's Law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, explains why this will not work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law The gist of it is that making up bullshit takes almost no energy, whereas refuting that bullshit effectively will be very time-consuming. This is exacerbated by the fact that bullshit is usually packaged in a way that makes it spread way faster by, for example, exploiting social media "engagement" algorithms. There are corollaries to this. For example, the idiom "a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth is done tying its shoes."
  - sleepybrett 5y ago
    Bullshit is a ddos attack, youtube is just putting up a packet filter that drops a portion of the ddos packets before they make it to the target.
- yupper32 5y ago
  Combating misinformation with more persuasive information takes about 10-100x more effort than putting out the original misinformation.
- _moof 5y ago
  People are not little machines that accept information as input, apply impartial rules of logic, and then spit out a correct answer. People are social-emotional animals with a carefully guarded sense of self, a basic need to belong, and all kinds of nervous system structures that, when activated, prevent rational thought. This is not as simple as putting more information out there.
ihsw 5y ago
Many people siding with "anti-vaxxers" are anti-mandate pro-vaccine activists. If they were given a voice in the current conversation then there would be a lot fewer disagreements.
tsfranke 5y ago
Agree completely on a no win situation. Censorship can keep good information out. No censorship can make whoever yells the loudest be the most heard, which can snowball into millions of ramifications. I'd like to go back to the early internet days where people had to at least make a geocities site to spread their word, with no financial incentives to getting more clicks or viewers. It wasn't perfect, but you had to be seeking that group / audience rather than having it thrown in your face everywhere.
z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
...or you just do some actual moderating instead of offloading your workload on machines. People worry about idiots and disinformation yet ignore and allow way more non conspiracy nutjobs all the time. Big Tech has such a cognitive dissonance its dizzying
inglor_cz 5y ago
This isn't a new situation. Free speech debates are as old as civilization itself. The printing press was at least as disruptive as the Internet, precisely because relatively small players could sabotage power of huge organizations such as the Church relatively cheaply. I think that the old classical liberal principles still apply. A certain fringe of the population will eat any propaganda unthinkingly, domestic or foreign. But if a majority was so uncritical, democracies would have collapsed a long time ago. We might actually be over the crest of max poisoning in social media. Lots of people have realized that such channels are not to be trusted. This is partly masked by the fact that a lot of new content is still churned out by dedicated players; silent majorities are silent.
- burrows 5y ago
  > A certain fringe of the population will eat any propaganda unthinkingly, domestic or foreign. But if a majority was so uncritical, democracies would have collapsed a long time ago. Like the millions of people who unironically watch CNN, FOX, ESPN, MTV and whatever else TeeVee networks are carrying?
  - all2 5y ago
    https://americanfreepress.net/perpetual-war-and-the-global-media-psyop/ https://americanfreepress.net/perpetual-war-and-the-global-m... > What is insidious, as Ulfkotte confesses, is that typically, intelligence agencies use “unofficial covers”—people working for the agency but not actually on its payroll as agents. It is a broad, loose network of “friends,” doing one another favors. Many are lead journalists from numerous countries. This informality provides plausible deniability for both sides, but it means an “unofficial cover,” as Ulfkotte became, is on his own if captured. > The American reporter James Foley, allegedly executed by ISIS, found that out. Ulfkotte confirmed to this author that Foley did indeed work for various intelligence organizations, as this newspaper reported on last month. He also stated that if a journalist is accused of spying, such reports are almost always credible. The point of this article is that journalists are just as fallible to money as everyone else. That the alphabet soup agencies don't mind using journalists for their own ends. To assume that stops with spying is an argument from silence (lol, but to assume that it does go past that is also an argument from silence).
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation Yeah. Don't do shit. Let the stupid run its course. Trying to combat disinformation is like bombing villages in hope of hitting an ammo dump. The collateral damage is more damaging than ignoring the problem. Why do we always have to be Doing Something(TM)?
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  You're arguing to let low information or critical thinking challenged people die because of the actions of others (whether those actions are in good faith or not is immaterial). If Youtube decides it wants to take action to promote the public welfare, that's their right as a business. "Doing Something" is usually harm reduction within the framework of law and public policy, and there's a lot of harm out there, hence the continual debate over a) should something be done? and b) what can be done?
- strgcmc 5y ago
  Imagine this attitude applied to climate change. Letting the stupid runs its course and choosing inaction, will lead to disastrous warming outcomes. So, maybe there are situations where doing nothing is okay, but I don't think very large scale problems that require coordinated large scale action over long time scales to address, like global pandemics or mitigating the impacts of man made climate change, are the right situations for that kind of approach. Too many thousands/millions will die, too many billions/trillions of dollars of damage will be done, via inaction. Of course, it all comes down to whether you can stomach the cost of inaction, because maybe you don't think the impacts are all that bad. I don't have an answer to that, if two parties fundamentally disagree about what the cost of impact will be or whether that cost is acceptable (e.g. many folks in the US apparently think 600k+ COVID deaths in the US isn't a big deal, and wasn't worth the interventions applied to mitigate it to that level).
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    I don’t see the connection
  - 5y ago
gentle 5y ago
Great point!
josephcsible 5y ago
> I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". You say that like it's a bad thing. If we don't stop the censorship now, it'll be too late to stop it in a year or two when we're the ones being censored for some reason.
- mcovey 5y ago
  I think it's already too late. Removal of unpopular / non-mainstream opinions from large social media sites is now the norm and is celebrated (by those who didn't get silenced).
commandlinefan 5y ago
> I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". I can confirm your suspicions in my case. I'm vaccinated (against COVID, the flu, and tetanus, and all the other things you can get vaccinated against), but I think YouTube is wrong here.
- goldenbikeshed 5y ago
  I think the problem is less what YouTube is doing here and more that YouTube has this kind of power. If every country had 10 video Websites like Youtube that each had a 10th of the users from that country, and maybe some international users, then one portal taking a total ban-all hard-ass stance on misinformation wouldn't be a big deal. tldr: Monopolies bad, YouTube bad, facebook bad.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    Okay so you have your wish, there are 10 major video sites in the US who all have 5-20% market share. The forces that push one service moderate content will push the others. Like there are a lot of social networks, have you noticed that every single one is monitoring for COVID related content and adding a banner? tldr: competition can't solve political issues because there's a monopoly on government
    - musingsole 5y ago
      There is government pressure (more correctly just social pressure) but the government hasn't given a mandate that these platforms must take this censorship stance. And even then, this is only an issue because everyone is on just a handful of platforms -- so the companies build one-size-fits-all policies. But we're not all the same size. I'm not terrified of my community encountering misinformation. I'm far more terrified of a community being unable to articulate and defend why the information is "mis".
      - tastyfreeze 5y ago
        "We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook..." - Jen Psaki 7/15/2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0aWGsxyYPg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0aWGsxyYPg
lucumo 5y ago
Yes, exactly. It's just so similar to forum spam. Free speech absolutists were far less in favour of free speech when it came to banning viagra-salesmen. Like the forum moderators, it's perfectly okay for Google to just not want the headache of dealing with pests.
- a1369209993 5y ago
  > Free speech absolutists were far less in favour of free speech when it came to banning viagra-salesmen. Nope. We're in favor of viagra salesmen being able to speak to anyone who wants to listen to them, same as anyone else. It's just that effectively noone wants to listen to them, and we tend to design things accordingly because we're lazy and noone is complaining (that they want to listen to viagra salesmen).
mbesto 5y ago
> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? Actually, people have, we've just moved on from the more important discussion which is whether YouTube (and other similar forms of social media / UGC) should exist in its current form. I personally do not like regulation, but this is a situation in which the harm of social media / UGC is starting to outshine its benefit. I'm not sure if an outright ban of sites like YT is warranted but I think the frictionless experience of uploading/commenting/etc. on YT should be questioned.
- nradov 5y ago
  Fortunately the First Amendment doesn't allow the US government to regulate such activities just because elitist authoritarians consider them harmful. This is an area where fundamental rights overrule cost-benefit analysis.
  - mbesto 5y ago
    I agree in principle, but I think it's worth exploring analogous examples. For example, doesn't the FCC regulate what is on TV in some form?
    - nradov 5y ago
      The FCC has no legal authority to regulate anti-vaccine content on TV. (I don't support such content, just explaining the law.) The FCC has some limited authority to regulate obscenity and indecency on over-the-air broadcast channels only. Congress gave them this authority because broadcast spectrum is a scarce public resource that reaches into everyone's home whether they want it or not. However the FCC generally has no authority over cable, Internet, or satellite content. Those systems aren't subject to spectrum scarcity and have effectively infinite capacity. https://www.reuters.com/article/entertainment-us-usa-televsion-indecency-idUSBRE85K10W20120621 https://www.reuters.com/article/entertainment-us-usa-televsi...
      - mbesto 5y ago
marcosdumay 5y ago
Well, that's the entire point of principles. (I do actually not hold this one principle as absolutely, because Youtube is designed for public manipulation, so they have the onus of ensuring their manipulation isn't a bad one. But I do surely hold it for a neutral channel and that governments must ensure neutral channels exist.)
awofford 5y ago
Standing by people you don't agree with is a pretty hallmark demonstration of "principle."
SergeAx 5y ago
A simple question: do you beleive that suppressing freedom of speech will seriously inclrease a number of vaccinated? I beleive that the best outcome is it will stay around the same. Some sensitive people will calm down and eventually vaccinate, others will become stronger anti-vaxxers, because "if it is forbidden by authorities, it should be somehow true".
- sneak 5y ago
  A private site like YouTube choosing to censor content on its own servers is not suppressing freedom of speech. In fact, it is YouTube exercising freedom of speech by wielding editorial control over their own website.
  - kklisura 5y ago
    So... Youtube is now a publisher, not a platform?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - VLM 5y ago
      Youtube should be held civil and criminal liable for ALL content on its highly edited and curated platform.
  - bcrosby95 5y ago
    Freedom of speech can go beyond just what's in the federal constitution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._Robins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R... It's not necessarily that simple, although it probably is under current state laws.
  - engineer_22 5y ago
    I mean... Yeah... Long ago some people got together and said large government organizations should not censor speech. They thought this idea was good enough that it shouldn't just be law, they should Amend the US Constitution to protect people from a particular large organization's overwhelming power to suppress dissent. But today the organization censoring speech is a public corporation [wealthier and more powerful than most governments], and because it doesn't have explicit ties to any government, we are supposed to assume that the spirit of the original rule is not being violated. Citizens may expect no freedom of thought or expression, even if the properties Google owns appear to be and function like public forums.
shadowgovt 5y ago
Principles aren't worth anything if people don't stick by them when expediency would recommend another course of action. ... This is why I chucked this particular principle overboard years ago. I don't personally think it holds water in light of irrational human actors and an under-informed public, given the immense power of modern bidirectional communications media.
- mythrwy 5y ago
  How do you propose to deal with unpopular opinions that turn out to be correct with this method? Also (and related) how do you propose to deal with corruption?
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    > How do you propose to deal with unpopular opinions that turn out to be correct with this method? Multiple tiers of signal (forums open to wider ideas that are, perhaps, more private than YouTube. Additionally, academic forums where people with relevant background can hash things out). I don't think the "everyone can see everything" Facebook / YouTube / Twitter model has been proven to work for difficult and sensitive topics. YouTube is just not one of the places the messy conversations are safe to have. It's a cat-video host, not a pathology research organization or academic community (nor does it seem it wants to be). > Also (and related) how do you propose to deal with corruption? I don't know, but I think there's a burden of proof that the open model prevents corruption (assuming open is what we have now). It's massively vulnerable to propaganda and information distortion based on amount of effort put into amplify signal, not truth of information in signal. People with little background in a technical subject to lean on when exercising their critical thinking are very vulnerable to the notion "Everybody is saying it, so it must be true," and when you couple that to bubble effects I worry we see bad results. The "wisdom of crowds" was always an experiment. It's possible for the experiment to fail.
seph-reed 5y ago
YouTube's algorithm actively pushes people down rabbit holes towards fringe content. The best way to combat this is not invest billions of dollars in infrastructure meant to do exactly the thing it just did. Bad actors didn't poison the system, youtube covered itself in lacerations and jumped into sewer water. They stand back watching their algorithm divide and extremize everyone on every side of every debate, and now that the flame wars are starting to turn into mass graves they're hoping they can stop the whole thing by banning a few extremes here and there. > Just a no win situation I think there is a clear win here: AI should not be allowed to do what it is doing. Humans can't handle it. And the cost of lives is on Facebook and YouTube, plenty of employees took a stand to say exactly what was/is happening and were ignored.
Solstinox 5y ago
Hypothetically, what do you do when there isn’t enough quality information to gauge “disinformation” from “information?”
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
trezemanero 5y ago
Yes? If we continue to allow explicit censoring this will become normal.
mdp2021 5y ago
If you have a formula to infallibly decide that A is a "bad actor" for any A in actual practice, you have solved the organizational problem of the past few millennia.
xanaxagoras 5y ago
> I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". I know I am. As someone with 2 shots that sympathizes quite a lot with the people who are commonly and ridiculously maligned as "anti-vaxxers", as though their position is even remotely similar to the people that term accurately described pre-2020, this will make my people dig their heels in even more. Good. Sunshine is the best disinfectant, remember? Democracy dies in darkness, remember? The left has morphed into a censorious dictatorship that castigates anyone who doesn't think specific thoughts and punishes wrongthink by making pariahs out of those who wronglythink it. This is just a prominent example of the same authoritarian movement expressed through the burgeoning hegemony of big tech. Shit like this doesn't convince anyone, we'll just leave you to fester in your echo chamber, oblivious as you are to the fact that we'll be festering in our own. Speaking of which, this announcement doesn't bother me at all. Youtube is over, it's just corporate sponsored tepid garbage at this point. It's not interesting anymore because creators aren't permitted to speak freely - not just w/r/t COVID. We are already moving to platforms where free expression is allowed and supported, and I hope Google does even more to hasten the exodus.
jjtgbbjui 5y ago
Provide a better education for the poor. I don’t mean education about a particular subject; better education in general. In almost all conspiracy theories, one side has a lot of facts, the other has a lot of “feelings”. If you try having a conversation with someone who believes in some conspiracy you’ll eventually get to “I just don’t feel…”
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  How on earth is YouTube supposed to do that? They have no control over the however many thousands of public school systems exist in the United States, let alone education in the rest of the world.
- vimy 5y ago
  People who don’t want to take the vaccine come from all walks of life. Not just the poor or uneducated.
  - MrRiddle 5y ago
    Education is only a part of it. One of other parts is trust in the system. Countries with more trustworthy politicians and more humane social policy have better response both to lockdown measures and vaccines.
  - bobsoap 5y ago
    Agreed, and I'm not OP, but I'd define "general education" to include concepts like effective fact-checking and media literacy, and not just for our children but for older folks as well. I think a big part of the issue are some members of the older generations who left school long ago when there was maybe one newspaper in town. The internet, which came much later, gives everyone a voice and allows every idiot to dress stuff up, make it look professional, put lipstick on it and amplify it with the click of a button. How do you know to apply critical doubt to someone's claims when you don't even know how damn easy it is to produce a convincing fake? And if you do have a doubt, how would you even start fact-checking when all you know is Facebook and Youtube? Too many people have their guard down, sitting in the comfort of their living room browsing The Algorithm, and don't even realize they are being attacked.
disconjointed 5y ago
there is definitely a better way. i am building that right now
credit_guy 5y ago
I don't know myself; however Steven Pinker published yesterday a new book called "Rationality". He promises to give the readers tools to cope with exactly this type of situations. I don't know if he delivers on it, I just started the book, but I really hope he does. https://www.amazon.com/Rationality-What-Seems-Scarce-Matters-ebook/dp/B08WK3JNLT/ https://www.amazon.com/Rationality-What-Seems-Scarce-Matters...
JeremyNT 5y ago
> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". Social networks seem to be unable to optimize for anything other than "engagement," which inevitably leads to amplifying compelling but technically incorrect and outright dangerous content. The thing to remember is that YouTube is essentially designed to boost disinformation. As implemented they have no effective counterbalance to this. Is it also "censorship" when the YT recommendation system effectively buries factual and useful information for some people just because it's less engaging than the misinformation they currently consume? Maybe so? The solution seems pretty obvious to me. There's a middle ground between banning and allowing to run rampant - and that's to add human reviewers to counterbalance the terrible job currently being done by their automatic recommendation system, and manually down-rank disinformation so it is less likely to be surfaced automatically in peoples' playlists. Google will never do it, because it would 1) require paying humans to do work, which is expensive, and 2) it wouldn't drive engagement and generate clicks. So they just take the easy way out, so they can keep on doing what they do.
- makeworld 5y ago
  > Social networks seem to be unable to optimize for anything other than "engagement," This is mostly due to the profit motive. Optimizing for time spent on the platform benefits shareholders.
- oblio 5y ago
  I would argue it's much, much, worse than what you're saying. I mean this part: > Google will never do it, because it would 1) require paying humans to do work, which is expensive, and 2) it wouldn't drive engagement and generate clicks. Every regular business out there needs support. In the form of pre-sales, sales, post-sales, actual support folks, etc. Google's entire business model is predicated on there being no meaningful human support. If they're forced to implement the level of support their worldwide, what-they-consider-top-notch operation would actually require, their business model goes bust. Ok, I'm probably exaggerating, but their profit margins would go down from ~25% to probably something like 5%. They will <<never>>, ever do it, unless someone puts a legal gun to their head.
mlindner 5y ago
I got the vaccine and I'm pro-vaccine in general (for vaccines that are long term preventative, not single-year preventative, ex: never gotten flu vaccine) however I keep finding myself wanting to defend the anti-covid-vaxxers as they're fighting a fight I sort of feel like I understand.
sensanaty 5y ago
> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? Yeah, don't do anything? Why do we have to do anything about """disinformation"""? What'll happen in a few years when the things you stand for and believe in are labelled as disinformation? Because if you start censoring and combating "disinformation" now, it's only a matter of time until the same practices start affecting you and the things you stand for. Besides, do you really think banning people off of platforms for wrongthink is more likely to make them change their minds? If anything, those kinds of actions cause resentment to fester, which only leads to more radicalization (for lack of a better term) in the future.
- goatlover 5y ago
  This assumes that disinformation can't be identified objectively. Claiming that COVID vaccines implant a microchip is simply false. There's no good reason to allow that sort of claim to spread on social media in the midst of a pandemic where people can die because they believe blatantly false conspiracy theories. You're committing the slippery slope fallacy. That any kind of censorship leads to the bad kind of censorship, instead of there being a reasonable standard for banning harmful disinformation, and not just differences in political, religious or whatever views. Societies always have to maintain some kind of balance between individual rights and the collective good.
  - sensanaty 5y ago
    So who's going to be the one that decides what disinformation is or isn't? Where exactly do you draw a line when deciding what constitutes disinformation, and as such what gets deleted out of existence? Sure, the microchip stuff is bullshit, but where do we draw the line exactly on what vaccine-related topics can or can't be posted about online? And this is where we fundamentally disagree, I believe that any censorship of literally any kind is too much censorship. There is no such thing as a "reasonable standard" for banning "disinformation", because any two random people will disagree on what should be silenced or not.
    - 5y ago
AmericanChopper 5y ago
Misinformation, aside from being a rather subjective thing to define, isn’t the cause of the problem, it’s just a symptom of it. The cause of the problem is people losing trust in their institutions. People not trusting pharmaceutical companies barely needs any explanation due to their history of scandals (any opioid crisis threads on HN today?). People not trusting public health institutions is a bit more serious. But it’s a perfectly rational reaction given how much they’ve lied over the course of the pandemic. Looking to misinformation as the source of the problem is just a way to deflect responsibility. If the problem you’re trying to solve is “how do we combat misinformation”, then “strictly controlling the information they’re allowed to consume, and the things they’re allowed to say” seems like a reasonable response to a lot of people. But if your problem is “why have people lost trust in our institutions”, then “because we failed to strictly control the information they’re allowed to consume, and the things they’re allowed to say” is quite obviously a counterproductive KGB-style response.
diegoveralli 5y ago
I believe that tradeoffs between individual freedom and the common good are necessary. So I am biased in favour of intervening when it's necessary. But it's very hard to see how these social network interventions are well thought out and have considered all the possible side effects, many of which are mentioned in other comments. I suppose they're tracking the data and will change course if this doesn't work how they expected.. Still, rather than being a case of deplatforming harmful speech, these look like amputations of entire conversations from the service, maybe to take the spotlight off the degenerate nature of Youtube as a human communication platform. It's clear that the ability of bad characters to screw up an entire system, as you say, is at least partially enabled by Youtube's incentives, and the features those lead to (the old radicalization = engagement fiasco for example). A better way to combat disinformation would be to understand how Youtube often brings the worst out of its viewers, and to fix that. But it's not clear who has the incentive or the obligation to do it. The alternative is to move the conversation to other types of social networks, with other incentives. But that seems even harder. What is clear to me is that having most of the world get their news from a service that algorithmically (I think, it's unclear from the article) bans a fully vaccinated, pro-vaccine M.D. for suggesting people who have been infected have immunity (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693407), to give an example, is not ideal. If they choose to do this instead of tackling the problems in their recommendation system, which rewards disinformation and other harmful types of content in all sorts of topics, not just vaccines, then it's even worse.
deadpannini 5y ago
"Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision?" Yes. Combat disinformation by refuting it. This requires credibility, and censorship is one of the fastest ways to burn that down.
- ptaipale 5y ago
  The covid disinformation is like a religion; no amount of researched data is going to change peoples minds. Believe me, I've been patient in explaining facts and referring to data, but people just report fabricated data memes and click the laughing emoji (which in fact should be removed from Facebook...)
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Once you give up on changing people's minds, you fall into who can acquire more power and guns, which is a pretty unhealthy place for society.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- m-p-3 5y ago
  The problem is that bullshit takes significantly less effort to produce than a well-researched counter-argument. With the sheer volume of disinformation out there, you can't even start to imagine having the required manpower to squash it all with refutation alone.
  - deadpannini 5y ago
    Yeah, fighting ignorance isn't easy. But the alternatives are much worse, ineffective in the long run, and by damaging your credibility, impair your ability to fight rationally in the future. De-platforming is always going to fail because your opponents are hydras. "Yay, we crushed Milo Yiannopoulos!" Er, wait, how's that going, really? Malevolent troublemaking nihilists are still at large? _Donald Trump_ won the next election? Better to have it out in public.
MrYellowP 5y ago
> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? Censorship is always bad. Always. When people accept it on a broader scale, more censorship will be applied eventually. People already accept it. At some point, broad censorship becomes the norm. What needs to be disregarded completely is the fact that it's about a vaccine. People shouldn't talk about censorship in context of what's being censored. Censorship itself should always be the topic. The fact that there's people dumb enough to believe things they shouldn't, isn't a problem that censorship solves. Furthermore are these people only so dumb, because politics made them dumb. They went to schools that made, or kept, them dumb. By "dumb" I mean "incapable of thinking critically", which - to be fair - also applies to a lot of people on the vaxing side of the equation. What they need is education. Locking them out of the public is only going to make them grow "underground". That's definitely not preferrable.
- notacoward 5y ago
  So your answer to GP's question is no, you don't have any suggestions for how to fight misinformation. Thanks for that.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    Squeezing something into a yes-no when the entire argument is in the question's premise is an unreasonable tactic. "[What are your] suggestions for how to fight misinformation[?]" assumes that the priority is fighting misinformation. MrYellowP's major point is that the first priority is fighting censorship and the premise is misguided. And it isn't explicit but I think I detect a secondary point that YouTube doesn't have a any good suggestions for fighting misinformation either. Doing something ineffective isn't better than doing nothing; their strategy is managing to get the anti-vax agenda in as headline news, and making the vaccine a more political issue (which is bad for its uptake).
    - notacoward 5y ago
      If somebody asks for solutions better than X, giving constraints that preclude X is no better than a red herring. Contrary to your claim, MrYellowP never cast doubt on the importance of fighting disinformation, or even tried. It's just a distraction, a derailment, and a favorite tactic of disinformation enablers since forever.
MrRiddle 5y ago
You don’t, like you’re not supposed to lead war on drugs. It’s a battle against the symptoms not the cause.
shartacct 5y ago
> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". No, because it's pointless to legitimatize conspiratorial or fascistic views by engaging in a one-sided debate where one side is backed by scientific fact and the other is backed by Karen on facebook's idea that the election was stolen and that a COVID vaccine will kill you. I would argue that there is no reason why freedom of speech should apply when you are actively trying to undermine the country (treason) and sow chaos/fear among the populace (terrorism).
StanislavPetrov 5y ago
> I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". Part of the issue is the blanket characterization of everyone who doesn't verbatim repeat the preferred rhetoric of Youtube/Google as "anti-vaxxers". As everyone informed and intelligent knows, the government, the corporate media and the "intelligence agencies" have been, by far, the greatest disseminators of "disinformation" for decades. From the Bay of Tonkin to babies pulled from incubators to WMD in Iraq to Hunter Biden's laptop being a Russian plot. The problem is that this sort of disinformation is not only allowed, but amplified by these same corporate media outlets (and their government handlers) who claim that we desperately need to eliminate free speech. You want to fight disinformation? Teach people how to think critically and be necessarily skeptical of everything they are told, no matter what the source. Teach people how to examine evidence that underlies assertions, and reject assertions that are made without evidence (or, worse yet, claims of "secret evidence" that are rampant in corporate media and government sources). Except this is the opposite of what Google/Youtube and the government want. They want total control over the information flow, along with a low-information population that uncritically soaks up whatever propaganda they are saturated with. They don't want a population that is equipped with the tools needed to sort through the lies and bullshit - they just want to control which lies and what bullshit they are exposed to.
Grustaf 5y ago
I think a big part of vaccine resistance is because of the insane levels of propaganda and censorship. Anyone who is even slightly suspicious of authorities will be much more hesitant to take a vaccine when any criticism of it is effectively forbidden. Put it the other way around, how many will be convinced to get vaccinated thanks to censorship? Here in Scandinavia, I'm sure at least 99% of people happily give their children the standard childhood vaccines, so it's not like people are anti-vaccines in general.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". This is called "spite". Turns out that the aphorism about one cutting of their nose to spite their face is incredibly apt.
swiley 5y ago
I was quiet about it until the mandate and planning to get vaccinated once everything child out. After that I’ll die before I get vaccinated and I’ve been posting about it under my real name which is something I almost always avoid doing with non-software politics.
raxxorrax 5y ago
> siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". A large media company like Google banning content that is heavily politicized by partisan politics is a big threat.

mariodiana 5y ago

"Misinformation" should not be combatted by anything other than better, more persuasive information.

ookblah 5y ago
Great in theory, but if you've ever debated someone who is not acting in good faith online it's near impossible. Their energy input is an order of magnitude lower than yours. And yes, in this specific context it IS misinformation, disinformation, or just flat out false.
- vibrato2 5y ago
  I haven't seen any serious attempt to address the concerns with the "vaccines". Only ostracism and censorship. Plus a healthy dose of disinformation about the safety and efficacy profiles of these therapies. If the science is so clear, why not give an anti vaxxer a huge prime time platform and embarrass them in debate?
  - JaimeThompson 5y ago
    Which concerns do you have?
    - vibrato2 5y ago
      With these specific therapies: 1) Myocarditis (long term heart damage) 2) general inflammation and clot risk 3) long term risks of brand new mRNA technology For myself and other young athletes, my research leads me to understand that the vaccine is higher risk than the infection. My greatest concern is the totalitarianism behind vaccine passports. At this point even if the shot cured cancer I wouldn't take it because of how it's pushed.
      - paulryanrogers 5y ago
        > For myself and other young athletes, my research leads me to understand that the vaccine is higher risk than the infection. As someone with a pre-existing heart condition I'd like to read that research. Do you have any links?
      - rwcarlsen 5y ago
        You are not alone. The authoritarian threat and government overreach problems are IMO orders of magnitude more important and concerning than the virus. I will almost certainly be taking a stand and be terminated by my employer over this within the next few weeks.
      - suzzer99 5y ago
        Here's a good study about the risk of myocarditis (it's very low). https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110475 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110475 There's a lot of misleading information out there about myocarditis that makes the risk sound much worse than it is. Yes adverse myocarditis reaction is a risk. But it's something like 1 in 17,000. 1 in 500 Americans have died from covid. Even if you're young and healthy, we have no idea the long term risks of contracting a serious case of covid. You have to factor that into the risk equation.
        spectramax 5y ago
        > But it's something like 1 in 17,000. 1 in 500 Americans have died from covid. This is true but misleading. You need to account for age as the primary factor that determines the risk exposure. Edit: Surprised that someone downvoted this. Care you explain what you disagree here? I am simply pointing out that it is not straight forward to compare risk levels because they are highly dependent on age.
  - ookblah 5y ago
    Why not give a flat earther a huge prime time platform? I mean that in of itself proves nothing. There have been many attempts and even in my own circles and in the end the it has nothing to do with the facts and all about fear and badly calculating risk. I can understand the mentality if you're hesitant of the vaccines being new and want to wait, but just understand that the current data shows you're taking a higher risk by not taking it. Your choice in the end, though. People who are full anti-vax are a different thing altogether.
    - musingsole 5y ago
      > Why not give a flat earther a huge prime time platform? They did. It happened, and the dude died in the rocket as it crashed to Earth. And following that, I stopped hearing so many murmurs about if a lake surface was flat or convex.
      - bena 5y ago
        He died last year. He also had successful launches previously. And those didn't halt anything. The world, collectively, has been a bit busy with other stuff since last year. If anything COVID conspiracy stuff has pushed out all other conspiracies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Hughes_(daredevil) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Hughes_(daredevil)
        musingsole 5y ago
        > If anything COVID conspiracy stuff has pushed out all other conspiracies. Conjecture is as conjecture does
        bena 5y ago
        As opposed to generalizing from self doing as it does? You didn't see it so it must not exist?
  - unethical_ban 5y ago
    Dozens of books have been written documenting the absolute, unmitigated travesty of the Trump administration. 70 million people still voted for him, and a majority of those did so as a positive review of his performance! I'm not sure what to do, but I know now that "mountains of evidence" does not stop alluring stupidity.
    - Nemrod67 5y ago
      https://youtu.be/lw2BVI9OhC4 https://youtu.be/lw2BVI9OhC4
      - unethical_ban 5y ago
        Useless.
  - depaya 5y ago
    It's not possible to embarrass someone with no shame. It's easy to lie and debate dishonestly[1]. Engaging in such a debate would only legitimize a position that may have no legitimacy to begin with. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - criddell 5y ago
    > If the science is so clear, why not give an anti vaxxer a huge prime time platform and embarrass them in debate? That doesn't work. It didn't work for climate change and it won't work for vaccines.
  - krageon 5y ago
    > If the science is so clear, why not give an anti vaxxer a huge prime time platform and embarrass them in debate? Neonazis clamor that they need a platform all the time. Now that we can see what that's like (the US, in case it is not clear) we can see that this is a terrible idea.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    Pro tip: if you declare any and all "serious attempts to address the concerns" as "disinformation", then the only thing left is ostracism and censorship. BTW, ever heard of Duane Gish?
    - vibrato2 5y ago
      Pro tip: If you make a strawman argument, the only thing illustrated is masturbation. And No. never heard of him.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  I have and I still think so. First of all, it is not realistic to assume that you will convince everyone; you won't. Second, practice is necessary and bad faith counterparts will help you get better. It is not my impression that "energy input of people spreading X is an order of magnitude lower". On the other hand, they obsess over such topics and spend a lot of time spreading their views - that is why they are visible.
seqastian 5y ago
Too bad that is not how humans work. If the good information is complicated and scary, we will go for easy and pleasing every time.
ramses0 5y ago
You’re wrong, several Oxford and Harvard studies show that misinformation is best fought with more misinformation. Either that, or your own personal beliefs, which are _way_ more true than something studied for years by ivory tower academics who are always changing their mind. Like and subscribe to my podcast and buy my T-Shirts……
jhedwards 5y ago
Good luck explaining to the mob that "there in fact is no fire", as they charge out of the theater. I typically agree with you, and it was justice Louis Brandeis who said it so well: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” On the other hand, the one exception to this is when the speech is question causes a clear and present danger. We are facing a rather perverse crisis in the world right now with respect to vaccine misinformation. I'm not saying I know the answer, but I know we did not get here through a lack of quality, persuasive information.
- peteradio 5y ago
  I think people are talking completely passed each other. The conservative crowd will debate the severity of the existing pandemic and whether the cure is worse than the illness. The vaccinate all crowd well just wants everyone to be vaccinated, the severity of the crisis is a forgone conclusion. I think both points of view have strong merit but its hard to mend the two views together they just don't really mix. The whole thing ends up being labelled "misinformation" because we aren't even on the same page. I find myself in the conservative camp which is a rare occurrence for me. But I can't for the life of me understand how people can be so enchanted with the heads of our federal organizations when the data behind their words does not stack up. Misleading the importance of data, stretching and inverting the burden of proof we should expect from our government ultimately makes me see them as liars. Watching liars speak is one thing but to see a whole populace see positive meaning, smiling nodding and go on to shout down anyone who tests the rhetoric, its blind fanaticism.
  - jhedwards 5y ago
    I think the crux of the issue is that "the cure is worse than the illness" is objectively false, as the vaccine has been proven to be safe, and bodies from COVID deaths continue to pile up. I try not to listen to politicians for the reasons you mentioned, but just looking at the data it seems like an awfully simple problem to me.
kgwxd 5y ago
If the hare never takes a nap, the tortoise will never catch up.
- account42 5y ago
  If the hare never takes a nap it will die of sleep deprivation.
atty 5y ago
This is an outmoded concept based on the idea that humans are purely rational creatures, which we already know is false. Just providing better information does not sway individuals. People are far more swayed by information from their “tribe”, even if that information is patently false, than they are by quantitatively better information, because it makes them feel good. That’s why actions like this seem to be necessary.
x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
Why do we always assume that it's "misinformation" and that if people were told or shown better, they would want better. Many times, people actually want the bad thing. I can't help but see the "Free Speech" alarmism on HN originating from the fact that the market of ideas is no longer participating in arguments about right-wing viewpoints, but is actively moving against them and taking them off the shelf.
mtberatwork 5y ago
Related: "Why Science Can't Settle Political Disputes" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693269
krageon 5y ago
Better information is not more persuasive.
- the_optimist 5y ago
  If this is correct, then why would you believe you've ascertained truth? The very hallmark of truth as we know it is that 'better' information, meaning more and more clarified data consistently resolve on the same conclusion.
  - bashinator 5y ago
    You’re conflating “correct” and “persuasive”.
    - the_optimist 5y ago
      You're assuming reasoning that defies communication.
      - lovich 5y ago
        The reasoning behind understand that “correct” and “persuasive” are two adjectives that aren’t synonyms and describe different values is fairly simple to communicate
      - krageon 5y ago
        No, nobody is doing that. Because we weren't talking about that at all.
enraged_camel 5y ago
Nah. Brandolini's Law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, explains why this will not work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law The gist of it is that making up bullshit takes almost no energy, whereas refuting that bullshit effectively will be very time-consuming. This is exacerbated by the fact that bullshit is usually packaged in a way that makes it spread way faster by, for example, exploiting social media "engagement" algorithms. There are corollaries to this. For example, the idiom "a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth is done tying its shoes."
- sleepybrett 5y ago
  Bullshit is a ddos attack, youtube is just putting up a packet filter that drops a portion of the ddos packets before they make it to the target.
yupper32 5y ago
Combating misinformation with more persuasive information takes about 10-100x more effort than putting out the original misinformation.
_moof 5y ago
People are not little machines that accept information as input, apply impartial rules of logic, and then spit out a correct answer. People are social-emotional animals with a carefully guarded sense of self, a basic need to belong, and all kinds of nervous system structures that, when activated, prevent rational thought. This is not as simple as putting more information out there.

ihsw 5y ago

Many people siding with "anti-vaxxers" are anti-mandate pro-vaccine activists. If they were given a voice in the current conversation then there would be a lot fewer disagreements.

tsfranke 5y ago

Agree completely on a no win situation. Censorship can keep good information out. No censorship can make whoever yells the loudest be the most heard, which can snowball into millions of ramifications. I'd like to go back to the early internet days where people had to at least make a geocities site to spread their word, with no financial incentives to getting more clicks or viewers. It wasn't perfect, but you had to be seeking that group / audience rather than having it thrown in your face everywhere.

z3ncyberpunk 5y ago

...or you just do some actual moderating instead of offloading your workload on machines. People worry about idiots and disinformation yet ignore and allow way more non conspiracy nutjobs all the time. Big Tech has such a cognitive dissonance its dizzying

inglor_cz 5y ago

This isn't a new situation. Free speech debates are as old as civilization itself. The printing press was at least as disruptive as the Internet, precisely because relatively small players could sabotage power of huge organizations such as the Church relatively cheaply. I think that the old classical liberal principles still apply. A certain fringe of the population will eat any propaganda unthinkingly, domestic or foreign. But if a majority was so uncritical, democracies would have collapsed a long time ago. We might actually be over the crest of max poisoning in social media. Lots of people have realized that such channels are not to be trusted. This is partly masked by the fact that a lot of new content is still churned out by dedicated players; silent majorities are silent.

burrows 5y ago
> A certain fringe of the population will eat any propaganda unthinkingly, domestic or foreign. But if a majority was so uncritical, democracies would have collapsed a long time ago. Like the millions of people who unironically watch CNN, FOX, ESPN, MTV and whatever else TeeVee networks are carrying?
- all2 5y ago
  https://americanfreepress.net/perpetual-war-and-the-global-media-psyop/ https://americanfreepress.net/perpetual-war-and-the-global-m... > What is insidious, as Ulfkotte confesses, is that typically, intelligence agencies use “unofficial covers”—people working for the agency but not actually on its payroll as agents. It is a broad, loose network of “friends,” doing one another favors. Many are lead journalists from numerous countries. This informality provides plausible deniability for both sides, but it means an “unofficial cover,” as Ulfkotte became, is on his own if captured. > The American reporter James Foley, allegedly executed by ISIS, found that out. Ulfkotte confirmed to this author that Foley did indeed work for various intelligence organizations, as this newspaper reported on last month. He also stated that if a journalist is accused of spying, such reports are almost always credible. The point of this article is that journalists are just as fallible to money as everyone else. That the alphabet soup agencies don't mind using journalists for their own ends. To assume that stops with spying is an argument from silence (lol, but to assume that it does go past that is also an argument from silence).

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

>Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation Yeah. Don't do shit. Let the stupid run its course. Trying to combat disinformation is like bombing villages in hope of hitting an ammo dump. The collateral damage is more damaging than ignoring the problem. Why do we always have to be Doing Something(TM)?

toomuchtodo 5y ago
You're arguing to let low information or critical thinking challenged people die because of the actions of others (whether those actions are in good faith or not is immaterial). If Youtube decides it wants to take action to promote the public welfare, that's their right as a business. "Doing Something" is usually harm reduction within the framework of law and public policy, and there's a lot of harm out there, hence the continual debate over a) should something be done? and b) what can be done?
strgcmc 5y ago
Imagine this attitude applied to climate change. Letting the stupid runs its course and choosing inaction, will lead to disastrous warming outcomes. So, maybe there are situations where doing nothing is okay, but I don't think very large scale problems that require coordinated large scale action over long time scales to address, like global pandemics or mitigating the impacts of man made climate change, are the right situations for that kind of approach. Too many thousands/millions will die, too many billions/trillions of dollars of damage will be done, via inaction. Of course, it all comes down to whether you can stomach the cost of inaction, because maybe you don't think the impacts are all that bad. I don't have an answer to that, if two parties fundamentally disagree about what the cost of impact will be or whether that cost is acceptable (e.g. many folks in the US apparently think 600k+ COVID deaths in the US isn't a big deal, and wasn't worth the interventions applied to mitigate it to that level).
- endisneigh 5y ago
  I don’t see the connection
- 5y ago

gentle 5y ago

Great point!

josephcsible 5y ago

> I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". You say that like it's a bad thing. If we don't stop the censorship now, it'll be too late to stop it in a year or two when we're the ones being censored for some reason.

mcovey 5y ago
I think it's already too late. Removal of unpopular / non-mainstream opinions from large social media sites is now the norm and is celebrated (by those who didn't get silenced).

commandlinefan 5y ago

> I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". I can confirm your suspicions in my case. I'm vaccinated (against COVID, the flu, and tetanus, and all the other things you can get vaccinated against), but I think YouTube is wrong here.

goldenbikeshed 5y ago
I think the problem is less what YouTube is doing here and more that YouTube has this kind of power. If every country had 10 video Websites like Youtube that each had a 10th of the users from that country, and maybe some international users, then one portal taking a total ban-all hard-ass stance on misinformation wouldn't be a big deal. tldr: Monopolies bad, YouTube bad, facebook bad.
- Spivak 5y ago
  Okay so you have your wish, there are 10 major video sites in the US who all have 5-20% market share. The forces that push one service moderate content will push the others. Like there are a lot of social networks, have you noticed that every single one is monitoring for COVID related content and adding a banner? tldr: competition can't solve political issues because there's a monopoly on government
  - musingsole 5y ago
    There is government pressure (more correctly just social pressure) but the government hasn't given a mandate that these platforms must take this censorship stance. And even then, this is only an issue because everyone is on just a handful of platforms -- so the companies build one-size-fits-all policies. But we're not all the same size. I'm not terrified of my community encountering misinformation. I'm far more terrified of a community being unable to articulate and defend why the information is "mis".
    - tastyfreeze 5y ago
      "We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook..." - Jen Psaki 7/15/2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0aWGsxyYPg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0aWGsxyYPg

lucumo 5y ago

Yes, exactly. It's just so similar to forum spam. Free speech absolutists were far less in favour of free speech when it came to banning viagra-salesmen. Like the forum moderators, it's perfectly okay for Google to just not want the headache of dealing with pests.

a1369209993 5y ago
> Free speech absolutists were far less in favour of free speech when it came to banning viagra-salesmen. Nope. We're in favor of viagra salesmen being able to speak to anyone who wants to listen to them, same as anyone else. It's just that effectively noone wants to listen to them, and we tend to design things accordingly because we're lazy and noone is complaining (that they want to listen to viagra salesmen).

mbesto 5y ago

> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? Actually, people have, we've just moved on from the more important discussion which is whether YouTube (and other similar forms of social media / UGC) should exist in its current form. I personally do not like regulation, but this is a situation in which the harm of social media / UGC is starting to outshine its benefit. I'm not sure if an outright ban of sites like YT is warranted but I think the frictionless experience of uploading/commenting/etc. on YT should be questioned.

nradov 5y ago
Fortunately the First Amendment doesn't allow the US government to regulate such activities just because elitist authoritarians consider them harmful. This is an area where fundamental rights overrule cost-benefit analysis.
- mbesto 5y ago
  I agree in principle, but I think it's worth exploring analogous examples. For example, doesn't the FCC regulate what is on TV in some form?
  - nradov 5y ago
    The FCC has no legal authority to regulate anti-vaccine content on TV. (I don't support such content, just explaining the law.) The FCC has some limited authority to regulate obscenity and indecency on over-the-air broadcast channels only. Congress gave them this authority because broadcast spectrum is a scarce public resource that reaches into everyone's home whether they want it or not. However the FCC generally has no authority over cable, Internet, or satellite content. Those systems aren't subject to spectrum scarcity and have effectively infinite capacity. https://www.reuters.com/article/entertainment-us-usa-televsion-indecency-idUSBRE85K10W20120621 https://www.reuters.com/article/entertainment-us-usa-televsi...
    - mbesto 5y ago

marcosdumay 5y ago

Well, that's the entire point of principles. (I do actually not hold this one principle as absolutely, because Youtube is designed for public manipulation, so they have the onus of ensuring their manipulation isn't a bad one. But I do surely hold it for a neutral channel and that governments must ensure neutral channels exist.)

awofford 5y ago

Standing by people you don't agree with is a pretty hallmark demonstration of "principle."

SergeAx 5y ago

A simple question: do you beleive that suppressing freedom of speech will seriously inclrease a number of vaccinated? I beleive that the best outcome is it will stay around the same. Some sensitive people will calm down and eventually vaccinate, others will become stronger anti-vaxxers, because "if it is forbidden by authorities, it should be somehow true".

sneak 5y ago
A private site like YouTube choosing to censor content on its own servers is not suppressing freedom of speech. In fact, it is YouTube exercising freedom of speech by wielding editorial control over their own website.
- kklisura 5y ago
  So... Youtube is now a publisher, not a platform?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - VLM 5y ago
    Youtube should be held civil and criminal liable for ALL content on its highly edited and curated platform.
- bcrosby95 5y ago
  Freedom of speech can go beyond just what's in the federal constitution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._Robins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R... It's not necessarily that simple, although it probably is under current state laws.
- engineer_22 5y ago
  I mean... Yeah... Long ago some people got together and said large government organizations should not censor speech. They thought this idea was good enough that it shouldn't just be law, they should Amend the US Constitution to protect people from a particular large organization's overwhelming power to suppress dissent. But today the organization censoring speech is a public corporation [wealthier and more powerful than most governments], and because it doesn't have explicit ties to any government, we are supposed to assume that the spirit of the original rule is not being violated. Citizens may expect no freedom of thought or expression, even if the properties Google owns appear to be and function like public forums.

shadowgovt 5y ago

Principles aren't worth anything if people don't stick by them when expediency would recommend another course of action. ... This is why I chucked this particular principle overboard years ago. I don't personally think it holds water in light of irrational human actors and an under-informed public, given the immense power of modern bidirectional communications media.

mythrwy 5y ago
How do you propose to deal with unpopular opinions that turn out to be correct with this method? Also (and related) how do you propose to deal with corruption?
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  > How do you propose to deal with unpopular opinions that turn out to be correct with this method? Multiple tiers of signal (forums open to wider ideas that are, perhaps, more private than YouTube. Additionally, academic forums where people with relevant background can hash things out). I don't think the "everyone can see everything" Facebook / YouTube / Twitter model has been proven to work for difficult and sensitive topics. YouTube is just not one of the places the messy conversations are safe to have. It's a cat-video host, not a pathology research organization or academic community (nor does it seem it wants to be). > Also (and related) how do you propose to deal with corruption? I don't know, but I think there's a burden of proof that the open model prevents corruption (assuming open is what we have now). It's massively vulnerable to propaganda and information distortion based on amount of effort put into amplify signal, not truth of information in signal. People with little background in a technical subject to lean on when exercising their critical thinking are very vulnerable to the notion "Everybody is saying it, so it must be true," and when you couple that to bubble effects I worry we see bad results. The "wisdom of crowds" was always an experiment. It's possible for the experiment to fail.

seph-reed 5y ago

YouTube's algorithm actively pushes people down rabbit holes towards fringe content. The best way to combat this is not invest billions of dollars in infrastructure meant to do exactly the thing it just did. Bad actors didn't poison the system, youtube covered itself in lacerations and jumped into sewer water. They stand back watching their algorithm divide and extremize everyone on every side of every debate, and now that the flame wars are starting to turn into mass graves they're hoping they can stop the whole thing by banning a few extremes here and there. > Just a no win situation I think there is a clear win here: AI should not be allowed to do what it is doing. Humans can't handle it. And the cost of lives is on Facebook and YouTube, plenty of employees took a stand to say exactly what was/is happening and were ignored.

Solstinox 5y ago

Hypothetically, what do you do when there isn’t enough quality information to gauge “disinformation” from “information?”

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

trezemanero 5y ago

Yes? If we continue to allow explicit censoring this will become normal.

mdp2021 5y ago

If you have a formula to infallibly decide that A is a "bad actor" for any A in actual practice, you have solved the organizational problem of the past few millennia.

xanaxagoras 5y ago

> I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". I know I am. As someone with 2 shots that sympathizes quite a lot with the people who are commonly and ridiculously maligned as "anti-vaxxers", as though their position is even remotely similar to the people that term accurately described pre-2020, this will make my people dig their heels in even more. Good. Sunshine is the best disinfectant, remember? Democracy dies in darkness, remember? The left has morphed into a censorious dictatorship that castigates anyone who doesn't think specific thoughts and punishes wrongthink by making pariahs out of those who wronglythink it. This is just a prominent example of the same authoritarian movement expressed through the burgeoning hegemony of big tech. Shit like this doesn't convince anyone, we'll just leave you to fester in your echo chamber, oblivious as you are to the fact that we'll be festering in our own. Speaking of which, this announcement doesn't bother me at all. Youtube is over, it's just corporate sponsored tepid garbage at this point. It's not interesting anymore because creators aren't permitted to speak freely - not just w/r/t COVID. We are already moving to platforms where free expression is allowed and supported, and I hope Google does even more to hasten the exodus.

jjtgbbjui 5y ago

Provide a better education for the poor. I don’t mean education about a particular subject; better education in general. In almost all conspiracy theories, one side has a lot of facts, the other has a lot of “feelings”. If you try having a conversation with someone who believes in some conspiracy you’ll eventually get to “I just don’t feel…”

nonameiguess 5y ago
How on earth is YouTube supposed to do that? They have no control over the however many thousands of public school systems exist in the United States, let alone education in the rest of the world.
vimy 5y ago
People who don’t want to take the vaccine come from all walks of life. Not just the poor or uneducated.
- MrRiddle 5y ago
  Education is only a part of it. One of other parts is trust in the system. Countries with more trustworthy politicians and more humane social policy have better response both to lockdown measures and vaccines.
- bobsoap 5y ago
  Agreed, and I'm not OP, but I'd define "general education" to include concepts like effective fact-checking and media literacy, and not just for our children but for older folks as well. I think a big part of the issue are some members of the older generations who left school long ago when there was maybe one newspaper in town. The internet, which came much later, gives everyone a voice and allows every idiot to dress stuff up, make it look professional, put lipstick on it and amplify it with the click of a button. How do you know to apply critical doubt to someone's claims when you don't even know how damn easy it is to produce a convincing fake? And if you do have a doubt, how would you even start fact-checking when all you know is Facebook and Youtube? Too many people have their guard down, sitting in the comfort of their living room browsing The Algorithm, and don't even realize they are being attacked.

disconjointed 5y ago

there is definitely a better way. i am building that right now

credit_guy 5y ago

I don't know myself; however Steven Pinker published yesterday a new book called "Rationality". He promises to give the readers tools to cope with exactly this type of situations. I don't know if he delivers on it, I just started the book, but I really hope he does. https://www.amazon.com/Rationality-What-Seems-Scarce-Matters-ebook/dp/B08WK3JNLT/ https://www.amazon.com/Rationality-What-Seems-Scarce-Matters...

JeremyNT 5y ago

> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". Social networks seem to be unable to optimize for anything other than "engagement," which inevitably leads to amplifying compelling but technically incorrect and outright dangerous content. The thing to remember is that YouTube is essentially designed to boost disinformation. As implemented they have no effective counterbalance to this. Is it also "censorship" when the YT recommendation system effectively buries factual and useful information for some people just because it's less engaging than the misinformation they currently consume? Maybe so? The solution seems pretty obvious to me. There's a middle ground between banning and allowing to run rampant - and that's to add human reviewers to counterbalance the terrible job currently being done by their automatic recommendation system, and manually down-rank disinformation so it is less likely to be surfaced automatically in peoples' playlists. Google will never do it, because it would 1) require paying humans to do work, which is expensive, and 2) it wouldn't drive engagement and generate clicks. So they just take the easy way out, so they can keep on doing what they do.

makeworld 5y ago
> Social networks seem to be unable to optimize for anything other than "engagement," This is mostly due to the profit motive. Optimizing for time spent on the platform benefits shareholders.
oblio 5y ago
I would argue it's much, much, worse than what you're saying. I mean this part: > Google will never do it, because it would 1) require paying humans to do work, which is expensive, and 2) it wouldn't drive engagement and generate clicks. Every regular business out there needs support. In the form of pre-sales, sales, post-sales, actual support folks, etc. Google's entire business model is predicated on there being no meaningful human support. If they're forced to implement the level of support their worldwide, what-they-consider-top-notch operation would actually require, their business model goes bust. Ok, I'm probably exaggerating, but their profit margins would go down from ~25% to probably something like 5%. They will <<never>>, ever do it, unless someone puts a legal gun to their head.

mlindner 5y ago

I got the vaccine and I'm pro-vaccine in general (for vaccines that are long term preventative, not single-year preventative, ex: never gotten flu vaccine) however I keep finding myself wanting to defend the anti-covid-vaxxers as they're fighting a fight I sort of feel like I understand.

sensanaty 5y ago

> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? Yeah, don't do anything? Why do we have to do anything about """disinformation"""? What'll happen in a few years when the things you stand for and believe in are labelled as disinformation? Because if you start censoring and combating "disinformation" now, it's only a matter of time until the same practices start affecting you and the things you stand for. Besides, do you really think banning people off of platforms for wrongthink is more likely to make them change their minds? If anything, those kinds of actions cause resentment to fester, which only leads to more radicalization (for lack of a better term) in the future.

goatlover 5y ago
This assumes that disinformation can't be identified objectively. Claiming that COVID vaccines implant a microchip is simply false. There's no good reason to allow that sort of claim to spread on social media in the midst of a pandemic where people can die because they believe blatantly false conspiracy theories. You're committing the slippery slope fallacy. That any kind of censorship leads to the bad kind of censorship, instead of there being a reasonable standard for banning harmful disinformation, and not just differences in political, religious or whatever views. Societies always have to maintain some kind of balance between individual rights and the collective good.
- sensanaty 5y ago
  So who's going to be the one that decides what disinformation is or isn't? Where exactly do you draw a line when deciding what constitutes disinformation, and as such what gets deleted out of existence? Sure, the microchip stuff is bullshit, but where do we draw the line exactly on what vaccine-related topics can or can't be posted about online? And this is where we fundamentally disagree, I believe that any censorship of literally any kind is too much censorship. There is no such thing as a "reasonable standard" for banning "disinformation", because any two random people will disagree on what should be silenced or not.
  - 5y ago

AmericanChopper 5y ago

Misinformation, aside from being a rather subjective thing to define, isn’t the cause of the problem, it’s just a symptom of it. The cause of the problem is people losing trust in their institutions. People not trusting pharmaceutical companies barely needs any explanation due to their history of scandals (any opioid crisis threads on HN today?). People not trusting public health institutions is a bit more serious. But it’s a perfectly rational reaction given how much they’ve lied over the course of the pandemic. Looking to misinformation as the source of the problem is just a way to deflect responsibility. If the problem you’re trying to solve is “how do we combat misinformation”, then “strictly controlling the information they’re allowed to consume, and the things they’re allowed to say” seems like a reasonable response to a lot of people. But if your problem is “why have people lost trust in our institutions”, then “because we failed to strictly control the information they’re allowed to consume, and the things they’re allowed to say” is quite obviously a counterproductive KGB-style response.

diegoveralli 5y ago

I believe that tradeoffs between individual freedom and the common good are necessary. So I am biased in favour of intervening when it's necessary. But it's very hard to see how these social network interventions are well thought out and have considered all the possible side effects, many of which are mentioned in other comments. I suppose they're tracking the data and will change course if this doesn't work how they expected.. Still, rather than being a case of deplatforming harmful speech, these look like amputations of entire conversations from the service, maybe to take the spotlight off the degenerate nature of Youtube as a human communication platform. It's clear that the ability of bad characters to screw up an entire system, as you say, is at least partially enabled by Youtube's incentives, and the features those lead to (the old radicalization = engagement fiasco for example). A better way to combat disinformation would be to understand how Youtube often brings the worst out of its viewers, and to fix that. But it's not clear who has the incentive or the obligation to do it. The alternative is to move the conversation to other types of social networks, with other incentives. But that seems even harder. What is clear to me is that having most of the world get their news from a service that algorithmically (I think, it's unclear from the article) bans a fully vaccinated, pro-vaccine M.D. for suggesting people who have been infected have immunity (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693407), to give an example, is not ideal. If they choose to do this instead of tackling the problems in their recommendation system, which rewards disinformation and other harmful types of content in all sorts of topics, not just vaccines, then it's even worse.

deadpannini 5y ago

"Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision?" Yes. Combat disinformation by refuting it. This requires credibility, and censorship is one of the fastest ways to burn that down.

ptaipale 5y ago
The covid disinformation is like a religion; no amount of researched data is going to change peoples minds. Believe me, I've been patient in explaining facts and referring to data, but people just report fabricated data memes and click the laughing emoji (which in fact should be removed from Facebook...)
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Once you give up on changing people's minds, you fall into who can acquire more power and guns, which is a pretty unhealthy place for society.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
m-p-3 5y ago
The problem is that bullshit takes significantly less effort to produce than a well-researched counter-argument. With the sheer volume of disinformation out there, you can't even start to imagine having the required manpower to squash it all with refutation alone.
- deadpannini 5y ago
  Yeah, fighting ignorance isn't easy. But the alternatives are much worse, ineffective in the long run, and by damaging your credibility, impair your ability to fight rationally in the future. De-platforming is always going to fail because your opponents are hydras. "Yay, we crushed Milo Yiannopoulos!" Er, wait, how's that going, really? Malevolent troublemaking nihilists are still at large? _Donald Trump_ won the next election? Better to have it out in public.

MrYellowP 5y ago

> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? Censorship is always bad. Always. When people accept it on a broader scale, more censorship will be applied eventually. People already accept it. At some point, broad censorship becomes the norm. What needs to be disregarded completely is the fact that it's about a vaccine. People shouldn't talk about censorship in context of what's being censored. Censorship itself should always be the topic. The fact that there's people dumb enough to believe things they shouldn't, isn't a problem that censorship solves. Furthermore are these people only so dumb, because politics made them dumb. They went to schools that made, or kept, them dumb. By "dumb" I mean "incapable of thinking critically", which - to be fair - also applies to a lot of people on the vaxing side of the equation. What they need is education. Locking them out of the public is only going to make them grow "underground". That's definitely not preferrable.

notacoward 5y ago
So your answer to GP's question is no, you don't have any suggestions for how to fight misinformation. Thanks for that.
- roenxi 5y ago
  Squeezing something into a yes-no when the entire argument is in the question's premise is an unreasonable tactic. "[What are your] suggestions for how to fight misinformation[?]" assumes that the priority is fighting misinformation. MrYellowP's major point is that the first priority is fighting censorship and the premise is misguided. And it isn't explicit but I think I detect a secondary point that YouTube doesn't have a any good suggestions for fighting misinformation either. Doing something ineffective isn't better than doing nothing; their strategy is managing to get the anti-vax agenda in as headline news, and making the vaccine a more political issue (which is bad for its uptake).
  - notacoward 5y ago
    If somebody asks for solutions better than X, giving constraints that preclude X is no better than a red herring. Contrary to your claim, MrYellowP never cast doubt on the importance of fighting disinformation, or even tried. It's just a distraction, a derailment, and a favorite tactic of disinformation enablers since forever.

MrRiddle 5y ago

You don’t, like you’re not supposed to lead war on drugs. It’s a battle against the symptoms not the cause.

shartacct 5y ago

> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". No, because it's pointless to legitimatize conspiratorial or fascistic views by engaging in a one-sided debate where one side is backed by scientific fact and the other is backed by Karen on facebook's idea that the election was stolen and that a COVID vaccine will kill you. I would argue that there is no reason why freedom of speech should apply when you are actively trying to undermine the country (treason) and sow chaos/fear among the populace (terrorism).

StanislavPetrov 5y ago

> I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". Part of the issue is the blanket characterization of everyone who doesn't verbatim repeat the preferred rhetoric of Youtube/Google as "anti-vaxxers". As everyone informed and intelligent knows, the government, the corporate media and the "intelligence agencies" have been, by far, the greatest disseminators of "disinformation" for decades. From the Bay of Tonkin to babies pulled from incubators to WMD in Iraq to Hunter Biden's laptop being a Russian plot. The problem is that this sort of disinformation is not only allowed, but amplified by these same corporate media outlets (and their government handlers) who claim that we desperately need to eliminate free speech. You want to fight disinformation? Teach people how to think critically and be necessarily skeptical of everything they are told, no matter what the source. Teach people how to examine evidence that underlies assertions, and reject assertions that are made without evidence (or, worse yet, claims of "secret evidence" that are rampant in corporate media and government sources). Except this is the opposite of what Google/Youtube and the government want. They want total control over the information flow, along with a low-information population that uncritically soaks up whatever propaganda they are saturated with. They don't want a population that is equipped with the tools needed to sort through the lies and bullshit - they just want to control which lies and what bullshit they are exposed to.

Grustaf 5y ago

I think a big part of vaccine resistance is because of the insane levels of propaganda and censorship. Anyone who is even slightly suspicious of authorities will be much more hesitant to take a vaccine when any criticism of it is effectively forbidden. Put it the other way around, how many will be convinced to get vaccinated thanks to censorship? Here in Scandinavia, I'm sure at least 99% of people happily give their children the standard childhood vaccines, so it's not like people are anti-vaccines in general.

heavyset_go 5y ago

> I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". This is called "spite". Turns out that the aphorism about one cutting of their nose to spite their face is incredibly apt.

swiley 5y ago

I was quiet about it until the mandate and planning to get vaccinated once everything child out. After that I’ll die before I get vaccinated and I’ve been posting about it under my real name which is something I almost always avoid doing with non-software politics.

raxxorrax 5y ago

> siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". A large media company like Google banning content that is heavily politicized by partisan politics is a big threat.