YouTube says it'll bring back creators banned for Covid and election content (businessinsider.com)

> There's a huge difference between government censorship and forcing private companies to host content they don't want to host on servers they own.

It really depends. I remember after the Christchurch mosque shootings, there was a scramble to block the distribution of the shooter's manifesto. In some countries, the government could declare the content illegal directly, but in others, such as Australia, they didn't have pre-existing laws sufficiently wide to cover that, and so what happened in practice is that ISPs "proactively" formed a voluntary censorship cartel, acting in lockstep to block access to all copies of the manifesto, while the government was working on the new laws. If the practical end result is the same - a complete country block on some content - does it really matter whether it's dressed up as public or private censorship?

And with large tech companies like Alphabet and Meta, it is a particularly pointed question given how much the market is monopolized.

It can simultaneously be legal/allowable for them to ban speech, and yet also the case that we should criticize them for doing so. The first amendment only restricts the government, but a culture of free speech will also criticize private entities for taking censorious actions. And a culture of free speech is necessary to make sure that the first amendment is not eventually eroded away to nothing.

The line should be what is illegal, which, at least in the US, is fairly permissive.

The legal process already did all the hard work of reaching consensus/compromise on where that line is, so just use that. At least with the legal system, there's some degree of visibility and influence possible by everyone. It's not some ethics department silently banning users they don't agree with.

The middle ground is when a company becomes a utility. The power company can't simply disconnect your electricity because they don't feel like offering it to you, even though they own the power lines. The phone company can't disconnect your call because they disagree with what you're saying, even though they own the transmission equipment.

The thing is that people will tell you it wasn’t actually censorship because for them it was only the government being a busy body nosey government telling the tech corps about a select number of people violating their terms (nudge nudge please do something)… so I think the and/or is important.

There's a literal world of literature both contemporary and classical which points to the idea that concentrations of power in politics and concentrations of wealth and power in industry aren't dissimilar. I think there are limits to this as recent commentaries by guys like Zizek seem to suggest that the, "strong Nation-State" is a positive legacy of the European enlightenment. I think this is true, "when it is."

Power is power. Wealth is power. Political power is power. The powerful should not control the lives or destinies of the less powerful. This is the most basic description of contemporary democracy but becomes controversial when the Randroids and Commies alike start to split hairs about how the Lenins and John Galts of the world have a right to use power to further their respective political objectives.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm (Leviathan by Hobbes)

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50922 (Perpetual Peace by Kant)

https://www.heritage-history.com/site/hclass/secret_societie...

No, they ban your account and exclude you from the market commons if they don't like what you say.

If the furry smut people became the dominant force in literature and your company was driven out of business fairly for not producing enough furry smut would that too constitute censorship?

I want to see how steep this hill you're willing to die on is. What's that old saying-- that thing about the shoe being on the other foot?

Let's say that in the future that the dominant form of entertainment is X-rated animal snuff films for whatever reason. Would a lack of alternative content constitute an attack on your right to choose freely or speak? Given your ethical framework I'd have to say, "no" but even as your discursive opponent I would have to admit that if you as a person are adverse to, "X-rated furry smut" that I would sympathize with you as the oppressed if it meant your ability to live and communicate has been stifled or called into question. Oppression has many forms and many names. The Johnny Conservatarians want to reserve certain categories of cruelty as, "necessary" or, "permissable" by creating frameworks like, "everything is permitted just as long as some social condition is met..."

At the crux of things the libertarians and the non-psychos are just having a debate on when it's fair game to be unethical or cruel to others in the name of extending human freedom and human dignity. We've fallen so far from the tree.

I have a consortium of other website owners who refuse to crosslink your materials unless you put our banner on your site. Is this oppression? Oppression goes both ways, has many names, and takes many forms. Its most insidious form being the Oxford Comma.

The government told me to.

Is andy99's personal webpage a de-facto commons where the public congregates to share and exchange ideas?

Libraries are typically run by the government. Governments aren't supposed to censor speech. Private platforms are a different matter by law.

Crazy how fast we got from “please remove health misinformation during a pandemic” (bad) to “FCC chair says government will revoke broadcast licenses for showing comedians mocking the president” (arguably considerably worse).

Also allowing it to be posted initially for a period of time before being taken down feels worse than simply preventing it from ever being published on your platform to begin with.

Of course they would never check things before allowing them to be posted because there isn’t any profit in that.

If we were still in the age of personal blogs and phpbb forums, where there were thousands of different venues - the fact the chess forum would ban you for discussing checkers was no problem at all.

But these days, when you can count the forums on one hand even if you're missing a few fingers, and they all have extremely similar (American-style) censorship policies? To me it's less clear than it once was.

No because you are perfectly technically capable of setting your own servers in a colo and distributing your video.

yes... coz youtube is not your ISP. A literal massive difference. RE: net neutrality.

“Covid” related search results were definitely hard-coded or given a hand-tuned boost. Wikipedia was landing on the 2nd or 3rd page which never happens for a general search term on Google.

I’d even search for “coronavirus” and primarily get “official” sites about Covid-19 even tho that’s just one of many coronaviruses. At least Wikipedia makes the front page again, with the Covid-19 page outranking the coronavirus page…

“Covid” related search results were definitely hard-coded. Wikipedia was landing on the 2nd or 3rd page which never happens.

I’d even search for “coronavirus” and primarily get “official” sites about Covid-19 even tho that’s just one of many coronaviruses. At least Wikipedia makes the front page again, with the Covid-19 page outranking the coronavirus page…

I 100% agree with your sentiment here Jensson but in Googling, "common carrier law" what I get are the sets of laws governing transportation services liability:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier

Is there perhaps another name for what you're describing? It piques my interest.

The US has pretty much given up on antitrust enforcement. That's the big problem.

The federal government was literally pressuring ABC to take Kimmel off the air. Even Ted Cruz and other prominent republicans said that was a bridge too far.

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...

Section 230 does not work like you think it does. In fact it is almost opposite of what you probably think it does. The whole point was to allow them to have it both ways.

It makes sites not count as the publisher or speaker of third party content posted to their site, even if they remove or moderate that third party content.

YouTube’s business model probably wouldn’t work if they were made to be responsible for all the content they broadcasted. It would be really interesting to see a world where social media companies were treated as publishers.

Might be a boon for federated services—smaller servers, finer-grained units of responsibility…

> It's often a lot better to just let kooks speak freely.

They have always been able to speak freely. I still see vaccine conspiracies on HN to this day. It was rampant during COVID as well.

It's less about censorship and more about more people becoming middle-class and therefore thinking they're smarter than researchers.

There is nobody more confident in themselves than the middle-class.

It isn't hard to find that randomized controlled trials and large meta-analyses show that COVID vaccines are highly effective. No need to rely on media. You can point to one or two observational re-analyses that show otherwise but overall they are not particularly convincing given the large body of easily accessible other evidence.

I appreciate you.

People have become more anti-Vax because the Covid vaccines were at best ineffective and as you said anything contra-narrative is buried or ignored.

If you push a shitty product and force people to take it to keep their jobs it’s going to turn them into skeptics of all vaccines, even the very effective ones.

More harm than good was done there. The government should have approved them for voluntary use so the fallout would not have been so bad.

This is typical of Covid conspiracy theorists, or conspiracy theorists of any sort: one or two papers on one side prove something, but an overwhelming mountain of evidence on the other side does not prove something. The theorist makes no explanation as to how a planetful of scientists missed the obvious truth that some random dudes found; they just assert that it happened, or make some hand-waving explanation about how an inexplicable planet-wide force of censors is silencing the few unremarkable randos who somehow have the truth.

The first paper seems to claim a very standard cohort study is subject to "immortal time bias", an effect whereby measuring outcomes can seem to change them. The typical example of sampling time bias is that slow-growing cancers are more survivable than fast-growing ones, but also more likely to be measured by a screening, giving a correlation between screening and survivablility. So you get a time effect where more fast-acting cancers do not end up in the measurement, biasing the data.

But in measurements such that one outcome or the other does not bias the odds of that outcome being sampled, there can be no measurement time effect, which is why it's not corrected for in studies like this. The authors do not explain why measurement time effects would have anything to do with detecting or not detecting death rates in the abstract, or anywhere else in the paper, because they are quacks, who apply arbitrary math to get the outcome they want.

As another commenter pointed out, randomized controlled trials -- which cannot possibly have this made-up time effect -- often clearly show a strongly positive effect for vaccination.

I did not read the second paper.

Please stop posting conspiracy theory garbage.

A sibling read the your first link and noted the problems with it. I read just the abstract of the second link, and it's clear their methodology and description of what they're measuring can't actually support their conclusions.

I agree. Again the vast majority would have gotten the vaccine.

There's always going to be people for all kinds of reasons pushing out bad ideas. That's part of the trade-off of living in a free society where there is no universal "right" opinion the public must hold.

> They've completely taken over public discourse on a wide range of subjects

Most people are not anti-vax. If "they've" "taken over public discourse" in other subjects to the point you are now holding a minority opinion you should consider whether "they" are right or wrong and why so many people believe what they do.

If can't understand their position and disagree you should reach out to people in a non-confrontational way, understand their position, then explain why you disagree (if you still do at that point). If we all do a better job at this we'll converge towards truth. If you think talking and debate isn't the solution to disagreements I'd argue you don't really believe in our democratic system (which isn't a judgement).

If that were the case, wouldn’t we see vaccine skepticism in poorly educated, racist non-Western nations?

> I think the anti-vax thing is mostly because the average Western education level is just abysmal.

What does the West have to do with it? Non-westerners are even more into folk medicine and witch doctors.

Anti-vax has never really been a thing though. I don't know what the data is these days, but it used to be like 1% of the population who were anti-vax.

We have the same thing going on with racism in the West where people are convinced racism is a much bigger problem than it actually is.

And whether it's anti-vax or racist beliefs, when you start attacking people for holding these views you always end up inadvertently encouraging people to start asking why that is and they end up down rabbit holes.

No one believes peas cause cancer for example, but I guarantee one of best ways to make people start to believing peas cause cancer is for the media to start talking about how some people believe that peas do cause cancer, then for sites like YouTube and Facebook to starting ban people who talk about it. Because if they allow people to talk about UFOs and flat Earth conspiracies why are they banning people for suggesting that peas cause cancer? Is there some kind of conspiracy going on funded by big agriculture? You can see how this type of thinking happens.

The anti-vax thing is because every single comparative study of vaccinated and unvaccinated children found a greater rate of developmental disorders in vaccinated children. They're also the only products for which you're not allowed to sue the manufacturers for liability, and the justification given by the manufacturers for requesting this liability protection was literally that they'd be sued out of business otherwise. If they were as safe as other treatments they wouldn't need a blanket liability immunity.

Anthony R. Mawson, et al., “Pilot Comparative Study on the Health of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated 6 to 12-year-old U.S. Children,” Journal of Translational Science 3, no. 3 (2017): 1-12, doi: 10.15761/JTS.1000186

Anthony R. Mawson et al., “Preterm Birth, Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Cross-Sectional Study of 6- to 12-Year-Old Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children,” Journal of Translational Science 3, no. 3 (2017): 1-8, doi:10.15761/JTS.1000187.

Brian Hooker and Neil Z. Miller, “Analysis of Health Outcomes in Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children: Developmental Delays, Asthma, Ear Infections and Gastrointestinal Disorders,” SAGE Open Medicine 8, (2020): 2050312120925344, doi:10.1177/2050312120925344.

Brian Hooker and Neil Z. Miller, “Health Effects in Vaccinated versus Unvaccinated Children,” Journal of Translational Science 7, (2021): 1-11, doi:10.15761/JTS.1000459.

James Lyons-Weiler and Paul Thomas, “Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses along the Axis of Vaccination,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17, no. 22 (2020): 8674, doi:10.3390/ijerph17228674.

James Lyons-Weiler, "Revisiting Excess Diagnoses of Illnesses and Conditions in Children Whose Parents Provided Informed Permission to Vaccinate Them" September 2022 International Journal of Vaccine Theory Practice and Research 2(2):603-618 DOI:10.56098/ijvtpr.v2i2.59

NVKP, “Diseases and Vaccines: NVKP Survey Results,” Nederlandse Vereniging Kritisch Prikken, 2006, accessed July 1, 2022.

Joy Garner, “Statistical Evaluation of Health Outcomes in the Unvaccinated: Full Report,” The Control Group: Pilot Survey of Unvaccinated Americans, November 19, 2020.

Joy Garner, “Health versus Disorder, Disease, and Death: Unvaccinated Persons Are Incommensurably Healthier than Vaccinated,” International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice and Research 2, no. 2, (2022): 670-686, doi: 10.56098/ijvtpr.v2i2.40.

Rachel Enriquez et al., “The Relationship Between Vaccine Refusal and Self-Report of Atopic Disease in Children,” The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology 115, no. 4 (2005): 737-744, doi:10.1016/j.jaci.2004.12.1128.

Is there any consideration of this with regard to Section 230? e.g., you're a passive conduit if you allow something to go online, but you're an active publisher if you actively employ any form of algorithm to publish and promote?

Look at 4chan and it's derivatives: minimal algorithms and they're the shitholes of ideas on the internet.

There's a journey that every hypothesis makes on the route to becoming "information", and that journey doesn't start at top-down official recognition. Ideas have to circulate, get evaluated and rejected and accepted by different groups, and eventually grasp their way towards consensus.

I don't believe Trump's or Kennedy's ideas about COVID and medicine are the ones that deserve to win out, but I do think that top-down suppression of ideas can be very harmful to truth seeking and was harmful during the pandemic. In North America I believe this led to a delayed (and ultimately minimal) social adoption of masks, a late acceptance of the aerosol-spread vector, an over-emphasis on hand washing, and a far-too-late restriction on international travel and mass public events, well past the point when it could have contributed to containing the disease (vs Taiwan's much more effective management, for example).

Of course there's no guarantee that those ideas would have been accepted in time to matter had there been a freer market for views, and of course it would have opened the door to more incorrect ideas as well, but I'm of the view that it would have helped.

More importantly I think those heavy restrictions on pre-consensus ideas (as many of them would later become consensus) helped lead to a broader undermining of trust in institutions, the fallout of which we are observing today.

Community notes is better than nothing, but they only relate to a single tweet. So if one tweet with misinformation gets 100k likes, then a community note might show up correcting it.

But if 100 tweets each get 1000 likes, they're never singularly important enough to community note.

Online, sure. But online doesn't mean YouTube or Facebook.

Right, engagement algorithms are like giving bad takes a rocket ship.

The words of world renown epidemiologists who were, to be frank, boring and unentertaining could never possibly compete with crunchymom44628 yelling about how Chinese food causes covid.

Bad takes have the advantage of the engagement of both the people who vehemently agree and the people who vehemently disagree. Everyone is incentivized to be a shock jock. And the shock jocks are then molded by the algorithm to be ever more shock jockish.

Especially at a time when we were all thrown out of the streets and into our homes and online.

And here I'll end this by suggesting everyone watch Eddington.

>It massively amplified the nuts. It brought it to the mainstream.

>COVID was handled terribly after the first month or so, and hopefully we've learned from that. We're going to endure the negative consequences for years.

In theory, I agree, kind of.

But also - we were 10+ months into COVID raging in the US before Biden’s administration, the administration that enacted the policies the article is about, came to be. Vaccine production and approval were well under way, brought to fruition in part due to the first Trump administration. The “nuts” had long been mainstream and amplified before this “silencing” began. Misinformation was rampant and people were spreading it at a quick speed. Most people I know who ultimately refused the vaccines made up their minds before Biden took office.

What's your alternative? The opposite is state dictated censorship and secrecy and those have turned very wrong every single time.

Well, people literally died. So, I think we all know how it played out.

The same thing since time eternal will continue to occur: the educated and able will physically move themselves from risk and others will suffer either by their own volition, or by association, or by lot.

In California, it is required for public schools and many private schools also require it, so effectively it isn't much of a choice.

Its known strategy that happens all the time by corrupt individuals in governments around the world. Its so pervasive, im not going to even to bother posting links.

Better out in the open with refutations or warnings than in the dark where concepts become physical dangers.

Re: 1- one certain protection of the state that they benefit from is the US Constitution, which as interpreted so far forbids the government to impair their free speech rights. Making a private actor host content they personally disagree with violates their right of free speech! That's what the 1st Amendment is all about

2. This has already been adjudicated and this argument lost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri

3. What market is Youtube a monopoly in?

This seems unlikely to be constitutional in the US.

These people will claim they were 'silenced' regardless. Even as they appear with their published bestseller about being silenced on every podcast and news broadcast under the sun, they will speak of the 'conspiracy' working against them at every step. The actual facts at hand almost never matter. Even at a press conference where the President is speaking on your behalf they'll speak of the 'groups' that are 'against' them, full of nefarious purpose. There is no magical set of actions that changes the incentive they have to lie, or believe lies. (except regulation of snake oil, which is not going to happen any time soon)

>Slow down our algorithmic hell hole.

What are your suggestions on accomplishing this while also bent compatible with the idea that government and big tech should not control ideas and speech?

If the government asks private companies to do that, then that's a violation of 1st amendment, isn't it?

This is the conundrum social media has created. In the past only the press, who were at least semi-responsible, had the ability to spread information on a massive scale. Social media changed that. Now anyone can spread information instantly on a massive scale, and often it is the conspiracy theories and incorrect information that people seek out.

"We were a bit naive: we thought the internet, with the availability of information, would make us all a lot more factual. The fact that people would seek out—kind of a niche of misinformation—we were a bit naive." -- Bill Gates to Oprah, on "AI and the Future of us".

Easy solution: Repeal Section 230.

Social media platforms in the United States rely heavily on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides them immunity from liability for most user-generated content.

Try to post a meme here, see how long it stays up.

More seriously, it's just not this simple man. I know people really want it to be, but it's not.

I watched my dad get sucked down a rabbit hole of qanon, Alex Jones, anti-vax nonsense and God knows what other conspiracy theories. I showed him point blank evidence that qanon was bullshit, and he just flat out refuses to believe it. He's representative of a not insignificant part of the population. And you can say it doesn't do any damage, but those people vote, and I think we can see clearly it's done serious damage.

When bonkers ass fringe nonsense with no basis in reality gets platformed, and people end up in that echo chamber, it does significant damage to the public discourse. And a lot of it is geared specifically to funnel people in.

In more mainstream media climate change is a perfect example. The overwhelming majority in the scientific community has known for a long time it's an issue. There were disagreement over cause or severity, but not that it was a problem. The media elevated dissenting opinions and gave the impression that it was somehow an even split. That the people who disagree with climate change were as numerous and as well informed, which they most certainly weren't, not by a long shot. And that's done irreparable damage to society.

Obviously these are very fine lines to be walked, but even throughout US history, a country where free speech is probably more valued than anywhere else on the planet, we have accepted certain limitations for the public good.

If I were trying to govern during a generational, world stopping epoch event, I would also not waste time picking through the trash to hear opinions.

I would put my trust in the people I knew were trained for this and adjust from there.

I suspect many of these opinions are born from hindsight.

The "debate" ended up doing nothing but spreading misinformation.

Society as a whole has a responsibility to not do that kind of shit. We shouldn't be encouraging the spread of lies.

Really, discussion was limited? Or blatant lies were rightly excluded from discourse?

There's a big difference, and in any healthy public discourse there are severe reputations penalties for lies.

If school reopening couldn't be discussed, could you point to that?

It's very odd how as time goes on my recollection differs so much from others, and I'm not sure if it's because of actual different experiences or because of the fog of memory.

> We needed those debates. Because the unchecked “trust the experts” makes the experts dumber. The experts need to respond to challenges.

We've had these debates for decades. The end result is stuff like Florida removing all vaccine mandates. You can't debate a conspiracy or illogical thinking into to going away, you can only debate it into validity.

>Who gets to decide what’s the truth vs. lies? The “police”?

This keeps coming up on this site. It seems like a basic premise for a nuanced and compassionate worldview. Humility is required. Even if we assume the best intentions, the fallible nature of man places limits on what we can do.

Yet we keep seeing posters appealing to Scientism and "objective truth". I'm not sure it is possible to have a reasonable discussion where basic premises diverge. It is clear how these themes have been used in history to support some of the worst atrocities.

I think it was even slightly worse. The White House was effectively delegating the decision of who to ban/police to the NIH/NIAID, an organization that was funding novel coronavirus research in Wuhan.

It's easy to see how at minimum there could be a conflict of interest.

They claim that the Biden admin pressured them to do it, except that they had been voluntarily doing it even during Trump's initial presidency.

The current administration has been openly threatening companies over anything and everything they don't like, it isn't surprising all of the tech companies are claiming they actually support the first amendment and were forced by one of the current administration's favorite scapegoats to censor things.

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There is no mass Marxist movement in the USA. There is a left wing crippled by worse than useless identity politics.

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What do you think about measures that stop short of banning? Like down ranking, demonetizing, or even hell 'banning' that just isolates cohorts that consistently violate rules?

No. You are objectively wrong. It's great medicine that works -- for example, in Germany, and in the US, and elsewhere, it has stemmed the flow of violent extremism historically to stop the KKK and the Nazis. You can't even become a citizen if you have been a Nazi. Even on the small scale, like reddit, banning /r/fatpeoplehate was originally subject to much handwringing and weeping by the so-called free speech absolutists, but guess what -- it all went away, and the edgelords and bullies went back to 4chan to sulk, resulting in the bullshit not being normalized and made part of polite society.

If you want to live in a society where absolutely anything goes at all times, then could I recommend Somalia?

The Nazis in 1933 hadn't done anything within an order of magnitude of the evil they would perpetrate in 1943. They nevertheless were still Nazis, and everyone who did not actively condemn them then was in part responsible for what they did later.

Many evil people weren't Nazis; some Nazis weren't necessarily evil. Evil is not part of the definition of Nazism. Promoting authoritarianism, exclusionary nationalism, institutional racism, autarky, anti-liberalism and anti-socialism are the hallmarks of Nazism. Anyone who holds the beliefs of the Nazis is a Nazi, regardless of what level of success they have to date achieved in carrying out their aims.

We read the history, a lot of it rhymes. Conservatives failed, and exchanged their values for a populist outsider to maintain power (see Franz von Papen). The outsider demeans immigrants and 'sexual deviants'. The outsider champions nationalism. He pardons the people who broke the law to support him. Condemns violence against the party while ignoring the more common violence coming out of the those aligned with the party. Encourages the language of enemies when discussing political opponents and protestors.

Nazi has a lot more connotations than genocide. I'm not sure it is worth nitpicking over. Even if you tone it down to Fascist or Authoritarian there will be push back.

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Europe is sliding, but has done ok so far. Crossing fingers.

Well it would if we would actually ban Nazis instead of platform them. They haven't been banned. That's the problem.

Perhaps not the wisest comment to make in light of recent events

The New York Times has published plenty of stories you could call controversial. Just this morning the top headline was that Trump lied at the UN. Trump has sued the Times for defamation, yet the paper stands by its reporting. That’s how publishing works: if you can’t defend what you publish, don’t publish it. The Section 230 debate is about whether large online platforms such as Facebook should bear similar accountability for the content they distribute. I think they should. That's the only way we can control misinformation and disinformation.

> With medicine there's pushback because the vast majority of the time, someone's scamming you and you likely don't actually know what you're talking about, we had a ton of this during covid, radioactive jewelery that was supposed to protect you, cow piss (I personally know people who tried this...), 5G towers (actual damage done to all sorts of towers), Ivermectin, Hydrochloroquine and more. People who are sick or have a sick loved one are especially vulnerable to these sorts of things (there's an example of such a victim in the comments), and often end up making things worse by waiting too long or causing further damage.

Pushback on what? There's always been new age hippy garbage, Chinese medicine, curing cancer with berries, and that kind of thing around. I don't see that causing much damage and certainly not enough to warrant censorship. People can easily see through it and in the end they believe what they want to believe.

Far far more dangerous and the cause of real damage that I have seen come from the pharmaceutical industry and their captured regulators. Bribing medical professionals, unconscionable public advertising practices, conspiring to push opioids on the population, lying about the cost to produce medications, and on and on. There's like, a massive list of the disasters these greedy corporations and their spineless co-conspirators in government regulators have caused.

Good thing we can question them, their motives, their products.

> With questioning elections, I think Jan 6 would be a pretty good indication of why it wasn't appropriate?

I don't understand your question. Can you explain why you think Jan 6 would be a pretty good indication that discussion and disagreement about elections should be censored?

> This wasn't how questioning the results of elections goes in democracies. Instead, even after courts had investigated, the outgoing president refused to accept the result without any substantiated evidence.

I never quite followed exactly were the legal issues around that election. Trump was alleged to have tried to illegally influence some election process and/or obstructed legal transfer of power. Additionally there was a riot of people who thought Trump won and some broke into congress and tried to intimidate law makers.

I mean taking the worst possible scenario, Trump knew he lost and was scheming a plan to seize power and was secretly transmitting instructions to this mob to enter the building and take lawmakers hostage or something like that. Or any other scenario you like, let your imagination go wild.

I still fail to see how that could possibly justify censorship of the people and prohibiting them from questioning the government or its democratic processes. In fact the opposite, a government official went rogue and committed a bunch of crimes so therefore... the people should not be permitted to question or discuss the government and its actions?

There are presumably laws against those actions of rioting, insurrection, etc. Why, if the guilty could be prosecuted with those crimes, should the innocent pay with the destruction of their human rights, in a way that wouldn't even solve the problem and could easily enable worse atrocities be committed by the government in future?

Should people who question the 2024 election be censored? Should people who have concerns with the messages from the government's foremost immigration and deportation "experts" be prohibited from discussing their views or protesting the government's actions?

Why wouldn't you buy it?

The Twitter files showed direct communications from the administration asking them ban specific users like Alex Berenson, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Andrew Bostom: https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/twitter-files-10th-i...

Meta submitted direct communications from the administration pressuring them to ban people as part of a congressional investigation: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/27/did-bidens-white-ho...

It would be more surprising if they left Google alone.

The difference between a contradiction and a revision is the difference between parallel and serial.

I'm not aware that the WHO ever claimed simultaneously contradictory things.

Obviously, rapid revisions during a period of emerging data makes YouTube's policy hard to enforce fairly. Do you remove things that were in line with the WHO when they were published? When they were made? Etc

OK and if you said something that you later realised to be wrong, would you be contradicting yourself by correcting it? What should they have done in this situation? People do make mistakes, speak out of turn, say the wrong thing sometimes; I don't think we should criticise someone in that position who subsequently fixes their error. And within a couple of days in this case! That's a good thing. They screwed up and then fixed it. What am I missing here?

Is there a difference between an expert opinion in the midst of a pandemic and an organizational recommendation?

they also changed the symptoms definitions, so ...

None of that argues that they contradicted themselves. You and several others have just hijacked this thread to pile on the WHO.

Argue that they were incompetent in their handling of it, sure, whatever. That's not the comment you're replying to.

I’m undecided on the issue, but… if I were trying to cover up an accidental lab leak I’d spread a story that it was a giant conspiracy to create a bio weapon. For extra eye rolls I’d throw in some classic foil hat tropes like the New World Order or the International Bankers.

If it was a lab leak, by far the most likely explanation is that someone pricked themselves or caught a whiff of something.

A friend of mine who lived in China for a while and is familiar with the hustle culture there had his own hypothesis. Some low level techs who were being given these bats and other lab animals to euthanize and incinerate were like “wait… we could get some money for these over at the wet market!”

> My memory is that the "lab leak" stuff I saw back then was all conspiracy theories about how it was a Chinese bioweapon.

No, that was just the straw man circulated in your echo chamber to dismiss discussion. To be clear, there were absolutely people who believed that, but the decision to elevate the nonsense over the serious discussion is how partisan echo chambers work.

> Because that is a bold claim to make. There is no proof of a lab leak and evidence leads to the wet market as the source.

A novel coronavirus outbreak happens at the exact location as a lab performing gain of function research on coronaviruses... but yeah, suggesting a lab leak is outlandish, offensive even, and you should be censored for even mentioning that as a possibility. Got it.

This line of thinking didn't make sense then and still doesn't make sense now.

> There is no proof of a lab leak and evidence leads to the wet market as the source

Because WHO worked with CPC to bury evidence and give clean chit to wuhan lab. There was some pressure building up then for international teams to visit wuhan lab and examine data transparently. But, with thorough ban of lab leak theory, WHO visited china and gave clean chit without even visiting wuhan lab or having access to lab records. The only place that could prove this definitively buried all records.

The topic at hand is not whether it's a bold claim to make. The question is: should organizations that control a large portion of the world's communication channels have the ability to unilaterally define the tone and timber of a dialog surrounding current events?

To the people zealously downvoting all of these replies: defend yourselves. What about this is not worthy of conversation?

I'm not saying that I support lab leak. The observation is that anyone that discussed the lab leak hypothesis on social media had content removed and potentially were banned. I am fundamentally against that.

If the observation more generally is that sentiments should be censored that can risk peoples lives by influencing the decisions they make, then let me ask you this:

Should Charlie Kirk have been censored? If he were, he wouldn't have been assassinated.

It’s not a bold claim. The Fauci emails showed he and others were discussing this as a reasonable possibility.

> Because that is a bold claim to make. There is no proof of a lab leak and evidence leads to the wet market as the source.

It was not a bold claim at the time. Not only was there no evidence that it was the wet market at the time, the joint probability of a bat coronavirus outbreak where there were few bat caves but where they were doing research on bat coronaviruses is pretty damning. Suppressing discussion of this very reasonable observation was beyond dumb.

It is not as cut and dry as you think. Also it is rather hard to get any evidence when you aren't allow to visit the "scene of the crime" so to speak and all data is being withheld.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid...

Even Dr Fauci said in 2021 he was "not convinced" the virus originated naturally. That was a shift from a year earlier, when he thought it most likely Covid had spread from animals to humans.

https://www.deseret.com/coronavirus/2021/5/24/22451233/coron...

(..February 2023..) The Department of Energy, which oversees a network of 17 U.S. laboratories, concluded with “low confidence” that SARS-CoV-2 most likely arose from a laboratory incident. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it favored the laboratory theory with “moderate” confidence. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from natural zoonotic spillover, while two remain undecided.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2305081

WHO says that "While most available and accessible published scientific evidence supports hypothesis #1, zoonotic transmission from animals, possibly from bats or an intermediate host to humans, SAGO is not currently able to conclude exactly when, where and how SARS-CoV-2 first entered the human population."

However "Without information to fully assess the nature of the work on coronaviruses in Wuhan laboratories, nor information about the conditions under which this work was done, it is not possible for SAGO to assess whether the first human infection(s) may have resulted due to a research related event or breach in laboratory biosafety."

https://www.who.int/news/item/27-06-2025-who-scientific-advi...

WHO paraphrased: We have no data at all about the Wuhan Laboratory so we can not make a conclusion on that hypothesis. Since we have data relating to natural transmission from animals we can say that situation was possible.

But there is no proof of any real wet lab connection and evidence points to the lab as a source.

Actual (N95/FFP2/FFP3) masks DO work, your comment is misleading. The study you've linked says:

> Colored masks of various construction were handed out free of charge, accompanied by a range of mask-wearing promotional activities inspired by marketing research

"of various construction" is... not very specific.

If you just try to cover your face with a piece of cloth it won't work well. But if you'll use a good mask (N95/FFP2/FFP3), with proper fit [0] then you can decrease the chance of being infected (see e.g. [1])

[0] https://www.mpg.de/17916867/coronavirus-masks-risk-protectio...

[1] https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/upgrading-ppe-for-staff-...

They claim a 5% reduction in spread with cloth masks and a 12% reduction with surgical masks. I think 1 less case out of every 10 or 20 is pretty acceptable?

Especially at the time when many countries were having their healthcare systems overloaded by cases.

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I didn't want to be the one to have to say it, but neither masks nor social distancing had any scientific backing at all. It was all made up, completely made up. The saddest thing I see all the time is the poor souls STILL wearing masks in 2025 for no reason. I don't care how immunocompromised they are, the mask isn't doing anything to prevent viral infection at all. They might help against pollen. I also can't believe how many doctors and nurses at my wife's cancer clinic wear masks all the damn time even though they are not in a surgical enviornment. It's all been foisted upon them by the management of those clinics and the management is completely insane and nobody speaks up about it because it's their job if they do, so the isanity just keeps rolling on and on and it is utterly dehumanizing and demoralizing. If a cancer patient wants to wear a mask because it affords them some tiny comfort, then fine, but that is purely psychological. I've seen it over and over and over because I've been at numerous hospitals this past year trying to help my wife survive a cancer that I think Pfizer may be to blame for.

They burned it beyond down to the ground and below. And many of you on here willfully continue to trust them and argue vehemently against people who try to tell you the actual truth of the matter. RFK Jr. is a flawed human being, but he's doing some good work in unwinding some of the web of lies we live under right now.

I'd expect questions with that label to have the sort of answers that are a pain to grade.

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That's what I told my MAGA friends. Biden recommended stuff, Trump threatens stuff. So far only one of them has followed through with action. Trump has threatened business deals and prosecution, and is currently sending government after his opponents with the DoJ. Yet those same people are as quiet as mice now on "government bullying"

They literally had access to JIRA at Twitter so they could file tickets against accounts.

Zuckerberg mentioned meta were getting government employees that were calling Facebook absolutely furious, and when they didn’t take down legal speech administration did not approve of, there was an immediate investigation launched into Meta that he considers retaliatory.

https://apnews.com/article/meta-platforms-mark-zuckerberg-bi...

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3kDr0LcmqOHOz3mBHMdDuV?si=j...

That was certainly the case with Twitter. It came out during the congressional hearings. FBI had a direct line to the decision makers.

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I sit here in my cubicle, here on the motherworld. When I die, they will put my body in a box and dispose of it in the cold ground. And in the million ages to come, I will never breathe, or laugh, or twitch again. So won't you run and play with me here among the teeming mass of humanity? The universe has spared us this moment."

~Anonymous, Datalinks.

Anyway this video about Biden drinking the blood of Christian children is brought to you by Alpha Testerone 2 Supplements, now FDA-approved

> Much like how monopolies can destroy free markets, unchecked propaganda can bury information by swamping it with a data monoculture.

The fundamental problem here is exactly that.

We could have social media that no central entity controls, i.e. it works like the web and RSS instead of like Facebook. There are a billion feeds, every single account is a feed, but you subscribe to thousands of them at most. And then, most importantly, those feeds you subscribe to get sorted on the client.

Which means there are no ads, because nobody really wants ads, and so their user agent doesn't show them any. And that's the source of the existing incentive for the monopolist in control of the feed to fill it with rage bait, which means that goes away.

The cost is that you either need a P2P system that actually works or people who want to post a normal amount of stuff to social media need to pay $5 for hosting (compare this to what people currently pay for phone service). But maybe that's worth it.

There is no generally accepted definition of propaganda. One person's propaganda is another person's accurate information. I don't trust politicians or social media employees to make that distinction.

Propaganda wouldn't be such a problem if content wasn't dictated by a handful of corporations, and us people weren't so unbelievably gullible.

indeed, didn't YT ban a bunch of RT employees for undisclosed ties? I bet those will be coming back.

Oh, but can you make an argument that the government, pressuring megacorporations with information monopolies to ban things they deem misinformation, is a good thing and makes things better?

Because that's the argument you need to be making here.

I'd say free speech absolutism (read: early-pandemic Zuckerberg, not thumb-on-the-scales Musk) has always aged better than the alternatives.

The trick is there's a fine line between honest free speech absolutism and 'pro free speech I believe in and silence about the freedom of that I don't.' Usually when ego and power get involved (see: Trump, Musk).

To which, props to folks like Ted Cruz on vocally addressing the dissonance of and opposing FCC speech policing.

Anything that people uncritically good attracts the evil and the illegitimate because they cannot build power on their own so they must co-opt things people see as good.

While this is true, It's also important to realize that during the great disinformation hysteria, perfectly reasonable statements like "This may have originated from a lab", "These vaccines are non-sterilizing", or "There were some anomalies of Benford's Law in this specific precinct and here's the data" were lumped into the exact same bucket as "The CCP built this virus to kill us all", "The vaccine will give you blood clots and myocarditis", or "The DNC rigged the election".

The "disinformation" bucket was overly large.

There was no nuance. No critical analysis of actual statements made. If it smelled even slightly off-script, it was branded and filed.

You can call it data and have sufficient respect of others that they may process it into information. Too many have too little faith in others. If anything we need to be deluged in data and we will probably work it out ourselves eventually.

The problem is that in our collective hurry to build and support social networks, we never stopped to think about what other functions might be needed with them to promote good, factual society.

People should be able to say whatever the hell they want, wherever the hell they want, whenever the hell they want. (Subject only to the imminent danger test)

But! We should also be funding robust journalism to exist in parallel with that.

Can you imagine how different today would look if the US had leveraged a 5% tax on social media platforms above a certain size, with the proceeds used to fund journalism?

That was a thing we could have done. We didn't. And now we're here.

They're not wrong; the attribution is part of the quote. In-game, the source of the quote is usually important, and is always read aloud (unlike in Civ).

Let's not waste time on idle hypotheticals and fear mongering. No propaganda campaign has ever posed an existential threat to the USA. Let us know when one arrives.

There are twin goals: total freedom of speech and holding society together (limit polarization). I would say you need non-anonymous speech, reputation systems, trace-able moderation (who did you upvote), etc. You can say whatever you want but be ready to stand by it.

One could say the problem with freedom of speech was that there weren't enough "consequences" for antisocial behavior. The malicious actors stirred the pot with lies, the gullible and angry encouraged the hyperbole, and the whole US became polarized and divided.

And yes, this system chills speech as one would be reluctant to voice extreme opinions. But you would still have the freedom to say it but the additional controls exert a pull back to the average.

Not quite: prior to the communications Decency Act of 1996 (which contained section 230), companies were also not liable for the speech of their users, but lost that protection if they engaged in any moderation. The two important cases at hand are Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co. And Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe Inc.

The former moderated content and was thus held liable for posted content. The latter did not moderate content and was determined not to be liable for user generated content they hosted.

Part of the motivation of section 230 was to encourage sites to engage in more moderation. If section 230 were to be removed, web platforms would probably choose to go the route of not moderating content in order to avoid liability. Removing section 230 is a great move if one wants misinformation and hateful speech to run unchecked.

I was referring more to established Media that people consider credible like the NBC, CBS, The Guardian, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, etc. The fact that the only person in "media" who has been severely punished for their lies is a roundly despised figure (without any credibility among established media or the ruling class) is not a ringing endorsement for the system. While the lies of Jones no doubt caused untold hardship for the families of the victims, they pale in comparison to the much more consequential lies told by major media outlets with far greater influence.

When corporate media figures tell lies that are useful to the establishment, they are promoted, not called to account.

In 2018 Luke Harding at the Guardian lied and published a story that "Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy" (headline later amended with "sources say" after the fake story was debunked) in order to bolster the Russiagate narrative. It was proven without a shadow of a doubt that Manafort never went to the Embassy or had any contact at all with Assange (who was under blanket surveillance), at any time. However, to this day this provably fake story remains on The Guardian website, without any sort of editor's note that is it false or that it was all a pack of lies!(1) No retraction was ever issued. Luke Harding remains an esteemed foreign correspondent for The Guardian.

In 2002, Jonah Golberg told numerous lies in a completely false article in The New Yorker that sought to establish a connection between the 9/11 attacks and Saddam Hussein called, "The Great Terror".(2) This article was cited repeatedly during the run up to the war as justification for the subsequent invasion and greatly helped contribute to an environment where a majority of Americans thought that Iraq was linked to Bin Laden and the 9/11 attackers. More than a million people were killed, in no small part because of his lies. And Goldberg? He was promoted to editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, perhaps the most prestigious and influential journal in the country. He remains in this position today.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of similar examples. The idea suggested in the original OP that corporate/established media is somehow more credible or held to a higher standard than independent media is simply not true. Unfortunately there are a ton of lies, falsehoods and propaganda out there, and it is up to all of us to be necessarily skeptical no matter where we get our information and do our due diligence.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort-hel...

2. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/25/the-great-terr...

A sympathetic jury can be an enemy of justice.

I'm not an Alex Jones fan, but I don't understand how a conspiracy theory about the mass shooting could be construed as defamation against the parents of the victims. And the $1.3B judgement does seem excessive to me.

Well when the local media bends a knee and outright bribes the President (Paramount, Disney, Twitter, Facebook), why should we trust the domestic media?

Instead of implementing government information control, why not invest those resources in educating and empowering ones citizenry to recognize disinformation?

Nonsense. If social media users engage in fraud, slander, or libel then you can still hold them accountable through a civil lawsuit. Section 230 doesn't prevent this.

The "editorializing" may possibly be applied i think (not a lawyer) when the platform's manipulation of what a user sees is based on content. And the Youtube's banning of specific Covid and election content may be such an "editorializing", and thus Youtube may not have Section 230 protection at least in those cases.

I remember a story that was investigated and then published...it was spread far and wide. The current president of the US stole the election and our biggest adversary has videos of him in compromising positions. Then debunked. (Steele dossier) https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-russiagate-...

I remember a story that was investigated and then published...for some reason it was blocked everywhere and we were not allowed to discuss the story or even link to the news article. It "has the hallmarks of a Russian intelligence operation."(Hunter Biden Laptop) Only to come out that it was true: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fbi-spent-a-year-pre...

I would rather not outsource my thinking or my ability to get information to approved sources. I have had enough experience with gell-mann amnesia to realize they have little to no understanding of the situation as well. I may not be an expert in all domains but while I am still free at least I can do my best to learn.

It never worked. Newspapers in the old days frequently printed lies and fake news. They usually got away with it because no one held them accountable.

>At that point the newspaper company is standing behind the story

the newspaper company is the bottleneck that the censors can easily tighten like it was say in USSR. Or like even FCC today with the media companies like in the case of Kimmel.

Social media is our best tool so far against censorship. Even with all the censorship that we do have in social media, the information still finds a way due to the sheer scale of the Internet. That wasn't the case in the old days when for example each typewritter could be identified by unique micro-details of the shape of its characters.

>Social media destroyed this process, now anyone can spread allegations at lightning speed on a massive scale without any evidence to back it up.

Why to believe anything not accompanied by evidence? The problem here is with the news consumer. We teach children to not stick fingers into electricity wall socket. If a child would still stick the fingers there, are you going to hold the electric utility company responsible?

>This has to stop. We should return to the old way, it wasn't perfect, but it worked for 100s of years.

The same can be said about modern high density of human population, transport connections and infectious decease spreading. What you suggest is to decrease the population and confine the rest preventing any travel like in the "old days" (interesting that it took Black Death some years to spread instead of days it would have taken today, yet it still did spread around all the known world). We've just saw how it works in our times (and even if you say it worked then why aren't we still doing it today?). You can't put genie back into the bottle and stop the progress.

>Repealing Section 230 will accomplish this.

Yes, good thing people didn't decided back then to charge the actual printer houses with lies present in the newspapers they printed.

What happens when the press refuses to publish anything which doesn't align with their financial or political interest?

There is no way to go back to this. It’s about as feasible as getting rid of vehicles.

> We should return to the old way, it wasn't perfect, but it worked for 100s of years

At this stage you are clearly just trolling. Are you even aware of the last 100s of years? From Luther to Marx? You are not acting in good faith. I want nothing to do with your ahistorical worldview.

No, the ruling class is. breadwinner I guess has bought into the propaganda, but hasn't made the connection that it's basically putting all the blame on the little people and proposes to put all the burden of "fixing" things onto them, with measures that will absolutely not actually fix anything except handing more power to the ruling class.

It’s a terrible idea and creates more problems than it solves.

You eliminate the good and the bad ideas. You eliminate the good ideas that are simple “bad” because it upsets people with power. You eliminate the good ideas that are “bad” simply because they are deemed too far out the Overton window.

And worst of all, it requires some benevolent force to make the call between good and bad, which attracts all sorts of psychopaths hungry for power.

I certainly guessed that was what you wanted to say. Funny how polarization makes everything predictable.

But what I just realized is that you don't explicitly say it, and certainly make no real argument for it. Ressa laments algorithmic promotion of inflammatory material, but didn't say "keep out anti-government subversives who spread dangerous misinformation" - which is good, because

1. We can all see how well the deplatforming worked - Trump is president again, and Kennedy is health secretary.

2. In the eyes of her government, she was very much such a person herself, so it would have been pretty bizarre thing of her to say.

Ironically, your post is very much an online "go my team!" call, and a good one too (top of the thread!). We all understand what you want and most of us, it seems, agree. But you're not actually arguing for the deplatforming you want, just holding up Ressa as a symbol for it.

> content that falsely alleges that approved vaccines are dangerous and cause chronic health effects

The J & J vaccine was approved at the time, but was later banned for causing chronic health effects.

> claims that vaccines do not reduce transmission or contraction of disease

Isn't that true of the covid vaccines? Originally, the proponents claimed that getting the vaccine would stop you from getting covid entirely, but later on, they changed the goal posts to "it will reduce your symptoms of covid".

That policy catches and bans any scientists studying the negative health effects of vaccines who later turns out to be right.

1) YouTube doesn't know what is true. They will be relying on the sort of people they would ban to work out when the consensus is wrong. If I watched a YouTube video through of someone spreading "vaccine misinformation" there is a pretty good chance that the speakers have relevant PhDs or are from the medical profession - there is no way the YouTube censors are more qualified than that, and the odds are they're just be random unqualified employees already working in the euphemistically named "Trust & Safety" team.

2) All vaccines are dangerous and can cause chronic health effects. That statement isn't controversial, the controversy is entirely over the magnitude. Every time I get a vaccine the standard advice is "you should probably hang around here for 5 minutes, these things are known to be dangerous in rare cases". I think in most countries you're more likely to get polio from a polio vaccine than in the wild. On the one hand, that is a success of the polio vaccine. On the other hand, the vaccine is clearly dangerous and liable to cause chronic health problems.

> This would include content that falsely says that approved vaccines cause ... cancer ...

Cancer is such a catch all that we can pretty much guarantee there will be some evidence that vaccines cause cancer. Everything causes cancer. Drinking tea is known to cause cancer.

3) All policies have costs and benefits. People have to be able to discuss the overall cost-benefit of a policy in YouTube videos even if they get one of the costs or benefits completely wrong.

> This seems like good banning to me. Anti-vaxxer propaganda isn't forbidden thoughts. It's bad science and lies and killing people.

Any subject important enough in any public forum is potentially going to have wrong opinions that are going to cause harm. While some people could be wrong, and could cause harm, the state itself being wrong is far more dangerous, especially with no dissident voices there to correct its course.

Edit: I see you're getting downvoted for simply stating your honest opinion. But as a matter of principle I'm going to upvote you.

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Google went so far as to scan people's private google drives for copies of the documentary 'plandemic' and delete them.

Why would Google ever do that? People are likely to leave YouTube for some other entertainment, and then they won't see more ads.

If anything, these people see the removal of their "favorite" videos as validation - if a video is removed, it must be because it was especially truthful and THEY didn't like that...

It's actually been showed many times that deplatforming significantly reduces the number of followers an influencer has. Many watch out of habit or convenience, but won't follow when they move to a platform with less moderation.

Why should Youtube try to tell me what it thinks I should want to watch instead of what I actually want to watch? I'm not particularly interested in their opinion on that matter.

Given the number of people that describes it's pretty clear that people do want that. It's not exactly a new and surprising thing that people want things that are bad for them.

Oof, I'm outside my edit window and didn't make my correct point. It's when people say "I was banned from _____ for _____". When people say "for _____" I take their word with a huge grain of salt.

Not even much to do with Reddit, it's something I picked up from playing video games: https://speculosity.wordpress.com/2014/07/28/the-lyte-smite/

It's fine, but the voting system basically makes Reddit not a place for any kind of serious discussion. Which is also fine if you don't waste time expecting more from it.

The answer is to leave Reddit and let them have their echo chamber. There's no point of posting there anyway.

Same, happened to me after replying to a comment in the JRE sub, I think I was calling something / someone dumb. Coincidentally, that sub is openly against him now.

Tried clarifying this in another comment, my point was more that people who say "I was banned from X for doing something innocuous" are often not telling the whole truth.

Yes, when accounts have a pattern of posting too many unsubstantive and/or flamewar comments, we sometimes rate limit them.

We're happy to take the rate limit off once the account has built up a track record of using HN as intended.

As mentioned, I haven't seen cases of that in the current thread. If there are any, I'd appreciate links. We don't see everything.

There's one comment literally spreading misinformation and it isn't flagged, but instead got pushback by others, critically pointing the weakness of their arguments.

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What is considered "misinformation" depends on whatever the censoring authority in question (e.g. Facebook or YouTube or some news website) _believes_ to be misinformation.

For example, in 2020, the WHO(!) Twitter account literally tweeted that masks don't work. That same statement would have been considered medical misinformation by a different authority.

Another example: the theory that Covid leaked from a lab in Wuhan which was known to do gain of function experiments on coronaviruses was painted as a wacky conspiracy theory by most of the mainstream media, despite the fact that many respectable sources (e.g. the CIA) later concluded that it has a significant amount of plausibility versus the alternative Wuhan wet market hypothesis which required that the virus somehow arrived there from a bat cave more than a thousand kilometres away.

That sounds great in theory. In practice, "misinformation" ends up being defined as anything the govt finds inconvenient. Or it is selectively applied so that when misinformation comes from all sides of the political spectrum, only people the govt doesnt like (in the more general sense) get kicked off platforms.

Yep..and fame, admiration, contempt, loathing, indifference etc

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I suppose the argument there is that it's not necessarily a megaphone for the fella with 24 followers. The concern comes from when someone amasses a following through "acceptable" means and then pivots. Not sure how to balance that.

Yeah, I personally still see a place for permanent bans. But I can see the other side.

Who gets to decide who’s naughty? One day it’s the Biden admin, and the next it’s the Trump admin. That’s the tough part about censorship.

You can leave it up to companies, but what happens when Trump allies like Elon Musk and Larry Ellison buy up major platforms like Twitter and TikTok?

Do we really trust those guys with that much power?

Both these things can be true.

People deserve second chances every now and then. Many people squander their second chances. Some people don't.

Oh, absolutely, I don't think this move by Google has anything to do with them being some kind of staunch free speech supporters. It's an obvious and rather pathetic attempt to suck up to the Trump administration, which itself is cancer when it comes to rights and freedoms. I'm no COVID denialist either.

I just don't think that "there's no point debating a Nazi" is, in general, a good argument in favor of censorship, whether public or private. It's one of those things that have a good ring to it and make some superficial sense, like "fire in the crowded theater", and then you look at how it works in the real world...

> If you actually cared about CSAM you would want those posting it to self incriminate and then face consequences in real life

We don’t have the resources for this, even when the FBI isn’t being purged and sent to Home Depots. Unrestricting IPs means a boom for CSAM production and distribution.

Yes, we should let people "self-incriminate" with Tor and disposable email services...

Equal and opposite reactions, if parent poster is falsely that confident, then its fair to meet them with strong condescension on the other side is it not?