6 ms·

Censoring discussion in an environment of coercive mandates. Anyone working for Google - how do you justify this? You have great options out there you know?

fridif 5y ago
By ignoring it and buying new houses and cars
pjc50 5y ago
There's still people dying in large numbers, unvaccinated? Eventually people notice the body count against a point of principle. That's how we got to this point.
- swader999 5y ago
  They'll notice it if the data can be discussed freely.
  - raisedbyninjas 5y ago
    This is Youtube, not SciHub.
- ashleyn 5y ago
  This ignores the aspect of personal responsibility. Nobody is forcing these people to refuse the free and widely-available vaccine - they do so by choice and an adult consciousness, and it follows that you bear the consequences for your personal decisions.
  - swader999 5y ago
    How can you make a responsible informed choice when censorship and access to information is restricted? Trust the experts then? Why would you if they don't let you freely talk about it?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - duhast 5y ago
      I'm assuming you're getting your health advice on YouTube and Facebook? How are random fearmongers on YouTube more credible than CDC or FDA?
      - swader999 5y ago
        The recent vote against boosters by the expert CDC committee and the resulting overturn by the head of the CDC highlights the need for broader free and uncensored discussion. I read a lot of studies and get help parsing them from YouTube occasionally. Watching videos of more competent people poking holes in videos of quacks talking about the same studies is quite useful and persuasive.
        duhast 5y ago
        Content like what you're describing is expensive to make, usually very boring and gets no views. You have to pay experts, read studies, interview government officials, maybe even read some science papers. Later you have to dumb it down enough so the common man can understand it. Content like this makes me want to defer the matter immediately to actual experts so I can stop thinking about it. Now contrast this to viral content claiming that Bill Gates is conspiring to implant 5G chips, vaccine induced magnetism, government hiding thousands of deaths from COVID vaccines and all other conspiracy theories that are easy to manufacture from the comfort of your home, require no expert opinion and get tons of views. Content like this is super addictive, exploits my fears, sows doubt and leaves me less informed. This content wins is the economy like this.
        swader999 5y ago
        I had a reply about attention algos promoting content higher than it deserves being the root problem. In the old days content with more credible links to it made it to the top for all regardless of your preconceived notions. Now everything is gamed out to your existing profile with God like precision.
- umvi 5y ago
  If they are unvaccinated and they die, so what? They made their choice. The doctors ought to be saying "Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of your own actions" not trying to force people to do something in order to save them from themselves. Then you always hear "well the real problem is that the unvaccinated are taking up ICU beds from non-covid patients that need them, etc." Ok, how long have we known about this problem now? Why are ICU beds such a fixed resource? Why can't we make temporary wards for unvaccinated covid patients to alleviate ICU beds? If this problem happened in the tech world it would be lambasted. "Please stop making requests to X website, it makes the server crash and then the people that really need to access it can't". Yeah DDoS attacks happen and are hard to prevent downtime, but if the server loading problem still persisted over a year and a half later people would be outraged that the company did nothing to try to meet the load. In the tech world when servers can't handle its load we start scaling (either automatically or manually) until the server can meet the load (or otherwise take some sort of mitigating action to alleviate the DoS). Hospitals need to innovate a way to do the same, "please don't get sick with covid because we have no way of scaling to meet load spikes" is such a crappy way of operating.
  - swader999 5y ago
    Well you can't easily scale staff of course, especially when some of them take a decade to train.
    - umvi 5y ago
      True, that is one limitation, but there are tons of other things you could do. A little innovation is required here. I do not believe it is an impossible problem. I think what's happening is that hospitals don't really want to innovate and are hoping to just wait for covid to blow over so then can return to "normal" operation and business-as-usual. But I say they need to innovate because this isn't the last pandemic that will ever happen, and hospitals need a way to deal with loading spikes and denial of service just like every other system susceptible to those things.
      - orra 5y ago
- president 5y ago
  Any statistics and numbers need to be scrutinized carefully given the past year of the media and our institutions showing a clear bias in trying to inflate numbers for mass hysteria and scaring people into taking the vaccine.
Aunche 5y ago
Google isn't the one who wants to cut their ad revenue and get accused for being Big Brother. Social media censorship has always occured because people demanded it. This time, it's not just an angry Twitter mob either. Even the president are saying that they are not doing enough to combat misinformation.
colechristensen 5y ago
The problem is that for any major issues you can get attention and money for publishing a contrarian view. Platforms like youtube then can be megaphones for monetizing conspiracy theories which do actual harm. There is some distance between good faith discussion and promoting the opposite of whatever view is popular. Content distributors are then on a knife edge with moderation, and how to moderate fairly is incredibly difficult. Youtube doesn’t want to be the vaccine conspiracy clearing house so at some point they decided to just ban it all. Making money from peoples attention brings this problem and moralizing won’t make it go away.
- swader999 5y ago
  All your points are true but they don't lead to the conclusion that censorship is the answer. The problem is the attention algorithms create an echo chamber with little room for distasteful alternatives. The quack content is on page 1 getting all the money from anyone on a particular rabbit hole. There shouldn't be this rabbit hole, the quack content should always be on page 12. And in the earlier days of Google before the heavy focus on personalisation, this is the way it worked.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    >the quack content should always be on page 12. The problem is that the content is engineered to take advantage of humans and google and becomes the thing on the first page. You might be yearning for the old days of less effective SEO. It's a hard problem how to moderate away though algorithm design or manual intervention things which pull on the strings of human weaknesses. Is an algorithm designed to de-prioritize content you don't like any better than a human selecting content for removal?

fridif 5y ago

By ignoring it and buying new houses and cars

pjc50 5y ago

There's still people dying in large numbers, unvaccinated? Eventually people notice the body count against a point of principle. That's how we got to this point.

swader999 5y ago
They'll notice it if the data can be discussed freely.
- raisedbyninjas 5y ago
  This is Youtube, not SciHub.
ashleyn 5y ago
This ignores the aspect of personal responsibility. Nobody is forcing these people to refuse the free and widely-available vaccine - they do so by choice and an adult consciousness, and it follows that you bear the consequences for your personal decisions.
- swader999 5y ago
  How can you make a responsible informed choice when censorship and access to information is restricted? Trust the experts then? Why would you if they don't let you freely talk about it?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - duhast 5y ago
    I'm assuming you're getting your health advice on YouTube and Facebook? How are random fearmongers on YouTube more credible than CDC or FDA?
    - swader999 5y ago
      The recent vote against boosters by the expert CDC committee and the resulting overturn by the head of the CDC highlights the need for broader free and uncensored discussion. I read a lot of studies and get help parsing them from YouTube occasionally. Watching videos of more competent people poking holes in videos of quacks talking about the same studies is quite useful and persuasive.
      - duhast 5y ago
        Content like what you're describing is expensive to make, usually very boring and gets no views. You have to pay experts, read studies, interview government officials, maybe even read some science papers. Later you have to dumb it down enough so the common man can understand it. Content like this makes me want to defer the matter immediately to actual experts so I can stop thinking about it. Now contrast this to viral content claiming that Bill Gates is conspiring to implant 5G chips, vaccine induced magnetism, government hiding thousands of deaths from COVID vaccines and all other conspiracy theories that are easy to manufacture from the comfort of your home, require no expert opinion and get tons of views. Content like this is super addictive, exploits my fears, sows doubt and leaves me less informed. This content wins is the economy like this.
        swader999 5y ago
        I had a reply about attention algos promoting content higher than it deserves being the root problem. In the old days content with more credible links to it made it to the top for all regardless of your preconceived notions. Now everything is gamed out to your existing profile with God like precision.
umvi 5y ago
If they are unvaccinated and they die, so what? They made their choice. The doctors ought to be saying "Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of your own actions" not trying to force people to do something in order to save them from themselves. Then you always hear "well the real problem is that the unvaccinated are taking up ICU beds from non-covid patients that need them, etc." Ok, how long have we known about this problem now? Why are ICU beds such a fixed resource? Why can't we make temporary wards for unvaccinated covid patients to alleviate ICU beds? If this problem happened in the tech world it would be lambasted. "Please stop making requests to X website, it makes the server crash and then the people that really need to access it can't". Yeah DDoS attacks happen and are hard to prevent downtime, but if the server loading problem still persisted over a year and a half later people would be outraged that the company did nothing to try to meet the load. In the tech world when servers can't handle its load we start scaling (either automatically or manually) until the server can meet the load (or otherwise take some sort of mitigating action to alleviate the DoS). Hospitals need to innovate a way to do the same, "please don't get sick with covid because we have no way of scaling to meet load spikes" is such a crappy way of operating.
- swader999 5y ago
  Well you can't easily scale staff of course, especially when some of them take a decade to train.
  - umvi 5y ago
    True, that is one limitation, but there are tons of other things you could do. A little innovation is required here. I do not believe it is an impossible problem. I think what's happening is that hospitals don't really want to innovate and are hoping to just wait for covid to blow over so then can return to "normal" operation and business-as-usual. But I say they need to innovate because this isn't the last pandemic that will ever happen, and hospitals need a way to deal with loading spikes and denial of service just like every other system susceptible to those things.
    - orra 5y ago
president 5y ago
Any statistics and numbers need to be scrutinized carefully given the past year of the media and our institutions showing a clear bias in trying to inflate numbers for mass hysteria and scaring people into taking the vaccine.

Aunche 5y ago

Google isn't the one who wants to cut their ad revenue and get accused for being Big Brother. Social media censorship has always occured because people demanded it. This time, it's not just an angry Twitter mob either. Even the president are saying that they are not doing enough to combat misinformation.

colechristensen 5y ago

The problem is that for any major issues you can get attention and money for publishing a contrarian view. Platforms like youtube then can be megaphones for monetizing conspiracy theories which do actual harm. There is some distance between good faith discussion and promoting the opposite of whatever view is popular. Content distributors are then on a knife edge with moderation, and how to moderate fairly is incredibly difficult. Youtube doesn’t want to be the vaccine conspiracy clearing house so at some point they decided to just ban it all. Making money from peoples attention brings this problem and moralizing won’t make it go away.

swader999 5y ago
All your points are true but they don't lead to the conclusion that censorship is the answer. The problem is the attention algorithms create an echo chamber with little room for distasteful alternatives. The quack content is on page 1 getting all the money from anyone on a particular rabbit hole. There shouldn't be this rabbit hole, the quack content should always be on page 12. And in the earlier days of Google before the heavy focus on personalisation, this is the way it worked.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  >the quack content should always be on page 12. The problem is that the content is engineered to take advantage of humans and google and becomes the thing on the first page. You might be yearning for the old days of less effective SEO. It's a hard problem how to moderate away though algorithm design or manual intervention things which pull on the strings of human weaknesses. Is an algorithm designed to de-prioritize content you don't like any better than a human selecting content for removal?