Those 3 are not even comparable to each other...

Oh you don't think a plague that killed over 7 million people rates w/ animal cruelty?

You sound like the people who argue for disallowing any communist speech or ideology from being discussed because "communism killed 100 million people" or something.

Like yes covid killed millions. What's your point exactly? Do you have any proof that YouTube taking down videos that didn't agree with how the situation was handled actually saved lives? Or is your argument just that if anyone disagreed (even for stupid reasons) publicly with covid policies, they are somehow causing people to die? Again, do you have any actual proof?

I'm gonna skip way to the end of this:

* masking saved lives

* vaccines saved lives

* kids could spread COVID-19

* even young, otherwise totally healthy people died from COVID-19

We knew all these things basically immediately, but because of intense brainrot tons of misinformation spread on the internet. YouTube pulling down videos about COVID-19 misinformation saved lives. The end.

So, no actual proof? And actually no, at least where I live, for the first two weeks masks were strongly discouraged and were said to be useless by our local government (Quebec). That was for the first 2 weeks of the pandemic, which were the most important in terms of spread. Even hospital staff were told to not wear them. I'm glad YouTube didn't ban anyone who didn't agree with our local government's opinion on masks then.

Also, that's funny since again, here in Quebec and in most of the world kids were back to school by autumn 2020. Yet it took more than a year after that for children in the US to go back to school. I guess American experts just knew more than everyone else. It's as if things aren't as cut and dry as you make them out to be.

It's truly bewildering how people on HN can have powerfully strong beliefs that are dispelled by the simplest of Google searches.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258979182...

https://www.afro.who.int/news/implications-social-media-misi...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10578995/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10122563/

etc etc etc etc