Can we at least get youtube to put up a banner saying "no it's impossible to defy the laws of physics and build a unlimited energy machine with a few magnets a microwave and a multimeter?"
If you seriously believe that the Earth is flat or that lizard people control the world, then frankly a Youtube disclaimer won't really change anything.
But take this random video I found earlier on PeerTube: https://peer.tube/videos/watch/7b5faff9-1752-4eba-be37-beeb0...
It's in French but basically it's one of these videos against the banking system that simplify and caricature the situation to the point of meaninglessness. Coming up with a proper fact-check for something like that would be incredibly difficult, and I'm sure extremely controversial.
It would also take a lot of time and money to get economists and physicists to weigh in on these videos. That's how these conspiracy theories manage to remain relevant in the first place: overwhelm the opposition with thousands upon thousands of hours of content, and claim that they take things out of context or that they don't get it if they don't bother to sink months of their lives watching all that garbage.
Edit: And I've noticed the downvotes, yet what I have said is still accurate. It is true that Gab moved to mastodon, for example, and there is evidence of their mindset spreading to other properties in the Fediverse.
Some of the early adopters are definitely unsavory, yet that content is what new users are going to see. Peertube/etc are still too small to protect against it, I fear.
Early online worlds were (often, not always), academics and techies. Even that was often hard going to generate larger appeal. Facebook was Literally Harvard.
Random malcontents have an even higher social hill to climb.
An elite founding cohort tends to regress to the mean. An unsavory cohort ... tends to further radicalise or collapse entirely.
Fandom/hobby groups are more sustainable and often avoid pathological evolution, but rarely seem to develop mass appeal.
And all this before adding financial or business pressures.
I'm very cynical about any attempts to curb this. I suspect these services will go for stuff that they know, through A/B testing and whatnot, won't affect their bottom line.
Let's say they show particularly harmful and scientifically 'banana-shit' videos, but with a disclaimer in a sidebar that the content in question is 'disputed'.
I imagine viewers are much more drawn to the content and will filter out the sidebar because 1) they don't notice, 2) they don't care because it's just a sidebar, or at worst 3) the libs are trying to make us be okay with homos/feminist/etc.
A provider of said content could defend their 'wokeness', a consumer could just ignore the sidebar or use it to point out how 'the libs' control things.
Meanwhile the rest of us, if we get past the partisanship, are left wondering how such few actors got to decide on so many societally-relevant topics. Surely we've progressed beyond having to deal with feudal lords?
I always though these were prank/scam videos?
LOL, as a boat owner that hasn't been out on my boat in quite a few hears, I wholeheartedly agree. On a side note, the payment's due again...
All you need is some vague sense that all the "experts" are either dumber than you, or part of some big conspiracy.
Then because of that you don't even try to understand the work of those that came before you and hey presto! You're on your way to slowly rediscovering the laws of thermodynamics on your own - and until you do (if you ever do) you'll believe all sorts of wacky shit might be possible.
I'm sure it's just my bias, but I can't think of any right now.
Not everything is politically motivated. Some people are just ignorant or crazy.
That at least I think it a little explainable. I'm often checking different news sources about a story from Google news, and if the comment section at the bottom of foxnews.com is anything to go by, it's extremely hard to tell what see from what you would expect a Russion bot to do to stir discontent apart from trolling and/or blind ignorance of what the article was about.
In some ways believing in bots is a bit of an uplifting story. That's a person that doesn't believe their fellow citizens could actually be as disdainful and hurtful to each other as appears readily apparent. It's real tempting to buy into that sometimes.
hmmm I feel the same way I happen upon an opinion piece from the NYTimes, or a clip from MSDNC, or any of the other "the sky is falling and the fascists are at the door to destroy democracy" stories running in any mainstream news of today...
The more you believe the other side is comprised of evil racist fascists, or evil pedophile fascists, the harder it is to give any of they opinions due consideration. It's probably not random that fascist shows up as an accusation by both sides.
The only thing that I think has worked to give me a somewhat fair accounting of an event over the last 6-12 months is to use Google news, and specifically seek out how both sides of the spectrum represent an event (that means seeking out the foxnews.com article most the time, but sometimes foxnews is the main one and I seek out how it's represented elsewhere). Often it's like reading high-school essays about that are about the same book but focused on entirely different themes of the plot. I generally have to synthesize my own accounting from them while weighting accordingly based on the news and the source.
- "There's no scientific basis for race"
These positions are so entrenched that disagreeing with them publicly is to risk your career. But they're also the product of ignorance. In the world of biology, the opposite positions of these are fairly uncontroversial views. (see [1] for an example of the first)
Using a throw-away account for obvious reasons.
[1] https://quillette.com/2019/05/03/selective-blank-slatism-and...
>>AntiVax - Flat Earth
To Attribute them only to far right tells me you do not really understand these groups. They are not left or right politically, especially anti-vax for which many have far-left economic and social positions
There is a movie on netflix about Epstein the island.
This is a news story about a series of events. It is not the same as a political ideology.
The US standards for defamation are explained very well here https://law.stackexchange.com/a/132/11158
Someone thinking girls were locked in the basement and deciding to storm the place is a sign of a mental health issue. But his actions doesn't make the known facts false.
I agree with all of your other points.
Folks with this "naive" political ideology are shooting at people and kicking peoples head on the streets. Many innocent have died in the riots, much more have lost their business to looting.
I don't see conservatives having a hard time condemning the pizza place shooter or any other similar act, but I see a lot of leftists rationalism and even denying altogether the bad actions of their bad people. They even cheer their bad actors on.
At this point I can only assume ill intent, since we are bombarded daily with rhetoric likening any action by the POTUS and his admin to something nazist.
If I were to go into work saying I supported Trump, I risk getting fired, because of rhetoric like this.
I don't know if they do this for ideological reasons, or if the outrage machine makes them a lot of money. My guess would be the latter.
But some random guy saying something silly and offensive in one (live?) interview is still not the same as a set of very specific completely baseless allegations in the right-wing conspiracies theories.
From a very quick search it seems that the police didn't take several cases serious, and were at the very least rather lax in their attitude. In other words, there's at least an actual crime and at least some smoke. It's not something invented from nothing.
And this is the real danger of this sort of politicized conspiracy bullshit: now this is automatically seen as "politically motivated" instead of actually looking at the matter at hand. People who spread pizzagate-esque conspiracy theories or enable them are very much harming the anti-paedophilia efforts.
> equality of outcome not equality of opportunity
Equality of opportunity is no greater thing to cherish. Opportunity comes from circumstance, and therefore this equates to wishing for equality in circumstances. Boiling this down to its fundamentals, this would mean important life decisions like whether to have children (and how many), what kind of hobbies and preferences people have, etc., would be left to the whims of balancing acts by the state.
He's either a troll, an idiot, or a saboteur. This isn't debatable in the slightest. Which of these explanations do you prefer?
I'm not sure why it has to be one of those. I mean maybe slightly an idiot because what he is saying is likely not good for him politically, but not entirely wrong. You make it sound like the USPS doesn't have any issues.
To the extent the USPS "has issues," as you put it, it is because Congress has consistently set them up to fail. Congress is free to shut down the USPS or kneecap it if they want, but the executive is not. Certainly not to serve their own corrupt purposes.
Just something else to add to the list of things Republicans would scream bloody murder about if a Democratic president were doing it.
You won't see them recommended on Youtube. I think there are a few "tankies" out there though who also annoy the mainstream left. Named after people who supported the Soviet tanks suppressing revolt in Hungary.
Israel/Palestine politics has a big risk of going from getting outraged about things that actually happened to things that didn't, plus conflating the faults of the government and military of Israel with blame on all Jewish people (which is antisemitic).
https://twitter.com/CaseyExplosion/status/129388933700478566...
> "Gender critical" is just Qanon for British women
For some examples: https://medium.com/@KatyMontgomerie/jameela-jamil-josie-long...
In the UK there's a lot of people who are far left who are pushing anti-vaccination, anti 5G, anti-mask "plandemic" KBF garbage.
The violent groups do tend be be far right though.
Edit: I’ll also add that the original commenter was deliberately vague (didn’t mention “Trump” or specific political groups, for example) to avoid controversy and you come in attempting to bulldoze that by mentioning BLM.
I've seen that go by on Twitter and am not impressed .. should I call for it to be cancelled?
(Mind you, a stock feminist answer might be that the Netflix series is just a representation of a whole rotten child beauty pageant culture which in turn derives from the sexist adult beauty pageant culture, and that nobody should be sexualised without their consent - which cannot appropriately be given by people who are underage.)
Except that we expect parents to be stewards for our children and give consent on their behalf, except in cases where we've decided that parents cannot be trusted to do so and we outlaw that activity for children (sex, alcohol, etc), or that consent does not fully convey the situation (a parent forcing an unwilling child to get a haircut is not viewed the same as a child forcing an unwilling child to play a full contact sport which is also not viewed the same as a parent forcing a child to get into a fistfight on the street).
Where do parents sexualizing their children for television fall into this? I dunno. If they were doing it for an individual that came over and paid in person, we'd have some real probing questions, but it's okay when it's on TV for a national audience?
But in an attempt to bring things vaguely back on topic: I'm actually curious to know if left-wing movements have been aided by YouTube and to what extent. Its effect on the right is very well documented but on the left I've tended to see the outrage on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook more.
You do see a small effect through raw footage videos. Shaming people videos.
The left owns the mass media (fox not withstanding) so the right needs a video outlet. Radio takes care of audio.
Not to get too far down a rabbit hole here but the OP was referring to the "far left", which certainly doesn't own the mass media. If anything, centrists own the mass media.
Arguably, entire political movements; the far right and conspiracy vlogosphere relies on constantly being advertised for free to new suckers through youtube recommendations.