At the time, YouTube said: “Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy.” [1] which, in my opinion, is a pretty extreme stance to take, especially considering that the WHO contradicted itself many times during the pandemic.
> the WHO contradicted itself many times during the pandemic
Did they? I remember them revising their guidance, which seems like something one would expect during an emerging crisis, but I don't remember them directly contradicting themselves.
Of course, if we just take the most recent thing they said as "revised guidance", I guess it's impossible for them to contradict themselves. Just rapidly re-re-re-revised guidance.
The difference between a contradiction and a revision is the difference between parallel and serial.
I'm not aware that the WHO ever claimed simultaneously contradictory things.
Obviously, rapid revisions during a period of emerging data makes YouTube's policy hard to enforce fairly. Do you remove things that were in line with the WHO when they were published? When they were made? Etc
A censorship policy that changes daily is a shitty policy. If people on June 8th criticized that official position before they reversed the next day, do you think it was right or a good idea for them to be censored?
That's a nice hypothetical. Do you have any examples of people getting censored for WHO changing their stance?
Like, we're getting pretty nuanced here pretty fast, it would be nice to discuss this against an actual example of how this was enforced rather than being upset about a hypothetical situation where we have no idea how it was enforced.
> A censorship policy that changes daily is a shitty policy.
Yes.
> If people on June 8th criticized that official position before they reversed the next day, do you think it was right or a good idea for them to be censored?
Obviously not. Like I pointed out to the other commenter, if you were to read the comment of mine you replied to, I have a whole paragraph discussing that. Not sure why you're asking again.
The person I replied to edited their comment after I replied making it look like I was saying the opposite of what I was. Is that what you were referring to?
There's only two ways one could have been contradicting information from the WHO which was later revised prior to them revising it. Either:
1. They really did have some insight or insider knowledge which the WHO missed and they spoke out in contradiction of officialdom in a nuanced and coherent way that we can all judge for ourselves.
2. They in fact had no idea what they were talking about at the time, still don't, and lucked into some of it being correct later on.
I refer to Harry Frankfurt's famous essay "On Bullshit". His thesis is that bullshit is neither a lie nor the truth but something different. Its an indifference to the factuality of ones statements altogether. A bullshit statement is one that is designed to "sound right" for the context it is used, but is actually just "the right thing to say" to convince people and/or win something irrespective of if it is true or false.
A bullshit statement is more dangerous than a lie, because the truth coming to light doesn't always expose a bullshitter the way it always exposes a lie. A lie is always false in some way, but bullshit is uncorrelated with truth and can often turn out right. Indeed a bullshitter can get a lucky streak and persist a very long time before anyone notices they are just acting confident about things they don't actually know.
So in response.
It is still a good idea to censor the people in category two. Even if the hypothetical person in your example turned out to get something right that the WHO initially got wrong, they were still spreading false information in the sense that they didn't actually know the WHO was wrong at the time when they said it. They were bullshitting. Having a bunch of people spreading a message of "the opposite of what public health officials tell you" is still dangerous and bad, even if sometimes in retrospect that advice turns out good.
People in category one were few and far between and rarely if ever censored.
> It is still a good idea to censor the people in category two.
I disagree on numerous levels with this position, not just on ethical grounds, but also on empirical grounds. People are simply not as gullible as you think they are, but I don't have time to delve into this, so I'll just leave it at that.
> People in category one were few and far between and rarely if ever censored.
According to whom? The stated policy makes no such distinction, it says anyone who contradicts WHO positions ought to be censored. There is no nuance, and how exactly is YouTube going to judge who belongs in each category? If they could reliably judge who was bullshitting, they wouldn't need the WHO policy to begin with. The policy is a "cover my ass" blanket so they don't have to deal with the nuance.
"People are simply not as gullible as you think they are, but I don't have time to delve into this, so I'll just leave it at that." well i for one don't believe you :).
They were producing contradictory messages about mere masks: man-made objects we've had in their present form for decades and in some form for centuries, if not millennia.
It's 2020 and suddenly we need research about how well masks work, if at all and what is their exact benefit.
> The difference between a contradiction and a revision is the difference between parallel and serial.
Eh, ya kind of, but it seems more like the distinction between parallel and concurrent in this case. She doesn't appear to be wrong in that instance while at the same time the models might have indicated otherwise, being an apparent contradiction and apparently both true within the real scope of what could be said about it at that time.
Did you reply to the wrong comment? We're discussing whether the WHO put out simultaneously contradictory information. Whether the WHO's politics matches your preferred politics for southeast Asia doesn't seem topical?
It goes to the issue of whether they are a reliable source of information or not. To spell it out, if WHO is captured by countries (China in this case) that stand to gain or lose if the information goes one way or the other, then we need look no farther to know that their information is not reliable.
FYI Taiwan is East Asia, not Southeast Asia. Perhaps you were thinking of Thailand.
> I'm not aware that the WHO ever claimed simultaneously contradictory things.
Whether they did or not is almost irrelevant: information doesn't reach humans instantaneously, it takes time to propagate through channels with varying latency, it gets amplified/muted depending on media bias, people generally have things going on in life other than staying glued to new sources, etc.
If you take a cross sample you're guaranteed to observe contradictory "parallel" information even if the source is serially consistent.
OK and if you said something that you later realised to be wrong, would you be contradicting yourself by correcting it? What should they have done in this situation? People do make mistakes, speak out of turn, say the wrong thing sometimes; I don't think we should criticise someone in that position who subsequently fixes their error. And within a couple of days in this case! That's a good thing. They screwed up and then fixed it. What am I missing here?
When you're a global organization who is pushing for the censorship of any dissent or questioning of your proclamations, it's really on you not to say one thing one day then the opposite the next day, isn't it? They could have taken some care to make sure their data and analysis was sound before making these kinds of statements.
If you posted to YouTube that it is very rare for asymptomatics to spread the disease, would you be banned? What if you posted it on the 9th in the hours between checking their latest guidance and their guidance changing? What if you posted it on the 8th but failed to remove it by the 10th?
What if you disagreed with their guidance they gave on the 8th and posted something explaining your stance? Would you still get banned if your heresy went unnoticed by YouTube's censors until the 10th at which time it now aligns with WHO's new position? Banned not for spreading misinformation, but for daring to question the secular high priests?
Good lord, refer to my original comment. The person I was replying to claimed the WHO contradicted themselves, I asserted that they did not. All the rest of this is your own addition.
Did the WHO push for censorship or was it YouTube/Google/others?
It was a novel time and things were changing daily. Care needs to be taken yes, but it’s also weighed against clear and open communication. People were very scared. Thinking they would die. I don’t mind having up-to-date information even if it were changing daily.
If corporations start adopting policies that censor anything contradicting WHO, there would be a larger onus on a claim that they were not involved in that censorship action, in my opinion.
If it wasn't them and it was all Google's idea to censor this without any influence from governments or these organizations, which is quite laughable to think but let's entertain the idea -- the WHO still should not have responded as it did with these knee jerk reactions, and also it should have been up to Google to ensure the did not use as their "source of truth" an organization that behaved in that way.
> It was a novel time
It wasn't really that novel since there have been centuries to study pandemics and transmissible diseases of all kinds, and there have even been many others of slightly less scale happen.
> and things were changing daily.
Things always change daily. Covid was not particularly "fast moving" at the time. It's not like new data was coming in that suddenly changed things day to day. It just progressed over the course of months and years. It appeared to be wild and fast moving and ever changing mainly because of the headless-chicken response from organizations like this.
> Care needs to be taken yes, but it’s also weighed against clear and open communication. People were very scared. Thinking they would die.
People were very scared because of the fear campaign, and the imbecilic and contradictory responses from these organizations.
Not that it was nothing to be afraid of, but people should have calmly been given data and advice and that's it. Automobiles, heart attacks, and cancer kill lots of people too, and should be taken very seriously and measures taken to reduce risk but even so it would be stupid to start screaming about them and cause panic.
> I don’t mind having up-to-date information even if it were changing daily.
It's not having data that is the problem, it is jumping the gun with analysis and findings and recommendations based on that data, then having to retract it immediately and say the opposite.
> If it wasn't them and it was all Google's idea to censor this without any influence from governments or these organizations
We actually has the emails the Biden administration sent to Youtube, here is a quote they sent:
"we want to be sure that you have a handle on vaccine hesitancy generally and are working toward making the problem better. This is a concern that is shared at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the White House"
That is a very clear threat. "We want to make sure you ...", and then saying this threat is done with the highest authority of the USA, so better get working on what we want.
There are hundreds of such emails detailed in this report if you want to read what they sent to the different tech companies to make them so scared that they banned anything related to Covid: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/weaponizati...
Them correcting themselves isn't a bad thing. The point is that it would be absolutely retarded to require that people never disagree with the WHO. Please try and follow the thread of the conversation and not take it down these pointless tangents.
No, the point (and my original reply) is that correcting themselves is not the same as contradicting themselves. I didn't say anything about never disagreeing with them, and it's not a tangent, I'm replying to replies to my original comment.
Put your money where your mouth is. How much do you want to bet I can find 20 videos today talking about the lab theory released in 2020 and 2021? I will bet you literally any amount of money. People like you are so insufferable. You know what you are saying is factually wrong.
Don't forget that they ban-hammered anyone who advanced the lab leak theory because a global entity was pulling the strings at the WHO. I first heard about Wuhan in January of 2020 from multiple Chinese nationals who were talking about the leak story they were seeing in uncensored Chinese media and adamant that the state media story was BS. As soon as it blew up by March, Western media was manipulated into playing the bigotry angle to suppress any discussion of what may have happened.
I believe having Trump as president exacerbated many, many things during that time, and this is one example. He was quick to start blaming the "Chinese", he tried to turn it into a reason to dislike China and Chinese people, because he doesn't like China, and he's always thinking in terms of who he likes and dislikes. This made it hard to talk about the lab leak hypothesis without sounding like you were following Trump in that. If we had had a more normal president, I don't think this and other issues would have been as polarized, and taking nuanced stances would have been more affordable.
I’m undecided on the issue, but… if I were trying to cover up an accidental lab leak I’d spread a story that it was a giant conspiracy to create a bio weapon. For extra eye rolls I’d throw in some classic foil hat tropes like the New World Order or the International Bankers.
If it was a lab leak, by far the most likely explanation is that someone pricked themselves or caught a whiff of something.
A friend of mine who lived in China for a while and is familiar with the hustle culture there had his own hypothesis. Some low level techs who were being given these bats and other lab animals to euthanize and incinerate were like “wait… we could get some money for these over at the wet market!”
> My memory is that the "lab leak" stuff I saw back then was all conspiracy theories about how it was a Chinese bioweapon.
No, that was just the straw man circulated in your echo chamber to dismiss discussion. To be clear, there were absolutely people who believed that, but the decision to elevate the nonsense over the serious discussion is how partisan echo chambers work.
That was one of the main arguments by some of my coworkers and friends when COVID came up socially. I specifically remember a coworker at a FAANG saying something along the lines of "It's a bioweapon, so it's basically an act of war".
Because that is a bold claim to make. There is no proof of a lab leak and evidence leads to the wet market as the source. There is a debate out there for 100k to prove this. Check it out.
> Because that is a bold claim to make. There is no proof of a lab leak and evidence leads to the wet market as the source.
A novel coronavirus outbreak happens at the exact location as a lab performing gain of function research on coronaviruses... but yeah, suggesting a lab leak is outlandish, offensive even, and you should be censored for even mentioning that as a possibility. Got it.
This line of thinking didn't make sense then and still doesn't make sense now.
But the first cases were all linked to a wet market far enough from the lab that it would be highly improbable for the cases to come from the lab itself.
Their containment protocols are known to be lax. A staffer could have been a vector for the initial transmission. Remember they tried to pin it on US military personnel early on. The CCP wants the market to be the focus of attention and we'll never get believable evidence that suggests otherwise.
You're talking about a country where freedom of speech is openly not existing. Imagine your chances of finding out that they accidentally spread a virus they were researching about.
The same country with 1 billion people and 6-8 covid cases per day. Sure.
To be honest I don't even understand why this is a topic anymore. Conspiracy or not, it's plausible that they screwed up. Why are people nitpicking, I don't get it.
> There is no proof of a lab leak and evidence leads to the wet market as the source
Because WHO worked with CPC to bury evidence and give clean chit to wuhan lab. There was some pressure building up then for international teams to visit wuhan lab and examine data transparently. But, with thorough ban of lab leak theory, WHO visited china and gave clean chit without even visiting wuhan lab or having access to lab records. The only place that could prove this definitively buried all records.
The topic at hand is not whether it's a bold claim to make. The question is: should organizations that control a large portion of the world's communication channels have the ability to unilaterally define the tone and timber of a dialog surrounding current events?
To the people zealously downvoting all of these replies: defend yourselves. What about this is not worthy of conversation?
I'm not saying that I support lab leak. The observation is that anyone that discussed the lab leak hypothesis on social media had content removed and potentially were banned. I am fundamentally against that.
If the observation more generally is that sentiments should be censored that can risk peoples lives by influencing the decisions they make, then let me ask you this:
Should Charlie Kirk have been censored? If he were, he wouldn't have been assassinated.
> "Should Charlie Kirk have been censored? If he were, he wouldn't have been assassinated."
On the other hand, if he were, then whoever censored him might have just as easily become the target of some other crazy, because that appears to be the world we live in now. Something's gotta change. This whole "us vs them" situation is just agitating the most extreme folks right over the edge of sanity into "Crazy Town". Wish we could get back to bein' that whole "One Nation Under God" "Great Melting Pot" "United States" they used to blather on about in grade-school back in the day, but that ship appears to have done sailed and then promptly sunk to the bottom... :(
> Because that is a bold claim to make. There is no proof of a lab leak and evidence leads to the wet market as the source.
It was not a bold claim at the time. Not only was there no evidence that it was the wet market at the time, the joint probability of a bat coronavirus outbreak where there were few bat caves but where they were doing research on bat coronaviruses is pretty damning. Suppressing discussion of this very reasonable observation was beyond dumb.
It is not as cut and dry as you think. Also it is rather hard to get any evidence when you aren't allow to visit the "scene of the crime" so to speak and all data is being withheld.
Even Dr Fauci said in 2021 he was "not convinced" the virus originated naturally. That was a shift from a year earlier, when he thought it most likely Covid had spread from animals to humans.
(..February 2023..) The Department of Energy, which oversees a network of 17 U.S. laboratories, concluded with “low confidence” that SARS-CoV-2 most likely arose from a laboratory incident. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it favored the laboratory theory with “moderate” confidence. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from natural zoonotic spillover, while two remain undecided.
WHO says that "While most available and accessible published scientific evidence supports hypothesis #1, zoonotic transmission from animals, possibly from bats or an intermediate host to humans, SAGO is not currently able to conclude exactly when, where and how SARS-CoV-2 first entered the human population."
However "Without information to fully assess the nature of the work on coronaviruses in Wuhan laboratories, nor information about the conditions under which this work was done, it is not possible for SAGO to assess whether the first human infection(s) may have resulted due to a research related event or breach in laboratory biosafety."
WHO paraphrased: We have no data at all about the Wuhan Laboratory so we can not make a conclusion on that hypothesis. Since we have data relating to natural transmission from animals we can say that situation was possible.
Fauci was trying to prevent a run on masks, which he believed were needed by the health care workers. So he probably justified his lie to the US to himself because it was for the "greater good" (The ends justify the means is not my view BTW).
It turns out that masks ARE largely ineffective at preventing CoViD infection. It's amazing how many studies have come up with vastly different results.
Actual (N95/FFP2/FFP3) masks DO work, your comment is misleading. The study you've linked says:
> Colored masks of various construction were handed out free of charge, accompanied by a range of mask-wearing promotional activities inspired by marketing research
"of various construction" is... not very specific.
If you just try to cover your face with a piece of cloth it won't work well. But if you'll use a good mask (N95/FFP2/FFP3), with proper fit [0] then you can decrease the chance of being infected (see e.g. [1])
They claim a 5% reduction in spread with cloth masks and a 12% reduction with surgical masks. I think 1 less case out of every 10 or 20 is pretty acceptable?
Especially at the time when many countries were having their healthcare systems overloaded by cases.
I didn't want to be the one to have to say it, but neither masks nor social distancing had any scientific backing at all. It was all made up, completely made up. The saddest thing I see all the time is the poor souls STILL wearing masks in 2025 for no reason. I don't care how immunocompromised they are, the mask isn't doing anything to prevent viral infection at all. They might help against pollen. I also can't believe how many doctors and nurses at my wife's cancer clinic wear masks all the damn time even though they are not in a surgical enviornment. It's all been foisted upon them by the management of those clinics and the management is completely insane and nobody speaks up about it because it's their job if they do, so the isanity just keeps rolling on and on and it is utterly dehumanizing and demoralizing. If a cancer patient wants to wear a mask because it affords them some tiny comfort, then fine, but that is purely psychological. I've seen it over and over and over because I've been at numerous hospitals this past year trying to help my wife survive a cancer that I think Pfizer may be to blame for.
There was scientific basis for N95 masks and similar masks. If you are talking about cloth and paper masks, I mostly agree. Even then there were tests done with using even those surgical masks with 3d printed frames. I remember this as one example of people following this line of thinking.
As for dehumanization, I used to live in Tokyo and spending years riding the train. I think blaming masks for dehumanization when we have entire systems ragebaiting us on a daily basis is like blaming the LED light for your electric bill.
Social Distancing having "no scientific backing" is very difficult to respond to. Do you mean in terms of long term reduction of spread, or as a temporary measure to prevent overwhelming the hospitals (which is what the concern was at the time)?
I do agree that it was fundamentally dishonest to block people from going to church and then telling other people it was OK to protest (because somehow these protests were "socially distanced" and outdoors). They could have applied the same logic to Church groups and helped them find places to congregate, but it was clearly a case of having sympathy for the in-group vs the out-group.
Basically, yes. However, if we make a distinction between respirators (e.g. N95 mask) and masks (including "surgical" masks, which don't really have a meaningfully better FFE than cloth masks), then at least respirators offer some protection to the wearer, provided they also still minimize contact. But, in keeping with this distinction, yes, masks were never seriously scientifically supported. It is incredibly disheartening to see mask mandates still in cancer wards, despite these being mandates for (objectively useless) cloth/surgical masks.
> I didn't want to be the one to have to say it, but neither masks nor social distancing had any scientific backing at all.
This is false. Even quick search shows multiple papers from pre-covid times that show masks being effective [0][1]. There are many more studies post-covid that show that N95/FFP2/FFP3 masks actually work if you wear them correctly (most people don't know how to do this). Educate yourself before sharing lies.
They burned it beyond down to the ground and below. And many of you on here willfully continue to trust them and argue vehemently against people who try to tell you the actual truth of the matter. RFK Jr. is a flawed human being, but he's doing some good work in unwinding some of the web of lies we live under right now.
It's good RFK is more willing to question things but he seems just as guilty when it comes to spinning webs of lies.
If we think tylenol might cause autism why doesn't he run/fund a nice clean and large randomized controlled trial? Instead he spreads conjecture based on papers with extremely weak evidence.
I think the problem is that apparently some people discovered there is a profitable business model in spreading misinformation, so a trustful (even if not always right), non malicious, reference of information might be needed.
it was an extreme time, but yes, probably the most authoritarian action I've seen social media take.
misinformation is a real and worsening problem, but censorship makes conspiracies flourish, and establishes platforms as arbiters of truth. that "truth" will shift with the political tides.
IMO we need to teach kids how to identify misinformation in school. maybe by creating fake articles, mixing them with real articles and having students track down sources and identify flaws. critical thinking lessons.
This just seems incredibly difficult. Even between people who are highly intelligent, educated, and consider themselves to be critical thinkers there can be a huge divergence of what "truth" is on many topics. Most people have no tools to evaluate various claims and it's not something you can just "teach kids". Not saying education can't move the needle but the forces we're fighting need a lot more than that.
I think some accountability for platforms is an important part of this. Platforms right now have the wrong incentives, we need to fix this. It's not just about "truth" but it's also about stealing our attention and time. It's a drug and we should regulate it like the drug it is.
As I recall from my school days, in Social Studies class there were a set of "Critical Thinking" questions at the end of every chapter in the textbook. Never once were we assigned any of those questions.
You do realize Arabs also massacred a lot of Jews at the same time? Both sides were absolutely abhorrent at the time, it was war between quickly assembled militias and civilians fighting for survival, that is never going to end well.
Example of Arabs lynching Jews, they started killing each other before the partition happened, so everyone knew it would be all out war after the British left:
> Arab workers stormed the refinery armed with tools and metal rods, beating 39[d] Jewish workers to death and wounding 49.
If you're going to take any conflict in the Middle East up to and including present day, and go back and forth in time to see which group "started it", you'll run out of written record first. There's always an earlier counterexample atrocity that the other side did.
Did they really bring up how the Arab massacred the Israelis during the partitioning when they talked about the 6 day war? If that was what you meant you should have said that, but you didn't so I don't believe it, to me it looks like you just wanted them to talk about Israeli atrocities there and not what the Arabs did to them before.
If you meant they should have brought up the preceding conflict when talking about the 6 day war you wouldn't just have mentioned what Israel did there.
So the only way I can read your post is that you wanted the coverage to be one sided. But maybe you were just unclear and you meant "I wanted to hear about how the conflicts escalated and arabs massacred jews which lead to jews massacring arabs and then repeat in an ever increasing spiral of violence", if so can you please clarify that is what you meant here and say you should have been clearer in your original comment?
My point is that the coverage I received in highschool civics WAS one sided in which jews were shown as heroes fighting to create a country against all odds and all the countries around it wanted to destroy them because they were jews.
The very institutions that we created to educate them against propaganda have themselves been used to instill propaganda. In this case, the very real islamaphobia and dehumanization of arabs that runs at the core of american culture.
Ok, you could have made that more clear, I didn't even consider the possibility that you didn't know the Jews did bad things when you heard that, so it sounded to me like you just wanted them to say bad things about Jews in this lecture rather than you feeling deceived.
I grew up in Sweden in the 90s and the debate was raging already then here due to significant Muslim immigration, so there was always people who brought up all these bad things the Jews did there, so I couldn't imagine an adult who cared about the topic not knowing.
>I didn't even consider the possibility that you didn't know the Jews did bad things when you heard that
so to give you context, (and I went to a good school)
In my American education, we spent 2 years covering in great detail teh horrors of the holocaust along with meeting survivors.
We spent exactly 0 days studying or learning about the kumir rouge, the vietnam war, the korean war, the congolese genocide, the Rwandan genocide or the armenian genocide.
I literally didn't learn about any of these till I went to university and was told about this stuff by peers who were more educated on these things. these topics were just not taught. An the idea that jews might the aggressors and not innocent victims? I'm pretty sure you would have gotten politically targeted for simply suggesting the idea.
so to drive the point home, most americans really have no idea.
Some of the worst examples of viral misinformation I've encountered were image posts on social media. They'll often include a graph, a bit of text and links to dense articles from medical journals. Most people will give up at that point and assume that it's legit because the citations point to BMJ et el. You actually need to type those URLs into a browser by hand, and assuming they go anywhere leverage knowledge taught while studying university level stats.
I spent several hours on one of these only to discover the author of the post had found a subtle way to misrepresent the findings and had done things to the graph to skew it further. You cannot expect a kid (let alone most adults) to come to the same conclusion through lessons on critical thinking.
> "IMO we need to teach kids how to identify misinformation in school. maybe by creating fake articles, mixing them with real articles and having students track down sources and identify flaws. critical thinking lessons."
You just described a perfectly normal "Civics & Current Events" class in early grade-school back when / where I grew up. We were also taught how to "follow the facts back to the actual sources" and other such proper research skills. This was way back when you had to go to an actual library and look up archived newspapers on microfiche, and encyclopedias were large collections of paper books. Y'know... When dinosaurs still roamed the streets... ;)
> IMO we need to teach kids how to identify misinformation in school.
This is extremely difficult. Many of the people who thrive on disinformation are drawn to it because they are contrarian. They distrust anything from the establishment and automatically trust anything that appears anti-establishment. If you tell them not to trust certain sources that’s actually a cue to them to explore those sources more and assume they’re holding some valuable information that “they” don’t want you to know.
The dynamics of this are very strange. A cluster of younger guys I know can list a dozen different times medical guidance was wrong in history from memory (Thalidomide, etc), but when you fact check Joe Rogan they laugh at you because he’s a comedian so you can’t expect him to be right about everything. “Do your own research” is the key phrase, which is a dog whistle to mean find some info to discount the professionals but then take sources like Joe Rogan and his guests at face value because they’re not the establishment.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52388586