Youtube's content moderation team also has a terrible track record.

One of my favorite science channels, Cody's Lab, gets banned all the time because he has educational videos on making explosives. The guy is so family friendly he doesn't even swear in his videos.

He got raided / investigated by a government body as well at some point (it's in one of his videos) where they went looking for nuclear materials. He had some, but it was traces and stored securely (he made his own lead/concrete container).

Anyway, Youtube - and by extension, the US government - are a bit cagey about instructions on how to make explosives (and thermite). If amateurs try to emulate it, they can injure themselves badly. I mean you only have to look at some of the "fail" compilations on youtube to see how stupid some people are.

Showing people how to make explosives at home is the opposite of family friendly. Mixing this stiff is dangerous, for those mixing and for those near by. Neither is it educational. Nor true science. Imagine he would make the same videos about drugs instead of explosives, would it still be family friendly? Both things are basic chemistry after all.

> authoritative bodies can be wrong / misled as well, and shouldn't be the only arbiters of truth

I agree, but with a very large caveat - the human brain is not good at probabilities, it basically only recognises “outcome A is guaranteed” and “outcomes A and B are equally likely”. So how much credit should we give to an authority who is correct 90% of the time?

90% isn’t great when it comes to life-or-death matters, so it’s dangerous to recommend “always trust them”. But recommending “don’t always trust them” results in people thinking that the authorites and the crackpots are 50/50 correct, which results in even more people dying :(

Yes but this has been politicised so heavily even the truth is normally garnished with a partizan message. It's hard to believe YouTube will be even remotely competent when it comes to filtering fact from fiction in this case.

There's a difference between being wrong about "put a band aid on a cut" and "aids is transmitted by having sex with Puerto Ricans". Health authorities are good at the first, and very bad at the second.

I think there is merit to the argument that if you cannot guarantee 100% correctness, that you cannot strip people of their ability to form their opinion themselves. And that requires access to different perspectives.

My latest find on this topic: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/world/europe/ski-party-pa...

Not recommending travel/border restrictions was a cached thought from a 1990s plague outbreak in India.

You assume that the WHO and others have to be right all the time everytime. And that they changed their minds regarding COVID-19 because of "public" pressure and not because of new insights. Both assumptions are not correct IMHO.

The CDC did bow to political authority on COVID-19 measures so. Contrary to science.

> You assume that the WHO and others have to be right all the time everytime.

If information is going to be censored based on what they say, they do have to be right all the time. And the point is, they aren't right all the time.

I have a hard time believing they would recommend removing content they aren't sure about.

By the way, Youtube has been banning pornography basically since day one. No outcry about that. Counterpoint, would you accept removing content about abortion and gay marriage rights? If the answer is yes, it indicates that it is not free speech you are worried about.

The ban on pornography isn't specific though. A comparable move would be to ban all videos covering medical information - strange but not "we're deciding what the truth is".

I never said I was worried about free speech.