The difference in this argument is that Nett isn't the owner of the only message board around, nor does he work hand-in-glove with the government when it comes to funding, taxation and messaging. Given that the platforms now essentially have monopolies, I'm unclear how this should be legislated going forward. Particularly since there is not "publicly owned digital space," akin to a town square, where a business or individual could operate unencumbered from arbitrary rules assigned by a private company. There's a distorted amount of power that the major platforms hold that is not presently balanced with acceptable oversight or impartial review, and it's a problem. Sure, you can create your own data-sharing website and try to drum up a community of interested folks. Oh, but you have to use Google's servers and search engines to advertise it. And it has to be compatible with iOS and Android's terms of services. See what I mean? You don't have any other option BUT use these platforms. So to say, "their sandbox, their rules," isn't really the whole story, given that we must all live in that sandbox and don't have the option of leaving it.
then your issue is with the regulations and those who put those regulations in place, not YouTube itself. I agree with you that it is essentially a monopoly, but I also acknowledge that they are well within their rights to do what they did, and in this case it will benefit society. this is one of those cases where there isn’t “two sides.” If there’s a mass shooting, you don’t also go interview people who are pro-mass shootings. They made a decision that will save lives, and hopefully ease the psychological stress of those impacted by the harm the videos hosted on their platform have caused. It won’t bring back the dead, but it is better late than never. And sure, it’s a slippery slope as to what’s “misinformation” and it could be abused. But for the sake of saving lives, it was a decision that had to be made, and was made correctly imo. In a crisis like this, no decision is going to make everyone happy. You have to accept some risk of downside. I’ll take the slippery slope argument and kicking that can down the road for the sake of saving lives now. It’s just the morally correct thing to do. And kudos to them for finding their balls and finally doing it. now Facebook next
You're putting a lot of trust into Big Tech acting honourably - and not simply acting in a way that secures the bottom line for the next quarter - as well as everyone involved accurately knowing what is best. Personally, I think showing all sides of a thing in an unbiased way is the best course of action. It becomes pretty clear what works and what doesn't when it's all exposed to reality. But the idea that you can trust a private entity whose first and foremost duty is to their shareholders, especially when big money is at stake, is unbelievably naive. You're handing the keys to Apple and Google and god knows what Russian- or Chinese-owned parent companies and trusting them to choose a policy that acts in the interest of all people involved. Sorry, we're going to have a hardline disagreement there.
Now Face Book needs to clean up it's act. It's troll farms spreading misinformation. https://www.relevantmagazine.com/cu...ristian-pages-are-run-by-foreign-troll-farms/
we did show all sides of this. And the other side is completely stupid and wrong, and we showed that. And they didn’t accept it because the implication is that “you have to show both [equally correct] sides.”
But again...you're assuming their version of "misinformation" will align with your own. "The MMR vaccine causes autism," is misinformation from an objective standpoint. "Contaminated Moderna vaccines have killed over a thousand people so far in Japan" is not. Do you think they'll treat both statements the same? Do you think the 2 or 3 thousand or so checkers at YouTube will methodically go through everything, or you think they'll just write an algorithm that blocks certain words from being said? And by the way, "they're completely stupid and wrong," is going to convert zero people. What it will do is split things further and fan the fumes of a divided society. What does that look like? We don't know yet. Falsified documents, for sure. Whole underground businesses and cash economies to avoid the mandates and investigations. Mass firing of desperately needed workers that could result in more deaths, thanks to the staff shortages. "You're a fucked up idiot" isn't going to work, and it's going to have a myriad of unintended consequences.
At this point, these tech companies are getting ahead of potential regulation, same as ever. If they didn't do something, the FCC would (and still might) launch an investigation. FWIW, this is a bandaid on a bullet hole. That said, I feel no sympathy for liars, charlatans and idiots not finding a sympathetic platform. The cries of "free speech" are shallow and as well thought out as some of the conspiracy theories. Wait til you find out about how often newspapers ran stories against the people that bought ad space on them.... The other thing is in recognition of the 2016 and 2020 election, Google is in the best position to understand exactly where this stuff is coming from, not just the idiot-echo. I'd bet they are getting ahead of other problems, such as election interference, employees striking because the company failed to act, etc. DCC has a valid point: these are monopolies that have amassed a bit too much power and need to be broken up into at least some smaller pieces. A few trillion dollar companies all occupying the same space isn't a success story, it's dystopian.
Agreed. At some point this comes to a head with legislation. I don't hold out hope that such legislation will fix anything, but that's where it's headed. Trolling and straight-up mal-intent aside, how do you distinguish who is a charlatan or an idiot or a liar? If we're going to police the content and insist that only "true" things can stand...what's the plan for doing that? I'm not asking as a gotcha question; legit curious if anyone has any ideas how a platform is supposed to successfully distinguish between a Fauci vs a Bret Weinstein vs an Eddie Bravo or Alex Jones. Yes, at this point this all feels like a Ma-Bell situation. Or Crown companies without the fiduciary duty to the public. Many of these problems would be kept in check if there were four Facebooks and three YouTubes. Again, I don't know how you foster that successfully.
Saw this on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/pxwhs1/nothing_of_value_was_lost/
so one of the people doing PT with me today is an actual virologist. She said her lab is conducting studies on how to combine the mRNA shots with the flu vaccine, like roll them into one if we end up needing a booster. Needless to say it was extremely cool meeting an actual virologist who's working on this stuff. Didn't wanna bug her asking questions, but she was extremely excited to talk about the potential of it.
Maybe you don't? Maybe we're at the point where we're shooting anyone who delivers this particular message, regardless of who or why. How to distinguish the truth? By whoever has the data to back up what they say. In another reality I would would agree with every single point you've raised. In this reality, we are in a misinfo/manipulation crisis, and we are falling for it hard. Facebook/Twitter should follow YT's lead and purge their rolls entirely. Reddit too, because it's not enough to just dump them in their own subreddit where they can still be found and engaged.
Got my booster yesterday, since it's been 6 months since I got the original. Aside from soreness in the arm, no side effects.
I'm sorry, I can't get behind this. Because WHO is the authority that you defer to, and do you actually think they will ever relinquish this control once the problem is over? Is it what the CDC says? The FDA? The current elected party? What if all three of those organizations don't agree...who's at the top of the food chain? Where is the free and fair access if there is actually harm (side effects, contaminated batches, long-term data showing health issues) being done? Look at it like this: anything they enact will be with us forever, and it will be applied to every other situation going forward. Seen through that rubric, what are you willing to accept? And if you somehow manage to get the government and big tech/pharma to play nice and reverse all their measures once this is "over," how do you define when this is over? What if we hit 90% vaccinated and we continue to see spikes and hospitalizations, forever? There's two issues at play: the virus/vaccine, and the measures that "the State" (government/big corporations) are allowed to enact under the guise of protection. While I think that most people - specifically those who are obese, elderly and/or have comorbidities - should get the vaccine immediately, it's unreal to me the level of control we're allowing to be enacted under the guise of "for your own good, because we know best."
maybe I'm just jaded, but that whole slippery slope argument is starting to fall on deaf ears for me because for a long time I believed in the slippery slope argument on a big one: gun rights And now our president literally is the guy who did the AWB, and you know what? If anything, the availability and proliferation of firearms has INCREASED! Texas is now a constitutional carry state, which is definitely something you should read about if you want your head to spin. But law school taught me that this was an effective legal argument, and in the real world with something that I cared about and that impacted me (guns), that was the main rallying cry. And jack shit happened changed, except, debatably, in a more positive direction as far as fewer restrictions. Fool me once and all that. That's why I just don't buy this argument for vaccines, and control, and things like YT "censoring" or whatever you wanna call a platform exercising their rights to now allow content to be hosted on there they don't feel fits.
Numbers in our county continue to rise, we're now the worst infection rate in the state. Go us! Meanwhile many people continue to deny it or outright laugh it off. Our vax rate is still below 50% and the hospitalization numbers climb. And it appears as though the county is just sitting on their hands, presumably because doing anything meaningful would be political suicide. Many of us believe the schools will end up shut down just like last Fall.
I'm not sure what argument you're making here; I certainly don't think that equating the vaccine mandates with gun control legislation is in any way an appropriate argument. There's a deep cultural divide when it comes to firearms, and the states all have different appetites for gun control that can vacillate greatly from what the Fed tries to enact. You often wind up with state-level panic buying or reactionary laws that create huge differences in how any particular firearm is controlled or carried, and one could argue that the states with the most stringent gun control laws have the highest number of gun deaths. I will say this with regards to gun control vs vaccine mandates: they both prove, once again, that legislation isn't a great tool when it comes to fixing a problem on the ground that human beings are actually executing. Same with drugs, booze and prostitution: the legislation had better reflect the needs and wants of the people governed, or the laws will be ignored and/or circumvented to a black market (which is arguably WAY more dangerous). If you create a class of people who cannot access services or their ability to function in society is greatly limited (and I find it interesting that they're still willing to collect the taxes of the people that they're now excluding), you won't force anyone who doesn't want to to capitulate. What you will do is create a hidden economy with its own rules, and you will disproportionately persecute the marginalized and minorities because they're easy targets. You see this happen with strict anti-abortion laws. So yeah. I don't think that you can really use firearm control as a reference for this, especially since there's WAY more buy-in on every level of government and industry on the mandates. If anything, your example shows that good intentions create terrible unintended consequences when inflicted on the unwilling.
Also, here's another reason why we shouldn't structure our society around vaccine compliance: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada...irus-updates-toronto-canada-september-30.html Unless you live in a country that can somehow exist completely locked off from the rest of the world (probably New Zealand is a fair example), everyone else has to live in a global community. And that global community is sitting at somewhere between 2-10% vaccinated. Having lived in various African and Middle-Eastern countries, I can say with some confidence that I hold out zero hope that they will be able to hit a target of 80% within the next year, if ever. So even if you eradicate it from your own population, you will continuously be subjected to re-infection from elsewhere. Unless you keep the borders locked down like they are indefinitely, at great economic and humanitarian cost.
There is no "apply this to every situation", that's absolutism, and it's not at all how this works. I trust YouTube to keep it's platform free of child pornography, classified government information, personal information of police officers and military officials, etc.....soo.....There's ALREADY censorship. Keeping us safe from harm is the primary reason the state exists, and in rare, fringe cases, that safety comes at the cost of someone's personal liberty to go against that measure. With the volume of corpses we have, those fringe cases are less important. I am fully supportive of someone not being allowed to work in a hospital without a vaccine, or getting arrested for refusing to wear a mask. My right to not die from being around you trumps your right to not cover your fucking mouth or get a shot or both. We're going to have 1 million dead from this virus in 2 years. The vast majority of deaths in the last 6 months were preventable. At what point does the state admit a failure in letting people die because they believed lies that could have been addressed? It's one thing if 11 people die from over-dosing on a supplement Joe Rogan spouts that has crushed glass in it. It's another if a half million people are dead from a virus that someone else exposed them to as they went through life. This "my freedom" shit is taken to a level that is anti-social: these are small things we have to do to keep society functioning with this virus present, and they are not new. If you can't play nice with others and not be a vector for this virus, you will suffer consequences. At this point it's obstinance, fed by lies, and I'm sick of that being consequence-free. I also ask: who benefits from this anti-vax nonsense? Who is demanding the right to continue to spread lies, misinformation and bullshit, and why? YouTube never had any promise of free or fair access. They can demonetize at will. My .02 is that they will start swinging that hammer more and more, as they lose ad revenue and customers (not to mention viewers) because of this shit. I can certainly envision YT being well within their rights to look at some shit being spouted by people like Alex Jones or whoever, and saying "this either runs with a "this is satire" banner the entire time, or we're deplatforming you." They could do the same thing to Taylor Swift and Barack Obama if they wanted to, it's just one of these groups seems to be spouting hateful, antisocial and detrimental nonsense. I'll go one further: if you're actually harmed by a vaccine, that's not public information. The public has no right to know about YOUR personal side effects, because it's creating a false narrative of equity. Your experience with the vaccine and its effects has no control variable, no independent review....your side effects might have resulted from licking public toilet seats and sipping PineSol all weekend. It's why the public health organizations have very strict parameters on population studies and the kind of information they can release. YouTube doesn't have those restrictions by law (yet) and it would hamper their business if they did. YT saying "Nicki Minaj' can't talk about her cousin's STD as a side effect of the vaccine on our platform" isn't some wild infringment of liberty and free speech, it's the bare fucking minimum they can do for public decency and to signal they won't host the lies that are literally causing thousands of people very day to die an awful, miserable, and 100% preventable death. There are consequences for lying in print, lying under oath, and lying on a resume. There are no consequences for lying on the internet, and when trillion-dollar companies are involved, maybe there should be, at least to the liars who seem to be doing the most damage. It's not "free" or "fair", it's the price of living in a society.