I agree that's how these things start. Now doctors in the field and epidemiologists are being censored on YouTube for having unorthodox views on COVID-19.
To the OP: you can rest assured that I watch most episodes with actual scientists and scholars, even the controversial scholars that sometimes spew nonsense. At no point did anyone deny that COVID was real, or deny that it was a serious problem.
At best, you can say they disagreed with the mainstream on how exactly severe it would be, who was most at risk from this danger, and how exactly to handle those risks. You know, entirely reasonable conversations that literally everyone around the country was having at the time, and probably still are having around the dining table.
YouTube's definition of COVID-19 misinformation: "Medical misinformation that contradicts local health authorities’ or the World Health Organization’s (WHO)" [1]
January 2020: WHO claims that there's "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" for SARS-CoV-2 [2]. Should YT have removed all videos discussing an alternative hypothesis?
June 2020: WHO claims asymptomatic spread is "very rare"[3]. Should YT have deleted all videos claiming that asymptomatic spread causes the majority of infections?
October 2020: WHO does "not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus"[4]. Should YT have banned all lockdown advocates?
> COVID-19 has added the additional element of this new concept of "disinformation". The argument is seductively simple: "being exposed to this information could lead you to engage in patterns of behavior that harm society. Therefore we can conceptualize this speech as being an indirect form of violence/negligence and therefore we have a moral obligation to remove such content".
Which is actually extremely funny, since Youtube directly links to all WHO content as it were the Word of God, and WHO just a month and a half ago was crying on all rooftops that masks were useless and should not be used before completely reversing their stance. So by their own standards WHO is propagating disinformation/negligence and harming society as well.
Well they were also censoring videos speculating about the lab leak theory. So they were definitely treating any discussion about covid that diverged from what who/cdc were saying as misinformation.
What are you talking about?! Don’t blame social media, the biggest and loudest source of COVID-related misinformation have been institutions like the WHO.
There is very little science (we don’t yet have enough data, and not enough time has passed), so all we have to go on is “broscience” (smartly connecting anecdotal facts and whatever little data we have, and drawing sensible conclusions). By designating one opinion as “officially correct science”, YouTube is seriously damaging humanity.
Videos like this not only spread false info, they do something more pernicious by distorting or distracting an already partially-numerate public from understanding growth rates and scale. Eg, the important thing about an outbreak is its second and third derivatives, rate of growth and rate of rate of growth.
Here they claim SARS-NCOV-2 is "similar in prevalance and death rate" to flu, somehow missing the fact that the former reached that point in one month and keeps going unless extensive social distancing, lockdowns and mask wearing is put in place.
I hate censorship, but I support censoring information sourced from the idiocracy (or malevolent foreign power as the case may be).
Perhaps instead of censoring the song, YouTube could require that the uploader include at the end of it an explanation of what it means for a pandemic to not be "real". Does it mean that COVID doesn't exist, and people are just pretending to have symptoms? Is that what "they" planned?
By actually getting people to talk through their beliefs, and state them clearly, society might be able to consider all opinions and have a conversation, rather than accepting the idea that our technological gatekeepers can be trusted to evaluate them correctly on our behalf.
Do you believe censorship is wrong all cases? What about a biologist providing instructions on how to add lethal mutations to viruses? Or a physicist giving detailed instructions about how to construct dirty nuclear bombs? There is certain knowledge that is unsafe to be widely disseminated, would you be against the censorship of said content?
I mention this because arguably, allowing covid to proliferate means thousands of deaths, long COVID syndrome, and potential for new mutations to arise. These misinformed hucksters are largely out to make their own names and make money, not to educate or because their carefully chosen speech is their "right". Should we allow any financially motivated snake oil salesmen to spew whatever trash he likes into our society, even if it kills one thousand people indirectly?
Some people would like freedom to discuss the coronavirus without being oppressed. They can't on YouTube if this policy takes hold.
The sort of people who contradict the WHO happened to be right on this one; they predicted a problem early and tended to pre-empt the WHO on upcoming problems. This was also expected, because the WHO only advises stuff that is already obvious to everyone. Interested parties can offer better advice than the WHO because they can move with news while the WHO has to wait.
Case in point, Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity runs a prepper/doomsday style channel. He is also a very smart bloke with an honest-to-goodness PhD in a virus-related field. Who are YouTube to say his opinions are less valid than an organisation that can't say "Taiwan" in a sentence and can only say things that are politically palatable to China and the US?
Chris' advice on the coronavirus has been consistently high quality, accurate, sourced and early compared to the WHO. His only fault is his standards for safety are a lot higher than are reasonable. This policy will be aimed at exactly people like him. He has been contradicting the authorities all the way.
This is the exact type of escalation that is not helpful. This caricatures the argument that institutions are not perfect. In the beginning, the WHO said the virus could not be spread between people. And YouTube & friends are actively censoring to imperfect sources (since all sources are ultimately imperfect).
The mere suggestion that covid came out of a lab was banned by youtube, and downvoted by Reddit and HN heavily at the time. You were considered a crazy person. Now its the leading theory. It shows how fast people listen to authoritarians in desperate times despite common sense lingering in the background. That phenomenon has led to terrible events in the past and carries forward today. If someone says you cant discuss/debate something be suspicious.
It's a problem in the English-speaking world too. IIRC the reason why YouTubers always say 'the pandemic' instead of 'COVID-19' or 'the coronavirus' is because of the risk of demonetization.
Some channels (e.g. RealLifeLore) even gate their videos on more controversial topics (e.g. war) behind a Nebula or Patreon subscription, with the rationale that they would get demonetized on YouTube.
COVID proved that even in the West people weren't able at least in specific circumstances to criticise the bad science being promulgated by public health authorities. While the layman could say what he liked, actual health professionals risked their licences and were stigmatised for speaking their mind.
I can bring other examples but i don't want to risk a flamewar.
I've been following MEDCram¹ on YouTube recently. It's a medical channel for students by doctors I believe, but currently it's all about COVID-19 obviously². It often speaks to other medical practitionners.
The quality of information on such a channel (prob. not the only one, just my own serendipity) is outstanding compared to any 'mainstream' media out there — with good reason, it's not sexy to downplay mass hysteria or talk about actual RNA mechanisms with schematics.
Here's my point, using an image: when the boat is leaking, I stick with the guy who built the boat (and help him if that's the right thing to do); while the poets and dramaturges aboard make noise for the sheep, eventually the fish if we only listened to them.
Reality ? fiction.
Global information ? mainstream news (sad but true, whether medical or financial or else).
indeed, like when the experts were all telling us that we shouldnt use masks, as they dont work, and then they swapped and told us to wear them, only to be filmed not doing it themselves.
Or when the mainstream media couldnt emphasize enough how covid was only of a concern to countries without any healthcare, to then flipflop entirely.
Cant we just make them all unable to reach an audience?
To highlight how easily this clumsy, "fact checker" based censorship regime can be manipulated, look at this article, which essentially lays out how the initial "debunking" was spearheaded by scientists with direct conflicts of interest:
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