It's extremely upsetting to see decisions like the parent's.

What's more concerning is the tone is absolute - the intention is "I know exactly what is right and the world shall follow my lead".

That guy Gandhi causing all kinds of trouble! Ban his content!

That guy MLK causing all kinds of trouble! Ban his content!

That guy Edward Jenner with his braindead idea of vaccination proposing we infect ourseves to get better! Ban! Ban! Ban!

History has many examples what that thinking leads to.

Whether that voice has value is an individual decision you and I get to make, on our own.

What data do you have, that proves diferuloylmethane is ineffective in treating COVID-19?

Are you 100% sure that diferuloylmethane cannot be an ingredient in a battery of medicine to help recover from COVID-19?

This is what I know - SARS-COV2 is novel and not even highly trained, world renowned infectious diseases experts know how it behaves and how to treat it.

Not a central authority that removes that choice from both of us leaving us with no choice.

They're scammers. They're perpetrating a scam. "Giving them a voice" means allowing them to scam others out of money. Why should YouTube be complicit in running a scam?

Perhaps you left out the videos that warn others of said scam.

Don't treat adults like chlidren or, pretty soon, you will have a world full of only children with no adult supervision!

Yes, being an adult means having the freedom to drink alcohol and drive a car instead of waiting for a bus or a parent to come pick me up.

It also means having the responsibilities of making my own decisions instead of waiting for someone else to do it for me.

What's the expectation - that if the decision making authority makes a wrong decision that kills me, I can then blame them and collect damages?

That's crazy talk - for one, I will be dead already!

'a new clinical trial to investigate vitamin C infusion for the treatment of severe 2019-nCoV infected pneumonia has begun in Wuhan, China'

I think it's wrong to be okay with YouTube suppressing information and misinforming people about global pandemics just because they own the corporation and infrastructure YouTube is built on. YouTube is abusing their monopoly to hurt people.

People don't like government censorship and misinformation not because it's inherently wrong for government to do these things, but because censorship and misinformation create harm. When you consider YouTube's scale and lack of real competitor - it's obvious that their censorship and misinformation is also harmful and therefore problematic. Even if it's legal, it's certainly not moral.

Remember a few years ago ISPs wanting to remove net neutrality and wanting to potentially charge for access to websites on "their platform"? Suddenly they're big enough to be a "public utility" and "invasion of free speech".

You can't have it both ways.

Anyone can start a YouTube clone, and if enough people disagree with YouTube's policies, they'll come use the clone. That's the free market of ideas.

See: Reddit/Voat

Why do they get the power but none of the responsibility? Is it just because they happen to agree with your worldview? And what if they don't -- what if they start banning videos that suggest Taiwan is a country? Would your opinion change?

IANAL but unless someone is knowingly spreading false information as true (i.e. fraud), the answer is no. They probably don't even carry the burden of having to reasonably vet information first.

> Why do they get the power but none of the responsibility?

Because it is your privilege to use YouTube, not your right.

> once you were as big as YouTube you'd deal with the same dilemmas

Yeah I'm not saying only YouTube should be regulated, I'm saying sites like YouTube and Facebook should be properly classified as publishers and held to standards as such.

> They don't control the flow of information.

This is a false statement. The vast majority of Americans get their news from Facebook, and yes, YouTube. They do control the flow of information. If it's not on Facebook or YouTube, it might as well not exist for over 50% of Americans. That's huge power that these corps wield with no oversight, dontcha think?

> get off your high horse

Uh there's no horse anywhere around here sir.

Yes, WHO decides.

Nuance in these discussions basically flies out the window entirely, and frankly, its stupid.

Learning when to step away from such fruitless pseudo-debates before wasting hours on the online equivalent of beating one's head against a brick wall is a valuable survival skill here. Sometimes it's best to simply state your opinion and move on.

I take you up on that offer.

Let us, for a moment, discuss this.

To disconnect us both from the exact matter at hand, because we are likely at this point pretty attached strongly to our biases to it, let us step aside, choose a completely different topic and hypothesize that our debate is on "should the government be allowed to track crimminals moving about in society".

I propose, that yes, murderers should be tracked at all times, as they move about in society, with tracking devices embedded onto their ankles.

You propose, no, no one, including murderers should be tracked at any time.

I then propose that murderers should be given a choice between been tracked, or have their pictures and descriptions published on a public website where anyone interested in staying away from murderers can check in.

What's your next move?

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."

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.

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.

When did YouTube become a government? The context is different. No matter what YouTube does, I can still host my own video.

Youtube has become so large precisely because this is a very difficult problem to solve.

Putting up content on a webserver is not a Youtube competitor.

Is anyone preventing me, by force or law, from hosting video on my own website? If not, you cannot compare government mandated anything with market forces. All you're saying here is that youtube is a really good product. That doesn't make obvious competitors "not count".

This is what I know - SARS-COV2 is novel and not even highly trained, world renowned infectious diseases experts know how it behaves and how to treat it.

I don't, for a second, believe Youtube has figured that one out.

Now whether you have decided to reject all competing hypothesis to something you have already decided to be the truth so you can move on with your life and be productive in areas you find valuable - that's your call but if I see you foisting your opinions on what kind of content I get to see, that's you infringing on my freedom and we have a problem.