[aleph_minus_one]

> Whats so special about anti covid desinfo rules?

- The magnitude of content involved.

- The fact that there exists a significant part of the society which is vocal about not endorsing these particular deletions.

- The fact that many people became aware of the moderation ("censorship") that YouTube does and its power.

- The fact that these COVID information videos (despite being perhaps wrong) formed important patterns of opinions, i.e. some opinions considered "extremist" or "wrong" were suppressed.

[nobody9999]

I respect that view. And I think you (and anyone else who shares that view) should be able to access any legal content, should they wish to do so.

That said, what does what you or I think have to do with YouTube's policies?

If you disagree with some or all of their policies (I certainly do), you are free not to use YouTube.

I tend not to use that site because I don't like ads and I don't like being spied upon.

No one is stopping you or anyone else from creating a platform for the topic(s) you'd like to see disseminated and discussed.

Or is it (and I'm not saying it is) your contention that YouTube should be required to provide both hosting and ad monetization to everyone, without regard to the content of those hosted videos?

[shakna]

We also suppress videos on the correct manufacturing process for plastic explosives. Not because doing it safely is a bad idea, but because proliferating bomb making materials is.

Covid disinformation got people killed. It will continue to get people killed, especially with a proponent of it leading the US health service.

Things likely to lead to death, are likely things you do not want on your platform.

[belorn]

Since Swedish policy during covid, produced by medical professionals and researchers, was contrary to US policy during covid, this kind of information was also removed.

You do not have this kind of disagreement within the professional field with bomb making materials. Pandemic prevention is an on-going research topic where a lot of different professionals has wild difference in views and approaches, and the meta studies done post the covid pandemic has also demonstrated that much of the strategies deployed by countries all over the world, including US and Sweden, was proven to be inefficient or directly false. The effectiveness of non-N95 respirator against an airborn virus that mostly spread through aerosols (rather than droplets) was one of them, and the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden demonstrated that in an early study when they found live virus surviving the filtered air conditioning in the hospital.

Some people in Sweden first learned about the US censorship because official news from the Swedish government was removed from platforms. Some fringe Covid disinformation might get people kill, but the chilling effect from liberal use of censorship will also kill people.

The biggest killer of all seems to be the politicization of pandemic research. The meta studies seems to be mostly ignored by the political discussion, and its very possible that we get a repeat of the pandemic sooner than later without any thing changing from last time.

[bjourne]

"Some people in Sweden first learned about the US censorship because official news from the Swedish government was removed from platforms."

Citation very, very much needed.

[shakna]

And none of that changes YouTube's liability - caused by misinformation and death.

A company can generally be relied upon to act to reduce their liability in most cases. That involves not pissing off their federal regulatory bodies.

Sweden was not caught up in the early suppression of misinformation. Things changed after a certain tacolike individual called Google's CEO into a private meeting. And expecting them to ignore that, is insane.

[whywhywhywhy]

>And none of that changes YouTube's liability - caused by misinformation and death.

Doesn’t section 230 protect them from the consequences of words users transmit through their platform.

[shakna]

Only if they "take reasonable steps" to "delete or prevent access" to that content. That is, they filter or suppress the information. Which is precisely the point of this thread. They did.

[zanfr]

Sweden is widely recognized as the example to absolutely not follow in handling pandemics.

N95s (and above) definitely work, so does filtered air. But sweden has a long standing history of eugenics

[int_19h]

> Sweden is widely recognized as the example to absolutely not follow in handling pandemics.

Is it? There were some very scathing attacks on their COVID policy back in the first two years of the pandemic, but when you look at more recent retrospectives that have the benefit of hindsight, it seems that they didn't actually do worse than countries which went full lockdown.

[Sloowms]

As opposed to the US? Like sending infected elderly people to elderly homes to infect more people?

[andrepd]

That's your perspective. What if I were to demand it be silenced and only opinions praising its policy were shown?

Let's talk it over in the open, it's not perfect but it's the best way.

[redeeman]

but its not about the information, its about who spouts it. For example its possible for the same government entity to be 100% whitelisted in saying "DONT MASK", and also "MASK OR YOU KILL GRANNY", both are 100% allowed, but when some layperson says the one that isnt favored by the regime at the time, well, they are censored at best.

[shakna]

Disinformation got people killed. That creates liability. The causes a platform to suppress information.

Information, backed by experts, usually requires intervention by a higher power to supress - because it doesn't carry the same liability.

[handoflixue]

Amazon.com currently carries the "Anarchist's Cookbook", including the Author's Footnote saying that the publication of this book is a terrible and dangerous idea. My local library also carries this book.

Is this disinformation really more dangerous than that book? Is there some reason YouTube should be more liable for user-uploaded content, versus a bookstore being liable for content they deliberately choose to carry?

[shakna]

For a time, the Cookbook was banned. However, due to most of it being common knowledge, and the rest of it being ineffectual nonsense unlikely to harm anyone, restrictions were relaxed.

In some jurisdictions, however, it does remain banned to this day. YT are liable if they broadcast the contents of the Cookbook to the UK, for example.

Which is a great example of companies acting because they'll end up liable. Which is the only point I've made.

[_heimdall]

> Disinformation got people killed

Back this up with data if you want to keep stating this as fact. How do you know know disinformation got people killed, and what specifically are you defining as disinformation?

[strangattractor]

In March 2020, an Arizona man died and his wife was hospitalized after ingesting chloroquine phosphate, a substance used in fish tanks to clean aquariums, in an attempt to prevent or treat COVID-19. They reportedly mixed the substance with liquid and drank it, experiencing immediate effects. The man's wife told NBC News she had seen televised briefings where President Trump discussed the potential benefits of chloroquine for COVID-19 and remembered using it for her koi fish. The Banner Health hospital system issued a warning against taking inappropriate medication and household products to treat or prevent COVID-19, emphasizing that chloroquine used for malaria should not be taken for this purpose.

[_heimdall]

I don't like the president, but I don't remember seeing him say to take chloroquine phosphate tablets. I definitely heard him say that he though hydroxychloroquine might me a possible treatment, presumably referring to hydroxychloroquine sulfate tablets.

More importantly though, the then (and unfortunately now) president isn't a doctor and didn't directly tell people to take it. If a person heard that and decided to eat a bottle of pills meant for a fish tank, I don't know who we could lay blame on other than the person that made that choice.

[shakna]

Hundreds verifiably died, after following misinformation [0]. And I would define misinformation as claiming something has health benefits, when very clearly, it will kill you. Like when Gary Lenius believed that hydrochloroquine was a cure.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-52731624

[_heimdall]

> A BBC team tracking coronavirus misinformation has found links to assaults, arsons and deaths. And experts say the potential for indirect harm caused by rumours, conspiracy theories and bad health information could be much bigger.

The claims in the article, which is notably from very early in the pandemic, are focused mainly on looting, rioting, etc.

There are also stories of people poisoning themselves with household cleaners that they believed to be doses of hydroxychloroquine sulfate.

I'm not sure how that's relevant though, they were dosing themselves with household chemicals based on what they heard from the then (and unfortunately now) president who notably has no medical background.

If a person says advil is useful for headaches and someone is harmed when they take a whole bottle, I wouldn't blame the first person for that decision and I definitely wouldn't begin to say speech should have been censored to avoid it.

[_heimdall]

> Covid disinformation got people killed.

You know this claim can never be substantiated right? You will never be able to show causation like that and we would never allow some controlled trial to see whether giving people whatever information you deem as misinformation actually increases the death rate relative to a control group.

[ordersofmag]

Even in science there is not a 'requirement' that you have a controlled experiment in order to have evidence that a claim is true. Following your argument you can't substantiate that humans are the result of evolution because we can't take two groups of early primates, subject one to evolutionary forces and the other not and see what happens. Instead we can observe a chain of correlations with plausible mechanisms that indicate causation and say it's evidentiary. For example, data that indicates unvaccinated people died at a higher rate and data that indicates people who chose not to vaccinate self-report that the reason they made that choice was based on particular information that they believed. That would be evidence that helps substantiate the theory the information led to deaths. It's not 'proof'. We can't 'prove' that exposure to the information actually led to the decision (because people sometimes misattribute their own decisions) and it would be impractical to imagine we can collect vaccine-decision rationales from a large number of folks pre-death (though someone might have) and you can't attribute a particular death to a particular decision (because vaccines aren't perfectly protective) so you have to do statistics over a large sample. But the causal chain is entirely plausible based on everything I know and there's no reason to believe data around those correlations can't exist. And science isn't about 'proof'. Science is about theories that best explain a set of observations and in particular have predictive power. You almost never run experiments (in the 8th grade science fair sense) in fields like astronomy or geology, but we have strong 'substantiated' theories in those fields nonetheless.

[_heimdall]

A causal chain being plausible does not justify or substantiate a claim of causation.

I absolutely would say that we can't prove humans are the result of evolution. The theory seems very likely and explains what we have observed, but that's why its a theory and not a fact - its the last hypothesis standing and generally accepted but not proven.

My argument here isn't with whether the causation seemed likely, though we can have that debate if you prefer and we'd have to go deep down the accuracy and reliability of data reporting during the pandemic.

My argument is that we can't make blanket statements that misinformation killed people. Not only is that not a proven (or provable) fact, it skips past what we define as misinformation and ignores what was known at the time in favor of what we know today. Even if the data you to point to shows correlation and possible causation today, we didn't have that information during the pandemic st the time that YouTube was pulling down content for questioning efficacy or safety.

[pmarreck]

Come on, man. COVID deaths per capita were highest in countries that had very active vaccine skepticism. While this is not causation establishment, it is super highly correlative:

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... gives good estimates of COVID death impact using a very reasonable methodology.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.27.22271579v... illustrates that it's hard to nail this relationship down since UNDERREPORTING was ALSO highest in countries with high vaccine skepticism.

While establishing causation is the gold standard, dismissing strong correlative relationships where everything reasonably considered conflationary has been ruled out (which a raw death count would ostensibly do much of) is not arguing in good faith, IMHO

[_heimdall]

Sure, you can absolutely claim correlation there and say something like "information making people hesitant to get the vaccine may have increased risk of death." That's wildly different than claiming that misinformation killed people.

Comparing country level statistics is also pretty inaccurate. The populations aren't controlled at all, here you are assuming the only meaningful difference in the populations are vaccination rate. Plenty of other factors could come into play; environmental differences, average health, average number of prescription drugs, preexisting conditions like heart disease or diabetes, etc. You can't just hand wave away any other population differences and assume that vaccination rate was the key there.

As you pointed out the data itself isn't reliable due to differences in reporting and testing. How can you skip past that and still land on misinformation caused deaths?

[pmarreck]

> the data itself isn't reliable due to differences in reporting and testing

That is why The Economist used excess-death estimates, skipping right over the whole "death caused by COVID" vs. "death caused by comorbidity" debate. Since COVID was arguably the only worldwide difference between 2019 and the following years, a presumption that the very-statistically-significant excess deaths were largely due to COVID was thus reasonable.

Where even raw death reporting was suspect, they used reasonable estimates. They made their data and analysis public, you can analyze it yourself and counterargue, or have an AI do it these days. Hey, maybe that would be a good exercise!

> Comparing country level statistics is also pretty inaccurate

It compares countries with their own prior years first AND THEN to each other, not countries directly to other countries. This should factor anything systematic at a per-country level, out, such as average health.

Hey, I'm not saying it's flawless (does that even exist?), I was just impressed by their work here back when I last looked at this. I am generally a skeptic and enjoy critical thinking, so I do not attribute this lightly.

[ndriscoll]

Measuring excess deaths doesn't skip that debate. e.g. consider a world where the only populations that died were very old people and morbidly obese people, and everyone else experienced mild or no symptoms. In that world, it would be fair to say that being very old or morbidly obese caused people to die from what was otherwise a mild cold; i.e. those comorbitities were "the cause". Then it would be fair to say excess deaths are a measurement of how prevalent those groups are.

[_heimdall]

Excess deaths is an interesting one, and again can show correlation, but it still can't distinguish cause. Obviously the death numbers were much higher those years, but two major factors were different - the virus was spreading and society responded to it in drastic ways. We can't say how many people died due to lack of access to care for example, or how fear and loneliness factored into death rates.

Excess death rates, at least in the US, are particularly interesting because they didn't follow the pattern I would have expected. Pandemics will effectively pull forward deaths, that didn't seem to happen here. Our all cause mortality spiked noticeably during the pandemic but it came back down to a more normal rate, I would have expected it to be below normal for at least a year or two. Its not as simple as pointing to all cause or excess deaths and saying it must have been vaccine hesitancy - we can't distinguish why those people died and it wouldn't explain the mortality rate after the pandemic.

[xorcist]

Right, but covid disinformation != vaccine skepticism.

As a sibling commenter pointed out, a big part of the covid disinformation that was removed at the time was by established researchers in respected institutions or countries such as Sweden whose pandemic strategy was just different from what many US state institutions implemented.

Sweden turned out to have one of the highest vaccine acceptance levels and also lowest deadliness in the disease. One cofounding factor is the purported high trust in institutions, but such trust is built on having clear and direct communication, and the perception of information being filtered for policitcal or personal career reasons can never yield rust.

Pandemic awareness is a much too complicated issue to be simplified into crazies and vaccine skeptics against everyone else.

[shakna]

Apart from all the accidental suicides from overdosing on alcohol, or taking cleaning products, or... There were a lot of news articles about this, at the time. They got to interview dying people, who admitted their mistakes.

Which is sorta why there actually is studies done on the impact of the misinformation [0].

> Following this misinformation, approximately 800 people have died, whereas 5,876 have been hospitalized and 60 have developed complete blindness after drinking methanol as a cure of coronavirus.34–37 Similar rumors have been the reported cause of 30 deaths in Turkey.38 Likewise, in Qatar, two healthy South Asian men ingested either surface disinfectant or alcohol-based hand sanitizer after exposures to COVID-19 patients.39 In India, 12 people, including five children, became sick after drinking liquor made from toxic seed Datura (ummetta plant in local parlance) as a cure to coronavirus disease.40 The victims reportedly watched a video on social media that Datura seeds give immunity against COVID-19.40

[0] https://www.ajtmh.org/view/journals/tpmd/103/4/article-p1621...

[catlifeonmars]

I think an administration that was happy to spread disinformation and cast doubt on vaccination had an outsized impact. YT ain’t the problem.

[AlexandrB]

> cast doubt on vaccination

This seems like a bizarre retcon. No only did Trump fund "Operation Warp Speed" but he still (occasionally) expresses pride at funding the vaccine research. This is not "casting doubt on vaccination". I think the US right was generally doubtful of vaccination, but I'm fuzzy about whether this started before or after the vaccine mandates. Certainly I remember it being more of a phenomenon once Biden took office - perhaps as knee jerk opposition to a Democrat president.

[Larrikin]

They are casting doubt on the vaccine currently by prohibiting access to it, downplaying the disease, and removing science funding.

The very first commercial I saw after Biden was sworn in was a government ad telling people to get vaccinated.

[potato3732842]

>We also suppress videos on the correct manufacturing process for plastic explosives. Not because doing it safely is a bad idea, but because proliferating bomb making materials is.

>Covid disinformation got people killed. It will continue to get people killed, especially with a proponent of it leading the US health service.

>Things likely to lead to death, are likely things you do not want on your platform.

Proliferating attitudes about the restriction of communication like you are doing and advocating for is bad and gets people killed. The history books are chock f-ing full of the recipe and the steps.

I'll take my chances with the plastic explosives and the health quackery.

Even though people may spew falsehoods the truth "just is" and will keep coming back up.

[shakna]

Russia's official propaganda technique [0], is about spewing falsehoods, because the truth does not keep coming back up. Lie enough, and people do give up.

Hitler and Goebbels did effectively make use of a ministry dedicated to spewing out as many falsehoods as they could, and it very effectively controlled the flow and acceptance of information in Nazi Germany.

Pol Pot and his Little Red Book empowered the Khmer Rouge, and actively buried the truth to the point where people assisted the regime to become one of the most bloody in all of history.

As Orwell warned us, because he lived through Soviet Russia and their propaganda machine, the truth does not survive when there are those dedicated to twisting it or hiding it to fit their purpose.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

[catlifeonmars]

> Even though people may spew falsehoods the truth "just is" and will keep coming back up.

I wish I had your level of confidence about this. I just feel like it is not the case these days and it’s depressing.

[insin]

> Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…

-- Jonathan Swift, 1710 [1]

(very apt that this has an ad in the middle of it)

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=KigTAAAAQAAJ&q=%22Truth+com...

[andrepd]

Indeed. In the ages pre-algorithmic social media and pre-generative AI I would agree that about truth. Now I'm not so sure.

[kevindamm]

funny, I still had this open from when I saw it mentioned in another thread on HN

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Debunking disinfo takes significantly more energy than it did to create it, although I have no more than anecdata to back it up I have yet to find anyone who disagrees.

So, I too would like to believe that the truth prevails but imo it only does so when its champions are incredibly persistent.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Covid disinformation got people killed.

If they trust bad medical advice on YouTube and die, it's their problem.

[shakna]

Its the problem of those they affect. "Infectious" is not self-contained to a singular individual.

Its also a problem for the platform - who is now party to it happening.

YouTube allowing bad medical advice will hurt YouTube. Their safest option, is to disallow it.

[aleph_minus_one]

> YouTube allowing bad medical advice will hurt YouTube.

YouTube censoring videos people want to see will also hurt YouTube.

[shakna]

I don't think that is so certain - or a viable alternative would be competing with them.

[const_cast]

Evidently not very much.

[roenxi]

> Its the problem of those they affect. "Infectious" is not self-contained to a singular individual.

The stats I've seen suggest the vast majority of people have caught COVID between 2019 and now and pretty much all the preventative measures that worked reliably were things that either individuals could do themselves or that required targeting travellers specifically.

It isn't obvious that people trusting YouTube about COVID affects any third party. Who and how are they affecting?

[shakna]

Even if we assume that's true (everything I've seen says it isn't), then a sole individual always affects others. Humans do not exist as lone monks in the hills, generally speaking. When they are ill, it affects their workplaces, it affects their families, it affects their friends. When they die, it's worse - it affects all of those, but also has tail effects on the health industry.

Nothing you do, ever, is in isolation. So nothing you do, ever, will not affect someone else. Pretending that everyone is a sole unit, to excuse behaviour, has never made sense.

[roenxi]

I mean, ok. Everything is connected to everything else, true enough. That seems a bit vague. Do you have a specific example to illustrate what you are talking about? Because the 'disinformation' that I saw being banned was typically people with PhDs in vaguely related fields talking about scientific papers. Disagreeing with them seems like a fair play, deplatforming them seems actually damaging. If I can't listen to people with PhDs to learn about academic papers because everything is interconnected then something has gone rather off the rails.

[peterclary]

Even if you don't care about those people, what about the people who would be affected by them? A would-be bomb-maker might only blow themselves up, or they may kill many in a crowd. Somebody walking around with a deadly pathogen infects and kills others. Children die because their parents believe in anti-vax nonsense. Individual freedom ends at the point at which it causes real harm to other people.

Also, you know who tends to be most in favour of "let stupid people face the consequences of their poor choices"? Those who want to profit from those people and their choices.

[logifail]

> Children die because their parents believe in anti-vax nonsense

Do we know how many otherwise healthy children caught Covid and died from it?

My impression from the official figures is that in most countries the number is vanishingly small if not zero.

[pmarreck]

Well, it's CERTAINLY not ZERO... I recall seeing numerous articles about overweight children dying of it, for example

Remember that even polio only put like 1% of its victims into an iron lung

[freedomben]

I'm not agreeing nor disagreeing with GP, but I would imagine they would argue that an overweight kid is not "otherwise healthy children."

[Izkata]

If you take the percentages from the CDC and multiply them out (and don't fall for the "polio" vs "paralytic polio" sleight of hand), it was way smaller than that - somewhere on the order of 0.01%.

The flu, for example, was always a worse risk than polio, people just became fearful of polio because we found a way to save some lives in a non-ideal way, which became very visible.

[const_cast]

So many caveats to this comment...

> "otherwise healthy"

Yeah, not all kids are otherwise healthy. There's kids with Leukemia or whatever that are extremely immunocompromised because of chemotherapy. They have to coexist with anti-vaxxers and, believe it or not, their lives matter too.

> caught Covid

You think the anti-vaxx crazy train starts and stops at Covid? These people have been attacking MMR for much longer than Covid. Children DO die to measles, mumps, and what have you.

[mbac32768]

In my state it was 2.

The absolute number.

[thrance]

No, it's everyone's. Herd immunity can only be achieved if a sufficiently large part of the population is vaccinated. Also, and I know basic empathy is a foreign concept nowadays, but what if I wished for my fellow to not die of a preventable disease because a grifter sold them on an insane idea?

[zanfr]

there is no long term herd immunity with coronaviruses; which is why they are often use in disaster prevention scenarios...

what you call "herd immunity" is merely letting people die and then go "we have herd immunity" as part of your survivor bias

only solution that works most of the time, regardless of pathogen (including covid): air filtration (respirators and/or whole room)

[xorcist]

There absolutely is. You just think the word immunity means something else.

After vaccination or a passed infection the immune response is there. When a sufficient immune resopnse from a large enough portion if the population is enough to lower the critical cases below some threshold, we call that type of immunity herd immunity.

It's not binary, but a useful concept nonetheless, and one that some people devote their professional lives to. It can be observed every flu season.

[brigandish]

Herd immunity is not a direct goal of vaccination, protection of the individual being vaccinated is. If someone needs protection, then they should get vaccinated!

[ekianjo]

Then why did we ask small kids to be vaccinated for COVID when they had no serious risk of anything? Rhetorical question, of course.

[brigandish]

On the contrary, for the overwhelming majority of children you're absolutely right, they didn't have serious risk from COVID-19, which makes your question a good one, not a rhetorical one.

Regardless, herd immunity was not a serious possibility at any point (given the high Rº and lack of a vaccine that could prevent transmission), which, considering this was known very early on makes your question, again, a good one not a rhetorical one, despite your intent.

Finally, regardless of herd immunity, at risk individuals would still require vaccination, which makes the herd immunity as a goal, again, irrelevant, which is where I started. It's a nice by-product.

[Imustaskforhelp]

I am not sure about America but in India, I was a child during covid, 7th grade - 8th grade and i didn't have a vaccine but my school students just one grade above us were called in school and they were asked for vaccine.

Though, to be fair, my whole family caught a "virus" during 2nd phase except my father but we didn't go to hospital and just bed rest for 2-3 days. My family really were skeptical of vaccine but personally I don't mind vaccines and would prefer it.

[protonbob]

Even more, why did we REQUIRE them to be vaccinated for COVID.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Then why did we ask small kids to be vaccinated for COVID when they had no serious risk of anything?

Think of the children ... :-)

[saint_yossarian]

> Herd immunity can only be achieved if a sufficiently large part of the population is vaccinated.

...or getting infected, of course.

[shakna]

Unfortunately, thus far, Covid19 has been through too many rapid changes for natural immunity to be effective. [0] The earlier forms allowed for it, but the evolution of the virus has outstripped most natural defences.

[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[ekianjo]

But somehow the vaccines catch up on the strains before they come out?

[zanfr]

sadly getting infected just means the virus will nuke your immune system (not to mention your endothelium)