[krapp]

I have to be honest, that already seems like exactly the kind of conversation I want to avoid.

The problem here, and it may just be an issue with the internet as a medium, or certain tendencies within technically-minded individuals, seems to be an overriding mistrust of nuance and complexity that leads to polarized, intransigent opinions.

Because really I can see both sides of that argument. On the one hand, society has an obligation to protect itself from bad actors, and part of that necessitates an ability by governments to surveil their citizens to a degree. On the other hand, people have a right to privacy and personal liberty, and governments' power shouldn't be absolute. But no one wants to hear that the only options which balance these concerns are the messy and imperfect ones where we try to do the best we can with imperfect information, and at times conflicting motives and agendas, and laws that require interpretation based on context, rather than being executed like code. The world isn't black and white, it's grey on grey on grey.

I can also see the other side of my own position in this thread - Youtube and other platforms could certainly use their outsized cultural influence and right to moderate content to suppress legitimate information or political activism. I just work from the apparently controversial premise that falsehoods do exist and that it does society no good to allow them to spread, even in the name of "free speech," and disagree with the premise that just because there is no universally acceptable, mathematically provable, perfectly objective answer to "who decides who the liars, cranks and con artists are" which doesn't carry a risk of abuse or hypocrisy, doesn't mean the only acceptable answer is that "liars, cranks and con artists don't exist, and no one gets to decide otherwise."

[subhobroto]

Fair enough, I respect your decision not to engage.

I also appreciate that you empathized with my POV.

To clarify, the point I was making wasn't "liars, cranks and con artists don't exist, and no one gets to decide otherwise."

It was "liars, cranks and con artists do exist, and we need to empower people to decide which is which by letting them practise."

Thank you for this conversation, I for one learned a lot.

[joshuamorton]

> It was "liars, cranks and con artists do exist, and we need to empower people to decide which is which by letting them practise."

This is such a silly argument. If I tell you two pieces of information: "Vaccines cause autism" and "Vaccines do not cause autism", how do you practice believing? By putting children at risk of preventable diseases?

Same goes for hydroxychloroquine or turmeric for covid-19. We have (at this point) decent scientific evidence for these not helping prevent the disease, and yet people will take them and either hurt themselves (chloroquine) or be willing to engage in more risky behavior otherwise.

The easiest way I have of putting this is that there is no difference between having no information, and having all possible information. If I present you with all possible strings of length < 100 containing "covid-19", you'll have lots of reasonable sounding statements about preventing the spread of covid-19. But without authoritative and reliable sources for why some of those strings are valuable to obey and others aren't, you're in no better place than if you had no information at all.