Not defending him, nor do I believe him, but I watched a brief portion of the London Real livestream interview last night and he said that 5G provokes symptoms similar to that of COVID-19, not that 5G spreads Coronavirus.

He's said a lot of bullshit in a lot of different venues. I did a quick search and found a long, rambling article [1] on his website about how coronavirus and 5G are linked. He sums his position up at the end with

> The evidence that COVID-19 is a bioweapon is overwhelming – and so is the evidence that 5G is involved to either cause the flu-like symptoms/pneumonia people have been experiencing, and/or to exacerbate the virulity of the virus by weakening people’s immune systems and subjecting them to pulsed waves of EMF to open up their skin to foreign DNA fragments (including viruses).

So he's been saying both that 5G causes an illness that is mistaken for COVID-19 and that 5G spreads coronavirus.

[1] https://www.davidicke.com/article/564306/coronavirus-5g-conn...

This is also incorrect.

Also he believes that British Royal Family are shape shifting reptiles; he might not have the best judgement on what is backed by evidence.

"Deplatforming" is some pretty great doublespeak for "censoring".

We already have a solution to idiots vandalizing 5G towers: arrest them.

This board regularly ‘censors’ people who break the rules. It’s the price of having a reasonably nice board to post on. There’s a difference between censorship and punishing bad behavior.

See this comment which makes this point already, and the subthread discussing the differences between YouTube and Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23064505

If I'm interested in content not on HN, I'll find it elsewhere. Why is it any different for YouTube? Now, if you'd said to me that Google doesn't prioritize other content, I'd argue that those wanting to talk about other content always have smaller forums to do it in, they just might be more local or viral in other ways. To me it's the difference between national broadcast TV "I'll know it's wrong when I see it," and the ability to post flyers or posters in a community. One is local and the other is wide-reaching.

There is, I suppose, another alternative. If we want to promote fringe ideas, we should make it easier to organize and elect local candidates, abolish "first-past-the-post" voting systems that encourage a two-party system, and so on.

But currently scientific reasoning is an accepted system of analysis for evidence-based decisions, and most politicians rely on it in addition to emotional intelligence to alter and guide their behaviour and decisions, even as they generally do whatever the person with the deepest pockets says to do, whether because that person sponsors scientific research or conducts surveys and campaigns to sway public opinion.

The issue I have is that fringe opinion, like this, would reject cause-and-effect reasoning and evidence to rely almost entirely on emotions instead. And because it's controversial, people click on it and watch it and wonder about it. When there's no actual evidence to it.

We used to and probably still do, have courses in grade/high school on media literacy, or not believing everything you see on TV. We routinely, as an HN community, encourage reading source materials and deciding for ourselves. But we're a small community, and for YouTube, it's easier to say "it's not our problem any longer" than it is to try and provide counterpoints to the material.

There's a serious risk to YouTube to not pull this down, because of how the feedback loop of their algorithms will encourage folks who like this to watch other fringe videos, until eventually they think all of YouTube, or the world, thinks the same way as these commentators. It's easier in the short term to pull down the content than to change how the algorithms work to make them somehow less relevant. And back to my original point, folks who want this content, they will find it, regardless of what platform it's on.

Have you found any new blogs or websites you visit on a frequent basis in the last 3 months? You can’t discover the voice of the little guy, there’s too much noise.

I’m probably not the best target audience as yes, I have. I use an RSS reader and manually curate a list of blogs to follow and podcasts to listen to, in addition to, yes, YouTube playlists I subscribe to as well. I even support content authors directly on Patreon. But not all good content is on YouTube — I’ve actually purchased content on Vimeo, for example, and have bookmarked a number of non-YouTube content sources, some of which are aggregators but some of which aren’t. How do you find it? Same way you always did... by following links, subscribing to email lists, searching Google with plus signs, err double quotes, and so on. Don’t get me wrong, YouTube is “easy” but sometimes it’s impossible to find that video you were watching the other day (if you have history disabled). As I said before, though, the problem is some folks want a worldwide platform to broadcast their ideas, no audience or community necessary. I think it’s just fine for such an audience to have content moderation strings attached. Nothing’s free, not even the soap box. If you really want an audience, work for it, and if you just want clicks in exchange for ad dollars, it shouldn’t be at the detriment of what’s considered acceptable by society. And yes, that might, indeed, mean censorship, but as pointed out, that’s the compromise we made for broadcast radio, TV and to some degree, newspapers. Any platform with enough viewers seems to inevitably become a cesspool without community reinforcement and guidelines. Not to say there shouldn’t be choices of platform, I don’t think ISPs or AWS should be banning individuals from the Internet, that’s something local police and judicial systems can determine. But if anything I’d say the opposite, the more unknown something is, the less culturally censored it should be, the more famous, the more cautious we should be, as a society... I don’t want to support regimes but I do support political systems and political discourse in general, and I think societal norms eventually change as needed, they have in the past without such widespread individual broadcasting platforms...

> I support free speech in principle, but internet platforms are such a powerful megaphone for spreading misinformation, the likes of which history has never seen

This analogy is misleading, because it does not make it clear that in this situation, everyone has a megaphone.

The solution isn’t deplatforming, it is arresting these people if they light stuff on fire as that’s the crime. Let them believe what they want.