Comments

• By softwaredoug 2025-09-2321:3936 reply

  I'm very pro-vaccines, I don't think the 2020 election was stolen. But I think we have to realize silencing people doesn't work. It just causes the ideas to metastasize. A lot of people will say all kinds of craziness, and you just have to let it ride so most of us can roll our eyes at it.

  By andy99 2025-09-2321:4910 reply

  The more important point (and this is really like a high school civics debate) is that the government and/or a big tech company shouldn't decide what people are "allowed" to say. There's tons of dumb stuff online, the only thing dumber is the state dictating how I'm supposed to think. People seem to forget that sometimes someone they don't agree with is in power. What if they started banning tylenol-autism sceptical accounts?

  By mapontosevenths 2025-09-2321:566 reply

  > the government and/or a big tech company shouldn't decide what people are "allowed" to say.

  That "and/or" is doing a lot of work here. There's a huge difference between government censorship and forcing private companies to host content they don't want to host on servers they own.

  Then again, Alphabet is now claiming they did want to host it and mean old Biden pressured them into pulling it so if we buy that, maybe it doesn't matter.

  > What if they started banning tylenol-autism sceptical accounts?

  What if it's pro-cannibalism or pedophilia content? Everyone has a line, we're all just arguing about where exactly we think that line should be.

  By int_19h 2025-09-240:081 reply

  > There's a huge difference between government censorship and forcing private companies to host content they don't want to host on servers they own.

  It really depends. I remember after the Christchurch mosque shootings, there was a scramble to block the distribution of the shooter's manifesto. In some countries, the government could declare the content illegal directly, but in others, such as Australia, they didn't have pre-existing laws sufficiently wide to cover that, and so what happened in practice is that ISPs "proactively" formed a voluntary censorship cartel, acting in lockstep to block access to all copies of the manifesto, while the government was working on the new laws. If the practical end result is the same - a complete country block on some content - does it really matter whether it's dressed up as public or private censorship?

  And with large tech companies like Alphabet and Meta, it is a particularly pointed question given how much the market is monopolized.

  By onecommentman 2025-09-243:381 reply

  I wonder, in the case of mass violence events that were used as advertisement for the (assumed) murderer’s POV, whether there should be an equivalent of a House of Lords for the exceptional situation of censoring what in any other context would be breaking news. You don’t want or need (or be able) to censor a manifesto for all time, but you would want to prevent the (assumed) murderers from gaining any momentum from their heinous acts. So a ninety day (but only 90 day) embargo on public speech from bad actors, with the teeth of governmental enforcement, sounds pretty reasonable to me. Even cleverer to salt the ether with “leaks” that would actively suppress any political momentum for the (presumed) murderers during the embargo period, but with the true light of day shining after three months.

  By int_19h 2025-09-245:22

  It doesn't sound reasonable to me tbh. If anything, reading those manifestos is a good way to learn just how nutty those people are in the first place. At the same time, having it accessible prevents speculation about motives, which can lead to false justification for politically oppressive measures.

  OTOH if the goal is to prevent copycats then I don't see the point of a 90-day embargo. People who are likely to take that kind of content seriously enough to emulate are still going to do so. Tarrant, for example, specifically referenced Anders Breivik.

  By MostlyStable 2025-09-2322:335 reply

  It can simultaneously be legal/allowable for them to ban speech, and yet also the case that we should criticize them for doing so. The first amendment only restricts the government, but a culture of free speech will also criticize private entities for taking censorious actions. And a culture of free speech is necessary to make sure that the first amendment is not eventually eroded away to nothing.

  By plantwallshoe 2025-09-2323:152 reply

  Isn’t promoting/removing opinions you care about a form of speech?

  If I choose to put a Kamala sign in my yard and not a Trump sign, that’s an expression of free speech.

  If the marketing company I own decides to not work for causes I don’t personally support, that’s free speech.

  If the video hosting platform I’m CEO of doesn’t host unfounded anti-vax content because I think it’s a bad business move, is that not also free speech?

  By AfterHIA 2025-09-240:481 reply

  The crux of this is a shift in context (φρόνησις) where-in entities like marketing companies or video hosting platforms are treated like moral agents which act in the same manner as individuals. We can overcome this dilemma by clarifying that generally, "individuals with the power to direct or control the speech of others run the risk of gross oppression by being more liberal with a right to control or stifle rather than erring on the side of propagating a culture of free expression whether this power is derived from legitimate political ascension or the concentration of capital."

  In short-- no. Your right is to positively assert, "Trump sign" not, "excludes all other signs as a comparative right" even though this is a practical consequence of supporting one candidate and not others. "Owning a marketing company" means that you most hold to industrial and businesss ethics in order to do business in a common economic space. Being the CEO of any company that serves the democratic public means that one's ethical obligations must reflect the democratic sentiment of the public. It used to be that, "capitalism" or, "economic liberalism" meant that the dollars and eyeballs would go elsewhere as a basic bottom line for the realization of the ethical sentiment of the nation-state. This becomes less likely under conditions of monopoly and autocracy. The truth is that Section 230 created a nightmare. If internet platforms are now ubiquitous and well-developed aren't the protections realized under S230 now obsolete?

  It would be neat if somebody did, "you can put any sign in my yard to promote any political cause unless it is specifically X/Trump/whatever." That would constitute a unique form of exclusionary free speech.

  By plantwallshoe 2025-09-242:421 reply

  > Being the CEO of any company that serves the democratic public means that one's ethical obligations must reflect the democratic sentiment of the public.

  How does one determine the democratic sentiment of the public, especially a public that is pretty evenly ideologically split? Seems fraught with personal interpretation (which is arguably another form of free speech.)

  By AfterHIA 2025-09-243:25

  Let's think pragmatically and think of, "democracy" as a way of living which seeks to maximize human felicity and minimize human cruelty. In a fair society there would be/is a consensus that at a basic level our social contract is legitimized by these commitments to that. The issue stems from splitting hairs about what human felicity constitutes. This can be resolved as recognizing that some dignified splitting of these hairs is a necessary component of that felicity. This presents in our society as the public discourse and the contingent but distinct values of communities in their efforts to realize themselves.

  I'm reminded of that old line by Tolstoy-- something like, "happy families are all happy for precisely the same reasons; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The point from an Adam Smith perspective is that healthy societies might all end up tending toward the same end by widely different means: Chinese communists might achieve superior cooperation and the realization of their values as, "the good life" by means dissimilar to the Quaker or the African tribesperson. The trick is seeing that the plurality of living forms and their competing values is not a hinderance to cooperation and mutual well-being but an opportunity for extended and renewed discourses about, "what we would like to be as creatures."

  Worth mentioning:

  https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Courses/Antirepresentationa...

  By lmz 2025-09-2323:223 reply

  Agreed. If I have a TV network and think these anti-government hosts on my network are bad for business, that is also freedom of speech.

  By rubyfan 2025-09-2323:341 reply

  Maybe. If it is independent of government coercion.

  By Jensson 2025-09-2323:412 reply

  But Youtube did this after government coercion, so what is the difference?

  By rubyfan 2025-09-2411:10

  Maybe it’s ok if it was an independent business decision but I’m not saying Youtube’s was or wasn’t.

  It’s a problem especially if there is a direct or implied threat to use the powers of the government to impact a business if the government is acting counter to the first amendment. This is essentially the government causing the outcome, not a business using its free speech after an independent business decision.

  One could argue a business might come to a decision to pull content the government doesn’t like independently without coercion if they had an antitrust case pending with the DOJ. There’s probably a line here where the government needs to act in a specific way to threaten to make it coercion. Maybe the line was crossed in YT’s case?

  On all of these cases I come to the conclusion there needs to be separation of powers on some of these executive branch actions. I’m not sure how to do it something is needed to protect individual rights from executive overreach (regardless of which party is in power).

  By alphabettsy 2025-09-244:051 reply

  I think you should look up the definition of coercion.

  By Jensson 2025-09-247:012 reply

  Have you seen the emails the Biden Administration sent to Youtube? Here is a quote verbatim that they sent to Youtube:

  > 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

  Saying you want to make sure they will censor these videos is a threat, and then they said that Biden was behind this to add legitimacy to the threat.

  If it was just a friendly greeting why would they threaten youtube with Bidens name? If youtube did this willingly there would be no need to write such a threatening message saying they want to make sure Youtube censors these.

  You can read the whole report here if you wanna see more: https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j...

  And if you don't see that as a threat, imagine someone in the trump administration sent that, do you still think its not a threat? Of course its a threat, it makes no sense to write that way otherwise, you would just say you wanted to hear how it goes not say you wanna make sure they do this specific thing and threaten them with the presidents powers.

  By mapontosevenths 2025-09-2412:251 reply

  >And if you don't see that as a threat, imagine someone in the trump administration sent that, do you still think its not a threat?

  We don't need to imagine anything. The chair of the FCC publicly threatened ABC over Kimmel. This morning Trump posted a direct threat of government reprisals if they didn't fire a comedian over a joke he doesnt like.

  Nothing vague or implied about it. Just the government of the United States directly threatening free speech

  I wont link to truth social. You can Google it.

  By computerthings 2025-09-2412:46

  [dead]

  By alphabettsy 2025-09-2413:321 reply

  Thank you for providing this report that had a conclusion before the investigation even started.

  Fortunately, the Trump administration has given us an example of what a threat and coercion actually looks like. They declared exactly the action they would take if they did not get their preferred outcome and it’s clearly politically motivated.

  That’s quite a bit different than we’re concerned about this misinformation and would like you to do something about it.

  I think a reasonable and nuanced debate can be had on whether or not that was appropriate, but there is a difference.

  By mapontosevenths 2025-09-2416:21

  > I think a reasonable and nuanced debate can be had on whether or not that was appropriate, but there is a difference.

  I very much agree. It's reasonable to ask if the Biden admin overstepped their boundaries by politely asking if Youtube would help them stop people from murdering each other with disinformation and trying to overthrow the government.

  I think the current situation is much less debatable. The government is now issuing ultimatums and very publicly threatening corporations to stifle free speech.

  By crtasm 2025-09-2323:42

  I hope to see the anti-government hosts before they're let go. The channels I've tried so far only seem to have boring old anti-corruption, anti-abuse of power and anti-treating groups of people as less than human hosts.

  By AfterHIA 2025-09-240:541 reply

  You use terms (other as well) like, "own, is the CEO of, and the owner of" and this speaks to the ironically illiberal shift we've seen in contemporary politics. Historically one needed to justify, "why" some person is put into a position of authority or power-- now as a result of the Randroid Neoliberal Assault™ it's taken for granted that if, "John Galt assumed a position of power that he has a right to exercise his personal will even at the behest of who he serves or at the behest of ethics" as an extension of, "the rights of the individual."

  I want to recapitulate this sentiment as often and as widely as possible-- Rand and her cronies know as much about virtue, freedom, and Aristotle as they do about fornicating; not much.

  By mapontosevenths 2025-09-2416:242 reply

  > Rand and her cronies know as much about virtue, freedom, and Aristotle as they do about fornicating; not much.

  Even if I disagreed with you I would upvote for this gem. I'll be chuckling at this one randomly for weeks.

  By HankStallone 2025-09-2416:351 reply

  It'd be a good zinger, except isn't it commonly known that Rand had an affair with her lead follower, and basically announced to her husband and her lover's wife that they were in open marriages from then on? It seems like fornicating was one thing she did know about.

  By mapontosevenths 2025-09-2419:16

  I have no idea why, but that somehow makes it even funnier. :)

  By AfterHIA 2025-09-253:56

  I appreciate your appreciation here. I live in place where they recently named a local private school, "Anthem School for Excellence" and usually when I'm talking Rand it's out of sheer terror. Thanks for lightening the mood!

  By AfterHIA 2025-09-240:34

  Bingo. This is Adam Smith's whole point in the second half of, "Wealth Of Nations" that nobody bothers to read in lieu of the sentiments of the Cato Institute and the various Adam Smith societies. Nations produce, "kinds of people" that based on their experience of a common liberty and prosperity will err against tyranny. Economics and autocracy in our country is destroying our culture of, "talk and liberality." Discourse has become, "let's take turns attacking each other and each other's positions."

  The American civilization has deep flaws but has historically worked toward, "doing what was right."

  https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/book-v-of-the-reven...

  By lkey 2025-09-2323:121 reply

  Or it might be the case that that 'culture' is eroding the thing it claims to be protecting. https://www.popehat.com/p/how-free-speech-culture-is-killing...

  By AfterHIA 2025-09-241:02

  This. Even if we have concrete protections in our society it takes a society of people committed to a common democratic cause and common functional prosperity that prevents there from being abuses of the right to speak and so on (..) This isn't complicated and this wasn't always controversial.

  I've already described above that even in this thread there's a sentiment which is that, "as long as somebody has gained coercive power legitimately then it is within their right to coerce." I see terms thrown around like, "if somebody owns" or, "if somebody is the CEO of..." which speaks to the growing air of illiberality an liberal autocranarianism which is a direct result of the neoliberal assault founding and funding thousands of Cato Institutes, Adam Smith Societies, and Heritage Foundations since the neoliberal turn in the late 1960's. We've legitimized domination ethics as an extension of the hungry rights of pseudotyrants and the expense of people in general.

  I wonder what people in general might one day do about this? I wonder if there's a historical precedent for what happens when people face oppression and the degradation of common cultural projects?

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution#October_Rev...

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror

  By SantalBlush 2025-09-2323:351 reply

  Are you in favor of HN allowing advertisements, shilling, or spam in these threads? Because those things are free speech. Would you like to allow comments about generic ED pills?

  I simply don't believe people who say they want to support a culture of free speech on a media or social media site. They haven't really thought about what that means.

  By AfterHIA 2025-09-241:15

  Without being crude I think they stopped, "thinking about that means" in any positive sense a long time ago. Cultures of discourse and criticism are never good for the powerful. The goal is to create a culture when anyone can say anything but with no meaningful social consequences negative or positive. I can call Trump a pedophile all day on my computer interface and maybe somebody else will see it but the Google and Meta machine just treat it as another engagement dollar. These dollars are now literally flowing to the White House in the form of investment commitments by acting Tech Czar Zuckerberg.

  While I'm with my dudes in computer space-- it all starts with the passing of the Mansfield Amendment. You want to know why tech sucks and we haven't made any foundational breakthroughs for decades? The privatization of technology innovation.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_Silicon_Valley

  https://www.nsf.gov/about/history/narrative#chapter-iv-tumul...

  By asadotzler 2025-09-2323:262 reply

  Will you criticize my book publishing company for not publishing and distributing your smut short story?

  By AfterHIA 2025-09-241:28

  Perhaps and if you have some kind of monopoly than definitely. Things beings, "yours" isn't some fundamental part of the human condition. CEOs serve their employees and shareholders and the ethics of the business space they operate in. Owners are ethically obligated to engage in fair business practices. I'm sick up to my neck of this sentiment that if John Galt is holding a gun he necessarily has the right to shoot it at somebody.

  Modern democracies aren't founded on realist ethics or absolute commitments to economic liberalism as totalizing-- they're founded on a ethical balance between the real needs of people, the real potential for capital expansion, and superior sentiments about the possibilities of the human condition. As a kid that supported Ron Paul's bid for the Republican nomination as a 16-year-old I can't help but feel that libertarian politics has ruined generations of people by getting them to accept autocracy as, "one ethical outcome to a free society." It isn't.

  The irony in me posting this will be lost on most: https://www.uschamber.com/

  By user34283 2025-09-2323:35

  No, but I will criticize Apple and Google for banning smut apps.

  If those two private companies would host all legal content, this could be a thriving market.

  Somehow big tech and payment processors get to censor most software.

  By briHass 2025-09-2323:101 reply

  The line should be what is illegal, which, at least in the US, is fairly permissive.

  The legal process already did all the hard work of reaching consensus/compromise on where that line is, so just use that. At least with the legal system, there's some degree of visibility and influence possible by everyone. It's not some ethics department silently banning users they don't agree with.

  By mitthrowaway2 2025-09-240:52

  The middle ground is when a company becomes a utility. The power company can't simply disconnect your electricity because they don't feel like offering it to you, even though they own the power lines. The phone company can't disconnect your call because they disagree with what you're saying, even though they own the transmission equipment.

  By mc32 2025-09-2323:071 reply

  The thing is that people will tell you it wasn’t actually censorship because for them it was only the government being a busy body nosey government telling the tech corps about a select number of people violating their terms (nudge nudge please do something)… so I think the and/or is important.

  By AfterHIA 2025-09-241:361 reply

  Great post mc32 (I hope you're a Wayne Kramer fan!)

  This private-public tyranny that's going on right now. The FCC can't directly tell Kimmel, "you can't say that" they can say, "you may have violated this or this technical rule which..." This is how Project 2025 will play out in terms of people's real experience. You occupy all posts with ideologically sympathetic players and the liberality people are used to becomes ruinous as, "the watchers" are now, "watching for you." The irony is that most conservatives believe this is just, "what the left was doing in the 2010's in reverse" and I don't have a counterargument for this other than, "it doesn't matter; it's always bad and unethical." Real differences between Colbert and Tate taken for granted.

  By mc32 2025-09-2412:391 reply

  All sides and i mean all sides with one tiny sliver of an exception will be hypocrites about freedom of speech. I’m not an absolutist as I think there are things we know produce harm in people, specially susceptible young populations, but definitely strictly political speech should be protected and allowed. How can we not have debates about efficacy of medical products or about trustworthiness of the data?

  By mapontosevenths 2025-09-2418:50

  > How can we not have debates about efficacy of medical products or about trustworthiness of the data?

  We must be able to have those debates, but we must also guard against grifters selling 5g-proof underwear to the functionally illiterate or serving up vaccine skepticism based more on their desire to score political points than science.

  The devil will always be in the details, and it's a tough balancing act. I personally suspect that the way we do this is by checking credentials.

  Doctors and scientists should be allowed to offer alternative theories. Meth-addicts posting from labs hidden in the Ozarks, software developers, and unqualified politicians, maybe not.

  By AfterHIA 2025-09-240:21

  There's a literal world of literature both contemporary and classical which points to the idea that concentrations of power in politics and concentrations of wealth and power in industry aren't dissimilar. I think there are limits to this as recent commentaries by guys like Zizek seem to suggest that the, "strong Nation-State" is a positive legacy of the European enlightenment. I think this is true, "when it is."

  Power is power. Wealth is power. Political power is power. The powerful should not control the lives or destinies of the less powerful. This is the most basic description of contemporary democracy but becomes controversial when the Randroids and Commies alike start to split hairs about how the Lenins and John Galts of the world have a right to use power to further their respective political objectives.

  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm (Leviathan by Hobbes)

  https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50922 (Perpetual Peace by Kant)

  https://www.heritage-history.com/site/hclass/secret_societie...

  By JumpCrisscross 2025-09-2322:52

  > the government and/or a big tech company shouldn't decide what people are "allowed" to say

  This throws out spam and fraud filters, both of which are content-based moderation.

  Nobody moderates anything isn’t unfortunately a functional option. Particularly if the company has to sell ads.

  By ncallaway 2025-09-240:15

  As with others, I think your "and/or" between government and "big tech" is problematic.

  I think government censorship should be strictly prohibited. I think "company" censorship is just the application of the first amendment.

  Where I think the problem lies with things like YouTube is the fact that we have _monopolies_, so there is no "free market" of platforms.

  I think we should be addressing "big tech" censorship not by requiring tech companies to behave like a government, but rather by preventing any companies from having so much individual power that we _need_ them to behave like a government.

  We should have aggressive anti-trust laws, and interoperability requirements for large platforms, such that it doesn't matter if YouTube decides to be censorious, because there are 15 other platforms that people can viably use instead.

  By AfterHIA 2025-09-240:14

  Another way of articulating this: "concentrations of power and wealth should not determine the speech or political sentiments of the many."

  My fear is that this is incredibly uncontroversial this is until it's not-- when pushes becomes shoves we start having debates about what are, "legitimate" concentrations of power (wealth) and how that legitimacy in itself lets us, "tolerate what we would generally condemn as intolerable." I feel we need to take a queue from the Chomsky's of the world and decree:

  "all unjustified concentrations of power and wealth are necessarily interested in control and as such we should aggressively and purposefully refuse to tolerate them at all as a basic condition of democratic living..."

  This used to be, "social democracy" where these days the Democratic Party in the United States' motto is more, "let us make deals with the devil because reasons and things." People have the power. We are the people. Hare fucking Krsna.

  By heavyset_go 2025-09-2323:16

  This is just a reminder that we're both posting on one the most heavily censored, big tech-sponsored spaces on the internet, and arguably, that's what allows for you to have your civics debate in earnest.

  What you are arguing for is a dissolution of HN and sites like it.

  By asadotzler 2025-09-2323:252 reply

  No one in Big Tech decides what you are allowed to say, they can only withhold their distribution of what you say.

  As a book publisher, should I be required to publish your furry smut short stories? Of course not. Is that infringing on your freedom of speech? Of course not.

  By mitthrowaway2 2025-09-2323:271 reply

  No, they ban your account and exclude you from the market commons if they don't like what you say.

  By mulmen 2025-09-2323:482 reply

  Yes that’s how free markets work. Your idea has to be free to die in obscurity.

  Compelled speech is not free speech. You have no right to an audience. The existence of a wide distribution platform does not grant you a right to it.

  These arguments fall completely flat because it’s always about the right to distribute misinformation. It’s never about posting porn or war crimes or spam. That kind of curation isn’t contentious.

  Google didn’t suddenly see the light and become free speech absolutists. They caved to political pressure and are selectively allowing the preferred misinformation of the current administration.

  By int_19h 2025-09-240:141 reply

  A market that has companies with the size - or rather, the market dominance - of the likes of Google is not meaningfully a free market. The fundamental problem isn't whether Google censors or not, nor what it censors, but the very fact that its decision on this matter is so impactful.

  By mulmen 2025-09-241:562 reply

  If you want to debate anti trust and regulation then let’s do it. Google’s dominance is bad for our society, culture, and our economy but it’s not a reason to erode our fundamental rights. Compelling free speech will do nothing to erode Google’s market share or encourage competition. In fact it will further entrench Google’s dominance.

  By int_19h 2025-09-245:171 reply

  You're right, but freedom of speech is also a valid angle from which to debate antitrust and regulation. Indeed, I don't want Google to be compelled to platform others - I want platforms that large to not exist in the first place. But pointing out that censorship by big tech megacorps has very real and very negative effects that can be comparable to outright government censorship in some cases is a part of that fight.

  By mulmen 2025-09-246:58

  > You're right, but freedom of speech is also a valid angle from which to debate antitrust and regulation.

  The effect of YouTube’s content moderation size on speech is a symptom of weak antitrust policy, not of free expression. So sure, mention the effect on speech if you want but don’t ignore the solution.

  By Dylan16807 2025-09-243:081 reply

  How is compelling google to censor less going to entrench their dominance? If it's purely by making them suck less, I'm okay with that risk.

  And I don't think it erodes any fundamental rights to put restrictions on huge monopolies.

  By mulmen 2025-09-243:451 reply

  > How is compelling google to censor less going to entrench their dominance?

  If you force Google alone to amplify certain speech then what competitive advantage does a less censorious service provide?

  > If it's purely by making them suck less, I'm okay with that risk.

  Define “suck less”. Now ask yourself if you are comfortable with someone you completely disagree with defining what sucks less.

  > And I don't think it erodes any fundamental rights to put restrictions on huge monopolies.

  You’re talking about antitrust, not free expression.

  Compelled speech is an erosion of the first amendment. You may think that erosion is acceptable but you can’t deny it exists.

  By Dylan16807 2025-09-244:522 reply

  > If you force Google alone to amplify certain speech then what competitive advantage does a less censorious service provide?

  If that's the only "advantage" another service has, I don't care if it has no competitive advantage. If it offers anything else then that's the advantage.

  Seriously this idea is super weird to me. There are plenty of reasons to avoid too much regulation. But "don't force company X to make their users happier because happy users won't leave" is a terrible reason.

  >Define “suck less”. Now ask yourself if you are comfortable with someone you completely disagree with defining what sucks less.

  A big part of the "if" is that people are making their own evaluations.

  > You’re talking about antitrust

  I am not talking about antitrust. I'm saying that the bigger and more powerful a corporation gets the further it is from a human and human rights.

  > Compelled speech is an erosion of the first amendment. You may think that erosion is acceptable but you can’t deny it exists.

  In this case, barely at all, and it's the same one we already have for common carriers.

  By mulmen 2025-09-245:371 reply

  > If that's the only "advantage" another service has, I don't care if it has no competitive advantage. If it offers anything else then that's the advantage.

  The value proposition of a less censorious YouTube alternative is exactly that it is less censorious. You’re seemingly arguing against free markets.

  > Seriously this idea is super weird to me. There are plenty of reasons to avoid too much regulation. But "don't force company X to make their users happier because happy users won't leave" is a terrible reason.

  The problem with compelled speech is that the government should not be in the business of deciding what kind of speech makes people happy.

  > A big part of the "if" is that people are making their own evaluations.

  People should have the freedom to choose the media they consume. Compelled speech takes that choice away from them by putting the government in the position of making that decision for the people. This distorts the marketplace of ideas.

  I don’t have time to read every comment or email or watch every video. Private content moderation is a value add and a form of expression. We need competition in that space, not government restriction.

  > I am not talking about antitrust. I'm saying that the bigger and more powerful a corporation gets the further it is from a human and human rights.

  If your problem with Google is how much influence they have then yes, you are talking about antitrust. That’s the regulatory mechanism by which excessive corporate influence can be restricted.

  > In this case, barely at all, and it's the same one we already have for common carriers.

  “A little” is still more than nothing which was your previous assertion. You may be comfortable with the rising temperature of our shared pot of water but I say it is a cause for concern.

  By Dylan16807 2025-09-249:551 reply

  > You’re seemingly arguing against free markets.

  You're only talking about the people that like a feature. Why do you need a free market for that if every company can do it?

  Not everything has to be a free market. There are reasons to use competition but not this reason.

  > the government should not be in the business of deciding what kind of speech makes people happy

  I did not say or intentionally imply they should.

  > People should have the freedom to choose the media they consume. Compelled speech takes that choice away

  Not if the compelling is just that they can't ban content. That only adds choice.

  > If your problem with Google is how much influence they have then yes, you are talking about antitrust. That’s the regulatory mechanism by which excessive corporate influence can be restricted.

  There can be other mechanisms, and more importantly my argument there isn't about mechanisms. They are barely barely humanlike, so human rights are barely barely relevant.

  > “A little” is still more than nothing which was your previous assertion. You may be comfortable with the rising temperature of our shared pot of water but I say it is a cause for concern.

  It's barely any increase because we already have common carrier rules.

  And I stand by the statement that it doesn't erode fundamental rights. The right of giant corporations to have free speech is at the edge, not fundamental. And a rule like that increases the free speech of so many actual humans.

  By mulmen 2025-09-253:551 reply

  > I did not say or intentionally imply they should.

  It is literally the very first thing you said in this comment thread. It either frames your entire argument or you have no idea what you are talking about.

  > How is compelling google to censor less going to entrench their dominance? If it's purely by making them suck less, I'm okay with that risk.

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45355859

  By Dylan16807 2025-09-256:06

  I was trying to figure out how it would entrench dominance. So when I say *if* it's by making them suck less, that's a hypothetical guess, not an endorsement.

  And even if it would objectively make them suck less in some scenario, there's still nothing in that post that says I want the government to force them to do it. That post was only about whether it entrenches their dominance or not.

  Then in my next comment I:

  * put the word 'advantage' in scare quotes

  * clarified that "if they suck less" is supposed to be evaluated by individual people and not me

  * stated that there are reasons to not want regulation, but that I was skeptical of this specific entrenchment reason

  The first two should make it clear that I'm not even saying it's an advantage, and the third should make it clear that I'm focusing on this specific argument and not making an overall case for government intervention. So that's three reasons I'm not saying the government should do it.

  How do I make my non-endorsement clearer?

  Also you were the one calling it a "competitive advantage" and "value proposition". That's not endorsement but it's definitely closer to endorsement than what I was saying.

  Edit: Wait, I made this whole post interpreting the "should" as about government intervention. But I think technically that "should" was actually about the government deciding what makes people happy? If that's what you meant to ask then I have no idea how you got there. The sentences you quoted don't support that interpretation at all. The "suck less -> entrenchment" theory only works if users are actually happy, completely separate from what the government thinks.

  By themaninthedark 2025-09-245:251 reply

  Just to split hairs here, as I do not think that a company should be forced to host content.

  Hosting content is not giving someone an audience.

  If I take my stool into the main square and stand on it, giving a speech about the evils of canned spinach. People pass by but no-one stops and listens(or not for long), I did not have an audience.

  If I record the same thing and put it up on Youtube and the same reaction happens. I only get 5~10 views, Youtube is not giving me an audience. They are hosting the video, just like they do for many other videos that are uploaded everyday.

  If Youtube suddenly starts pushing my video onto everyone's "Home", "Recommended " or whatever; then that would be them giving me an audience.

  If the Big Spinach Canners find my video and ask Youtube to take it down, that is censorship.

  By mulmen 2025-09-246:53

  > Hosting content is not giving someone an audience.

  Yes, it is.

  > If I take my stool into the main square and stand on it, giving a speech about the evils of canned spinach. People pass by but no-one stops and listens(or not for long), I did not have an audience.

  Well, yes, you did. They are free to cheer, boo, or leave. YouTube is more like an open mic night. I reject the idea that it is a public space like a main square.

  > If I record the same thing and put it up on Youtube and the same reaction happens. I only get 5~10 views, Youtube is not giving me an audience. They are hosting the video, just like they do for many other videos that are uploaded everyday.

  I am lucky to have never worked in content moderation but I’m certain YouTube refuses or removes submissions every day. So while your spinach speech may survive there are many other videos that don’t.

  > If Youtube suddenly starts pushing my video onto everyone's "Home", "Recommended " or whatever; then that would be them giving me an audience.

  Being on YouTube at all is YouTube giving you an audience. Their recommendation algorithm is the value proposition of their product to consumers whose attention is the product sold to advertisers.

  > If the Big Spinach Canners find my video and ask Youtube to take it down, that is censorship.

  Perhaps in the strictest dictionary sense it is censorship but it is not censorship in a first amendment sense. This is a private business decision. You’re free to submit your video as an ad and pay Google directly for eyeballs. And they can still say no.

  The only problem here is the size of YouTube relative to competitors. The fix there is antitrust, not erosion of civil liberties.

  Consider the landscape that evolves in a post-YouTube environment with an eroded first amendment and without section 230 protections. Those protections are critical for innovation and free expression.

  By AfterHIA 2025-09-241:39

  If the furry smut people became the dominant force in literature and your company was driven out of business fairly for not producing enough furry smut would that too constitute censorship?

  I want to see how steep this hill you're willing to die on is. What's that old saying-- that thing about the shoe being on the other foot?

  By zetazzed 2025-09-2323:101 reply

  Does Disney have a positive obligation to show animal cruelty snuff films on Disney Plus? Or are they allowed to control what people say on their network? Does Roblox have to allow XXX games showing non-consensual sex acts on their site, or are they allowed to control what people say on their network? Can WebMD decide not to present articles claiming that homeopathy is the ultimate cure-all? Does X have to share a "trending" topic about the refusal to release the Epstein files?

  The reason we ban government censorship is so that a private actor can always create their own conspiracy theory + snuff film site if they want, and other platforms are not obligated to carry content they find objectionable. Get really into Rumble or Truth Social or X if you would like a very different perspective from Youtube's.

  By AfterHIA 2025-09-241:47

  Let's say that in the future that the dominant form of entertainment is X-rated animal snuff films for whatever reason. Would a lack of alternative content constitute an attack on your right to choose freely or speak? Given your ethical framework I'd have to say, "no" but even as your discursive opponent I would have to admit that if you as a person are adverse to, "X-rated furry smut" that I would sympathize with you as the oppressed if it meant your ability to live and communicate has been stifled or called into question. Oppression has many forms and many names. The Johnny Conservatarians want to reserve certain categories of cruelty as, "necessary" or, "permissable" by creating frameworks like, "everything is permitted just as long as some social condition is met..."

  At the crux of things the libertarians and the non-psychos are just having a debate on when it's fair game to be unethical or cruel to others in the name of extending human freedom and human dignity. We've fallen so far from the tree.

  By mulmen 2025-09-2323:333 reply

  I have some ideas I want to post on your personal webpage but you have not given me access. Why are you censoring me?

  By AfterHIA 2025-09-241:511 reply

  I have a consortium of other website owners who refuse to crosslink your materials unless you put our banner on your site. Is this oppression? Oppression goes both ways, has many names, and takes many forms. Its most insidious form being the Oxford Comma.

  By mulmen 2025-09-2520:38

  > Is this oppression?

  Are you the government? If not then it is not oppression. It is free speech. This is the point of my rhetorical device.

  By matthewrobertso 2025-09-251:31

  The government told me to.

  By mitthrowaway2 2025-09-240:532 reply

  Is andy99's personal webpage a de-facto commons where the public congregates to share and exchange ideas?

  By AfterHIA 2025-09-242:00

  I know that your post is rhetorical but I'll extend your thinking into real life-- has andy99 personal webpage been created because you're an elected official representing others? Would this still give andy99 the right to distribute hate speech on his personal webpage? I think we can harmonize around, "unfortunately so" and that's why I think the way forward is concentrating on the, "unfortunately" and not the, "so."

  We have the right to do a potentially limitless amount of unbecoming, cruel, and oppressive things to our fellow man. We also have the potential for forming and proliferating societies. We invented religion and agriculture out of dirt and need. Let us choose Nazarenes, Jeffersons, and Socrates' over Neros, Alexanders, and Napoleons. This didn't use to be politically controversial!

  By mulmen 2025-09-243:37

  It would be if they’d stop censoring me!

  By singleshot_ 2025-09-250:06

  > a big tech company shouldn't decide what people are "allowed" to say

  On their platform, that’s exactly what they are entitled to do. When you type into the box in the Facebook app, that’s your speech. But unless the platform wants to add your contribution to their coherent speech product, they have every right to reject it.

  Otherwise, the government is deciding what people can say, and you’d be against that, right?

  Further, if I wanted to start a social media platform called thinkingtylenolcausesautismisstupid.com, wouldn’t restricting my right to craft my product defeat the whole point of my business?

  Giving platforms the ability to moderate their output to craft a coherent speech product is the only reason we have multiple social networks with different rules, instead of one first-mover social network with no rules where everyone is locked in by network effects.

  By ben_w 2025-09-249:17

  > There's tons of dumb stuff online, the only thing dumber is the state dictating how I'm supposed to think

    I've seen stupidity on the internet you wouldn't believe.
    Time Cube rants — four simultaneous days in one rotation — burning across static-filled CRTs.
    Ponzi pyramids stretching into forever, needing ten billion souls to stand beneath one.
    And a man proclaiming he brought peace in wars that never were, while swearing the President was born on foreign soil.
    All those moments… lost… in a rain of tweets.
  

  But even that dumb stuff aside: there's two ways for a government to silence the truth: censorship, and propaganda.

  We've got LLMs now, letting interested parties (government or not) overwhelm everyone with an endless barrage of the worst, cheapest, lowest quality AI slop, the kind that makes even AI proponents like me go "ah, I see what you mean about it being autocomplete", because even the worst of that by quality is still able to bury any bad news story just as effectively as any censorship. Too much noise and not enough signal, is already why I'm consuming far less YouTube these days, why I gave up on Twitter when it was still called that, etc.

  And we have AI that's a lot better at holding a conversation than just the worst, cheapest, lowest quality AI slop. We've already seen LLMs are able to induce psychosis in some people just by talking to them, and that was, so far as we can tell, accidental. How long will it be before a developer chooses to do this on purpose, and towards a goal of their choice? Even if it's just those who are susceptible, there's a lot of people.

  What's important is the freedom to share truth, no matter how uncomfortable, and especially when it's uncomfortable for those with power. Unfortunately, what we humans actually share the most is gossip, which is already a poor proxy for truth and is basically how all the witch hunts, genocides, and other moral-panic-induced horrors of history happened.

  It is all a mess; it is all hard; don't mistake the proxy (free speech in general) for the territory (speak truth to power, I think?); censorship is simultaneously bad and the only word I know for any act which may block propaganda which is also bad.

  By asadotzler 2025-09-2323:2813 reply

  My refusing to distribute your work is not "silencing." Silencing would be me preventing you from distributing it.

  Have we all lost the ability to reason? Seriously, this isn't hard. No one owes you distribution unless you have a contract saying otherwise.

  By jhbadger 2025-09-240:122 reply

  It's not that simple. For example, when libraries remove books for political reasons they often claim it isn't "censorship" because you could buy the book at a bookstore if you wanted. But if it really would have no effect on availability they wouldn't bother to remove the book, would they?

  By amanaplanacanal 2025-09-240:501 reply
  Libraries are typically run by the government. Governments aren't supposed to censor speech. Private platforms are a different matter by law.

  By typeofhuman 2025-09-2323:501 reply

  Not OP, but we did learn the US federal government was instructing social media sites like Twitter to remove content it found displeasing. This is known as jawboning and is against the law.

  SCOTUS. Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, holds that governments cannot coerce private entities into censoring speech they disfavor, even if they do not issue direct legal orders.

  This was a publicly announced motivation for Elon Musk buying Twitter. Because of which we know the extent of this illegal behavior.

  Mark Zuckerberg has also publicly stated Meta was asked to remove content by the US government.

  By brookst 2025-09-240:272 reply

  Crazy how fast we got from “please remove health misinformation during a pandemic” (bad) to “FCC chair says government will revoke broadcast licenses for showing comedians mocking the president” (arguably considerably worse).

  By typeofhuman 2025-09-241:502 reply

  If you're referring to Jimmy Kimmel. You should probably consider that while the FCC member made that comment, Sinclair (the largest ABC affiliate group) and others had been demanding ABC cancel his show for its horrible ratings, and awful rhetoric which inhibited them from selling advertising. His show was bad for business. It's worth suspecting ABC let no good opportunity go to waste: save Kimmel's reputation and scapegoat the termination as political.

  More here: https://sbgi.net/sinclair-says-kimmel-suspension-is-not-enou...

  By alphabettsy 2025-09-244:17

  Personally, not going to take Sinclair‘s press release at face value.

  https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/06/trump-fcc-sinclair...

  https://upriseri.com/sinclair-nexstar-duopoly-right-wing-con...

  By brookst 2025-09-244:311 reply

  I can’t figure out what you’re trying to say. It’s no big deal that the head of the FCC says they’ll pull licenses for media outlets that mock the president, because one media outlet says that would be the right commercial decision anyway?

  That can’t be your point, but I also can’t think of a more charitable interpretation.

  By typeofhuman 2025-09-2411:511 reply

  It wasn't for mocking the President. It was knowingly lying about at a catastrophic event which is a violation of FCC rules. IIUC it was because Kimmel said in more words that the coward that murdered Charlie Kirk was MAGA. Which is false and Kimmel knew it.

  By mafuy 2025-09-2621:27

  This is simply not true. And even if it were, far worse things have been said without complaints on channels aligned with MAGA for years, so it cannot be a sound foundation for such a sudden and drastic action.

  By themaninthedark 2025-09-241:191 reply

  >On July 20, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield appeared on MSNBC. Host Mika Brzezinski asked Bedingfield about Biden's efforts to counter vaccine misinformation; apparently dissatisfied with Bedingfield's response that Biden would continue to "call it out," Brzezinski raised the specter of amending Section 230—the federal statute that shields tech platforms from liability—in order to punish social media companies explicitly.

  >In April 2021, White House advisers met with Twitter content moderators. The moderators believed the meeting had gone well, but noted in a private Slack discussion that they had fielded "one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off from the platform."

  Is there a difference between the White House stating they are looking at Section 230 and asking why this one guy has not been banned?

  By slater 2025-09-241:273 reply

  from your paste, it looks like Mika B. brought up the section 230 thing?

  Also, spreading disinformation about covid has real-world implications.

  Orange man getting his feelings hurt because comedian said something isn't even in the same ballpark

  By themaninthedark 2025-09-243:19

  Sorry, I only grabbed part of the quote. Here is it paraphrased as the names are not that familiar to me.

  "Shouldn't they(Facebook and Twitter) be liable for publishing that information and then open to lawsuits?" - MSNBC "Certainly, they should be held accountable, You've heard the president speak very aggressively about this. He understands this is an important piece of the ecosystem." - White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield

  Source: https://reason.com/2023/01/19/how-the-cdc-became-the-speech-...

  So yes, MSNBC brought up Section 230 and the White House Communications Director says "Yes, we are looking to hold social media accountable."

  >Also from the same source: The Twitter moderators believed the meeting had gone well, but noted in a private Slack discussion that they had fielded "one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off from the platform."

  >Throughout 2020 and 2021, Berenson had remained in contact with Twitter executives and received assurances from them that the platform respected public debate. These conversations gave Berenson no reason to think his account was at risk. But four hours after Biden accused social media companies of killing people, Twitter suspended Berenson's account.

  I don't care about Trump's feelings but if we want to be able to speak truth to power, we have to be willing to let people talk shit as well. Yes, COVID has real world implications. Almost everything does.

  People on the left say "Think about the children and implications with regard to this." People on the right say "Think about the children and implications with regard to that."

  Notice how none of them seem to be saying "Let's lay out the facts and let you think about it."

  By tbrownaw 2025-09-243:29

  Preventing people from disputing claims of fact makes it harder to find out if those claims are actually solid. Same for arguments. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/66643-he-who-knows-only-his...

  Preventing people from having a platform for content-free asshattery doesn't have that problem.

  (A fun implication of this line is reasoning, is that the claim that Kimmel's comments were "lies" makes the jawboning against him more morally bad rather than less bad.)

  By typeofhuman 2025-09-241:57

  > Also, spreading disinformation about covid has real-world implications.

  Your logic can be used to censor anything that goes against the narratives of the arbiters of disinformation.

  > Orange man getting his feelings hurt because comedian said something isn't even in the same ballpark

  Pejorative. Lack of evidence. Ignoring contradictory evidence. Sounds like you are locked in.

  By pfannkuchen 2025-09-2323:421 reply

  I think the feeling of silencing comes from it being a blacklist and not a whitelist.

  If you take proposals from whoever and then only approve ones you specifically like, for whatever reason, then I don’t think anyone would feel silenced by that.

  If you take anything from anyone, and a huge volume of it, on any topic and you don’t care what, except for a few politically controversial areas, that feels more like silencing. Especially when there is no alternative service available due to network effects and subsidies from arguably monopolistic practices.

  By mock-possum 2025-09-241:03

  Also allowing it to be posted initially for a period of time before being taken down feels worse than simply preventing it from ever being published on your platform to begin with.

  Of course they would never check things before allowing them to be posted because there isn’t any profit in that.

  By sterlind 2025-09-2323:333 reply

  I'd certainly consider an ISP refusing to route my packets as silencing. is YouTube so different? legally, sure, but practically?

  By michaelt 2025-09-240:37

  If we were still in the age of personal blogs and phpbb forums, where there were thousands of different venues - the fact the chess forum would ban you for discussing checkers was no problem at all.

  But these days, when you can count the forums on one hand even if you're missing a few fingers, and they all have extremely similar (American-style) censorship policies? To me it's less clear than it once was.

  By scarface_74 2025-09-242:48

  No because you are perfectly technically capable of setting your own servers in a colo and distributing your video.

  By jabwd 2025-09-240:41

  yes... coz youtube is not your ISP. A literal massive difference. RE: net neutrality.

  By ultrarunner 2025-09-2323:422 reply

  At some level these platforms are the public square and facilitate public discussion. In fact, Google has explicitly deprioritized public forum sites (e.g. PHPbb) in preference to forums like YouTube. Surely there is a difference between declining to host and distribute adult material and enforcing a preferred viewpoint on a current topic.

  Sure, Google doesn't need to host anything they don't want to; make it all Nazi apologia if they thing it serves their shareholders. But doing so and silencing all other viewpoints in that particular medium is surely not a net benefit for society, independent of how it affects Google.

  By Scoundreller 2025-09-240:02

  “Covid” related search results were definitely hard-coded or given a hand-tuned boost. Wikipedia was landing on the 2nd or 3rd page which never happens for a general search term on Google.

  I’d even search for “coronavirus” and primarily get “official” sites about Covid-19 even tho that’s just one of many coronaviruses. At least Wikipedia makes the front page again, with the Covid-19 page outranking the coronavirus page…

  By Scoundreller 2025-09-240:01

  “Covid” related search results were definitely hard-coded. Wikipedia was landing on the 2nd or 3rd page which never happens.

  I’d even search for “coronavirus” and primarily get “official” sites about Covid-19 even tho that’s just one of many coronaviruses. At least Wikipedia makes the front page again, with the Covid-19 page outranking the coronavirus page…

  By unyttigfjelltol 2025-09-241:11

  > My refusing to distribute your work is not "silencing."

  That distinction is a relic of a world of truly public spaces used for communication— a literal town square. Then it became the malls and shopping centers, then the Internet— which runs on private pipes— and now it’s technological walled gardens. Being excluded from a walled garden now is effectively being “silenced” the same way being excluded from the town square was when whatever case law you’re thinking was decided.

  By Jensson 2025-09-2323:381 reply

  > No one owes you distribution unless you have a contract saying otherwise.

  The common carrier law says you have to for for some things, so it makes sense to institute such a law for some parts of social media as they are fundamental enough. It is insane that we give that much censorship power to private corporations. They shouldn't have the power to decide elections on a whim etc.

  By AfterHIA 2025-09-240:031 reply

  I 100% agree with your sentiment here Jensson but in Googling, "common carrier law" what I get are the sets of laws governing transportation services liability:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier

  Is there perhaps another name for what you're describing? It piques my interest.

  By Jensson 2025-09-240:191 reply

  Common carrier also applies to phones and electricity and so on, it is what prevents your phone service provider from deciding who you can call or what you can say. Imagine a world where your phone service provider could beep out all your swear words, or if they prevented you from calling certain people, that is what common carrier prevents.

  So the equivalent of Google banning anyone talking about Covid is the same as a phone service provider ending service for anyone mentioning covid on their phones. Nobody but the most extreme authoritarians thinks phone providers should be allowed to do that, so why not apply this to Google as well?

  By amanaplanacanal 2025-09-240:553 reply

  This is essentially the free speech maximalist position: allow any legal content.

  If they did that, people would leave the service in droves for a competitor with reasonable moderation. Nobody wants to use a site that is overrun with spam and porn.

  By nradov 2025-09-243:26

  Perhaps. But another approach would be to give users better filtering features so that they wouldn't see content they consider objectionable, even if it's not censored and still readily available to other users.

  By throwmeaway222 2025-09-2423:14

  So what's the solution, just continue to build two Americas that will eventually go to war?

  By Jensson 2025-09-241:061 reply

  > If they did that, people would leave the service in droves for a competitor with reasonable moderation.

  Did people leave Google in droves in favor of a competitor that censors out all porn from search results? No, people had no issue that you can find porn on Google, they still used it. Youtube providing porn to those who want it does not cause problems for anyone, just like it doesn't for Google search, and Google even run both so they can easily apply this same feature on Youtube.

  > Nobody wants to use a site that is overrun with spam and porn.

  The internet is overrun by spam and porn yet people still use it, so you are clearly wrong. Google already manages as search engine over the internet that is capable of not showing you porn when you don't search for it, but you can find it if you do, so Google has already solved that problem and could just do the same in Youtube.

  By amanaplanacanal 2025-09-242:101 reply

  Note that we are having this conversation on a site with heavy moderation. I doubt removing this moderation would in any way make the site better.

  You might ask yourself why you are here, instead of another website with less or no moderation.

  By Jensson 2025-09-247:121 reply

  The only reason we need moderation is that we have discussions, youtube videos doesn't have that feature, you can't attach a video to another persons video, but you can attach a comment here to another persons comment. I am all for moderating youtube comments for that very reason, but not youtube videos.

  I would prefer if discord / reddit and similar became common carriers of forums, not messages. So discord and reddit can't control what a subreddit does and what its moderators do, but the moderators can control what the people posting there can do.

  By having a common carrier forum provider anyone could easily make their own forum with their own rules and compete on an open market without needing any technical skills, and without the forum provider being able to veto everything they say and do on that forum. That is where we want to be, in such an environment HN wouldn't need to depend on ycombinator, you could have many independently moderated forums and you pick the best one.

  Discord and reddit today aren't that, both ban things they don't like, it would be much better if we removed that power from them. Both reddit and discord admins allows porn and spam, their censorship adds zero value to the platform, the only thing it does is kick some political factions out of the platform which doesn't add any value to it, as I wouldn't visit those discords / subreddits anyway so they don't hurt me.

  So it isn't hard to imagine how to draft such laws where all our favorite usecases are still allowed while also adding much more freedom for users and making life easier for these content platforms since they are no longer targeted by takedown request spam, it is a win win for everyone except those who want to censor.

  By amanaplanacanal 2025-09-248:181 reply

  You are welcome to set up such a forum provider today. You probably won't be able to get sponsors for it though. Reddit used to be much more lightly moderated, but they wanted to be able to run ads/make money. 4chan is much more lightly moderated than the big platforms.

  Unless you make a law preventing all moderation, the users and advertisers are going to migrate to the moderated forums.

  By Jensson 2025-09-248:25

  > You are welcome to set up such a forum provider today. You probably won't be able to get sponsors for it though. Reddit used to be much more lightly moderated, but they wanted to be able to run ads/make money.

  Thanks for answering why the law is needed, as you explained a private solution cannot solve this. Advertisers wouldn't be able to push reddit to ban things if reddit weren't allowed to ban them, so you would still be able to run ads with such a law, it just reduces the power those ad companies has over you.

  And no, the ad companies doesn't really care if you show porn or show terrorist propaganda on your site, you can both watch porn and read terrorist propaganda on Google without leaving the site yet every advertiser I know is happily spending a massive amount of money on Google ads. If they actually cared they would leave Google, instead they just care about bullying those who can comply, if they know the target wont budge due to a law then they would just continue to advertise like they do with Google.

  These kind of regulations are needed when the free market results in oppressive results, there are many such cases where regulations do a good job and I don't see why these internet companies should be an exception.

  By timmg 2025-09-2323:371 reply

  It's interesting how much "they are a private company, they can do what they want" was the talking point around that time. And then Musk bought Twitter and people accuse him of using it to swing the election or whatever.

  Even today, I was listening to NPR talk about the potential TikTok deal and the commenter was wringing their hands about having a "rich guy" like Larry Ellison control the content.

  I don't know exactly what the right answer is. But given their reach -- and the fact that a lot of these companies are near monopolies -- I think we should at least do more than just shrug and say, "they can do what they want."

  By Ekaros 2025-09-245:28

  If you refuse to distribute some information you are making editorial decision. Clearly you are reviewing all of the content. So you should be fully liable for all content that remains. Including things like libel or copyright violation.

  To me that sounds only fair trade. You editorialize content. You are liable for all content. In every possible way.

  By joannanewsom 2025-09-240:422 reply

  Jimmy Kimmel wasn't being silenced. He doesn't have a right to a late night talk show. Disney is free to end that agreement within the bounds of their contract. Being fired for social media posts isn't being silenced. Employment is for the most part at will. Getting deported for protesting the Gaza war isn't being silenced. Visas come with limitations, and the US government has the authority to revoke your visa if you break those rules. /s

  You seem to think there's a bright line of "silenced" vs "not silenced". In reality there's many ways of limiting and restricting people's expressions. Some are generally considered acceptable and some are not. When huge swaths of communication are controlled by a handful of companies, their decisions have a huge impact on what speech gets suppressed. We should interrogate whether that serves the public interest.

  By amanaplanacanal 2025-09-240:58

  The US has pretty much given up on antitrust enforcement. That's the big problem.

  By scarface_74 2025-09-242:501 reply

  The federal government was literally pressuring ABC to take Kimmel off the air. Even Ted Cruz and other prominent republicans said that was a bridge too far.

  By joannanewsom 2025-09-248:022 reply

  The federal government was literally pressuring YouTube to remove certain COVID content that did not violate its policies. It's said explicitly in the story.

  What I'm trying to get at is it's possible to stifle people's freedom of expression without literally blocking them from every platform. Threatening their livelihood. Threatening their home. Kicking them off these core social media networks. All of these things are "silencing". And we should be wary of doing that for things we simply disagree about.

  By rendall 2025-09-2410:14

  This is such an important idea. I'm afraid that most people do not think beyond "bad opinions should be legally suppressed" and unfortunately that includes many of the purported guardians of our social morals.

  By scarface_74 2025-09-2414:011 reply

  Did they say they were going to put YouTube out of business? The FCC threatened to take away ABCs broadcast license.

  By joannanewsom 2025-09-2417:151 reply

  Is that a meaningful distinction? If they had offered instead to show strong favoritism to Disney for suspending Jimmy Kimmel would that have made it okay? I think it's wrong for the federal government to pressure Disney in this way regardless of the means.

  By raw_anon_1111 2025-09-2417:47

  There is a huge difference between “soft power” and using the bully pulpit and bringing the full legal force of the government and taking away a broadcast license. This was a bridge too far for conservative politicians.

  The other distinction you seem to be ignoring is that the Biden administration was doing it because of public health concerns. Trump and the FCC was doing it because a comedian said meab things aboit him and a devout racist.

  What favoritism did the Biden administration show? They still went after Google for being a monopoly.

  Unlike Trump who only had his administration approve the Paramount deal after accepting a $15 million bribe in public

  By hn_throw_250915 2025-09-2323:34

  [dead]

  By justinhj 2025-09-2323:353 reply

  So you're saying that YouTube is a publisher and should not have section 230 protections? They can't have it both ways. Sure remove content that violates policies but YouTube has long set itself up as an opinion police force, choosing which ideas can be published and monetized and which cannot.

  By krapp 2025-09-2323:371 reply

  https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...

  By justinhj 2025-09-240:39

  Thank you. I was completely wrong about section 230.

  By tzs 2025-09-240:16

  Section 230 does not work like you think it does. In fact it is almost opposite of what you probably think it does. The whole point was to allow them to have it both ways.

  It makes sites not count as the publisher or speaker of third party content posted to their site, even if they remove or moderate that third party content.

  By bee_rider 2025-09-2323:41

  YouTube’s business model probably wouldn’t work if they were made to be responsible for all the content they broadcasted. It would be really interesting to see a world where social media companies were treated as publishers.

  Might be a boon for federated services—smaller servers, finer-grained units of responsibility…

  By yongjik 2025-09-2323:573 reply

  I feel like we're living in different worlds, because from what I've seen, giving people platforms clearly doesn't work either. It just lets the most stupid and incendiary ideas to spread unchecked.

  If you allow crazy people to "let it ride" then they don't stop until... until... hell we're still in the middle of it and I don't even know when or if they will stop.

  By n4r9 2025-09-2510:16

  Spot on. At least in the UK, anyone who thinks fake news will just "fizzle out" on social media hasn't been paying attention to the increasing frenzy being whipped up by the alt right on Twitter and Telegram, and consequences like the Southport riots.

  By mac-attack 2025-09-240:171 reply

  It's poorly thought out logic. Everyone sees how messy and how mistakes can be made when attempting to get to a truth backed by data + science, so they somehow they conclude that allowing misinformation to flourish will solve the problem instead of leading to a slow decline of morality/civilization.

  Very analogous to people who don't like how inefficient governments function and somehow conclude that the solution is to put people in power with zero experience managing government.

  By mitthrowaway2 2025-09-240:442 reply

  There's a journey that every hypothesis makes on the route to becoming "information", and that journey doesn't start at top-down official recognition. Ideas have to circulate, get evaluated and rejected and accepted by different groups, and eventually grasp their way towards consensus.

  I don't believe Trump's or Kennedy's ideas about COVID and medicine are the ones that deserve to win out, but I do think that top-down suppression of ideas can be very harmful to truth seeking and was harmful during the pandemic. In North America I believe this led to a delayed (and ultimately minimal) social adoption of masks, a late acceptance of the aerosol-spread vector, an over-emphasis on hand washing, and a far-too-late restriction on international travel and mass public events, well past the point when it could have contributed to containing the disease (vs Taiwan's much more effective management, for example).

  Of course there's no guarantee that those ideas would have been accepted in time to matter had there been a freer market for views, and of course it would have opened the door to more incorrect ideas as well, but I'm of the view that it would have helped.

  More importantly I think those heavy restrictions on pre-consensus ideas (as many of them would later become consensus) helped lead to a broader undermining of trust in institutions, the fallout of which we are observing today.

  By thrance 2025-09-2411:10

  That journey of "fringe hypothesis" to "actual fact" doesn't start out on right-wing Facebook groups, nor has it ever. There are more efficient channels for this. Make a paper, submit it for review, tell the press maybe. But social media can't play a part in establishing the truths we hold for granted, lest we want to be ruled by absolute buffoons that would make vaccines and paracetamol illegal on pseudo-scientific grounds.

  By mac-attack 2025-09-241:481 reply

  The issues you are bringing up don't highlight that they stuck with the wrong decision, but rather that they didn't pivot to the right decision as fast as you'd like... yet your solution is bottom-up decision-making that will undoubtedly take much much longer to reach a consensus? How do you square that circle?

  Experts can study and learn from their prior mistakes. Continually doing bottom-up when we have experts is inefficient and short-sighted, no? Surely you would streamline part of the process and end up in the pre-Trump framework yet again?

  Also, I'm curious why you have such a rosy picture of the bottom-up alternatives? Are you forgetting about the ivermectin overdoses? 17,000 deaths related to hydroxychloroquine? The US president suggesting people drinking bleach? It is easy to cherry pick the mistakes that science makes while overlooking the noise and misinformation that worms its way into less-informed/less-educated thinkers when non-experts are given the reins

  By mitthrowaway2 2025-09-242:56

  No, I'm not criticizing the officials for failing to reach the correct decision or adopt the correct viewpoints faster than they did. Institutions are large and risk-averse, data was incomplete, and people make mistakes.

  I'm criticizing them for suppressing the dissemination of ideas that did later turn out to be correct. I hope the distinction is clear.

  If you're going to impose a ban on the dissemination of ideas, you'd better be ten thousand percent sure that nothing covered by that ban later turns out to be the truth. Not a single one, not even if every other idea that got banned was correctly identified as a falsehood. Otherwise, the whole apparatus falls apart and institutions lose trust.

  I'm not forgetting ivermectin overdoses. I don't believe my picture is rosy. I'm aware of all the garbage ideas out there, which is why the measles is back and all the other madness. But I'm firmly of the opinion that trying to suppress these bad ideas has only redoubled their strength in the backlash, and caused a rejection of expert knowledge altogether.

  By atmavatar 2025-09-240:072 reply

  I wonder how much of that is giving a platform to conspiracy theorists and how much of it is the social media algorithms' manipulation making the conspiracy theories significantly more visible and persuasive.

  By thrance 2025-09-2411:05

  Look at 4chan and it's derivatives: minimal algorithms and they're the shitholes of ideas on the internet.

  By prawn 2025-09-243:12

  Is there any consideration of this with regard to Section 230? e.g., you're a passive conduit if you allow something to go online, but you're an active publisher if you actively employ any form of algorithm to publish and promote?

  By kypro 2025-09-2321:569 reply

  I agree. People today are far more anti-vaccine than they were a few years ago which is kinda crazy when you consider we went through a global pandemic where one of the only things that actually worked to stop people dying was the roll out of effective vaccines.

  I think if public health bodies just laid out the data they had honestly (good and bad) and said that they think most people should probably take it, but left it to people to decide, the vast, vast majority of people would still have gotten the vaccine but we wouldn't have allowed anti-vaccine sentiment to fester.

  By trollbridge 2025-09-2322:072 reply

  And the attempts at censorship have played a part in people drifting towards being more vaccine-hesitant or anti-vaccine.

  It's often a lot better to just let kooks speak freely.

  By hypeatei 2025-09-2411:06

  > It's often a lot better to just let kooks speak freely.

  They have always been able to speak freely. I still see vaccine conspiracies on HN to this day. It was rampant during COVID as well.

  By vFunct 2025-09-2322:451 reply

  It's less about censorship and more about more people becoming middle-class and therefore thinking they're smarter than researchers.

  There is nobody more confident in themselves than the middle-class.

  By khazhoux 2025-09-2322:551 reply

  That’s a very confident statement presented without a hint of evidence.

  By vFunct 2025-09-240:001 reply

  You know that there are studies addressing this, right? I didn't just make it up.

  Here's an overview study that reviewed other studies: https://jphe.amegroups.org/article/view/9493/html

  "Pre-COVID-19 interviews with a high-income vaccine hesitant sample in Perth, Australia found that vaccine hesitancy was based on an inflated sense of agency in making medical decisions without doctors or public health officials, and a preference for “natural” methods of healthcare (30)."

  "A similar study in the United States reported on interviews from 25 White mothers in a wealthy community who refused vaccination for their children (31). These participants reported high levels of perceived personal efficacy in making health decisions for their children and higher confidence in preventing illness through individual “natural” measures such as eating organic food and exercising. Additionally, these participants report lower perceived risk of infection or disease, which is contrasted with their high perceived risk of vaccination."

  "Vaccine hesitancy among those with privilege may be more than just a product of resource access. There is evidence that individuals with high socioeconomic status perceive themselves to be more capable, hardworking, important, and deserving of resources and privileges than others (32,33)"

  By khazhoux 2025-09-243:331 reply

  You said the middle class is the most unreasonably confident group of people. I don't see anything to that effect in what you posted. Yes, I think it's just your made-up dismissive generalization.

  By vFunct 2025-09-2415:03

  I don't see anything in your response that refutes that. Sounds like you have no argument.

  By gm678 2025-09-240:39

  That didn't happen in a vacuum; there was also a _lot_ of money going into pushing anti vaccine propaganda, both for mundane scam reasons and for political reasons: https://x.com/robert_zubrin/status/1863572439084699918?lang=...

  By logicchains 2025-09-2322:154 reply

  >where one of the only things that actually worked to stop people dying was the roll out of effective vaccines.

  The only reason you believe that is because all information to the contrary was systematically censored and removed from the media you consume. The actual data doesn't support that, there are even cases where it increased mortality, like https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11278956/ and increased the chance of future covid infections, like https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39803093/ .

  By wvenable 2025-09-2323:501 reply

  It isn't hard to find that randomized controlled trials and large meta-analyses show that COVID vaccines are highly effective. No need to rely on media. You can point to one or two observational re-analyses that show otherwise but overall they are not particularly convincing given the large body of easily accessible other evidence.

  By lisbbb 2025-09-243:321 reply

  I don't think a meta analysis is worth anything at all, to be totally honest with you. I also don't think those gene therapy shots were at all effective, given how many people contracted covid after receiving the full course of shots. I think basic herd immunity ended covid and the hysteria lasted far beyond the timeframe in which there was truly a problem. Furthermore, I think those shots are the cause of many cancers, including my wife's. The mechanism? The shots "programmed" the immune system to produce antibodies against covid to the detriment of all other functions, including producing the killer T-Cells that destroy cells in the early stages of becoming cancerous. That's why so many different cancers are happening, as well as other weird issues like the nasty and deadly clotting people had. I have no idea about mycarditis, but that's fine because it is a well documented side effect that has injured a lot of people. So cancer and pulmonary issues are the result of those poorly tested drugs that were given out to millions of people without informed consent and with no basic ethical controls on the whole massive experiment. And before you gaslight me, please understand that my wife, age 49 was diagnosed with a very unusual cancer for someone of her sex and age and it's been a terrible fight since June of 2024 to try and save her life, which has nearly been lost 3x already! Of course I have no proof that the Pfizer shots caused any of this, but damn, it sure could have been that. Also, her cousin, age 41, was diagnosed with breast cancer that same year. So tell me, how incredibly low probability is it that two people in the same family got cancer in the same year? It's got to be 1 in 10 million or something like that. Just don't gaslight me--we can agree to disagree. I'm living the worst case scenario post covid and I only hope my daughter, who also got the damn shots never comes down with cancer.

  By wvenable 2025-09-245:08

  I am sorry to hear what you and your wife are going through. Nothing I say here is meant to dismiss your experience.

  That said, I think it's important to separate personal experiences from what the larger body of evidence shows. Many vaccinated people still got COVID, especially once Omicron came along. The vaccines were never perfect at preventing infection. But the strongest data we have from randomized trials and real-world results show that vaccinated people were far less likely to end up in the ICU or die from COVID. That's what the vaccines were designed to do and that's where they consistently worked.

  As for cancer, I understand why you'd connect your wife's diagnosis to the vaccine -- it's natural to search for causes -- our brains are wired to look for patterns especially when big events happen close together. But cancer registries and monitoring systems around the world haven't found an increase in cancer rates linked to COVID vaccines. The vaccines give a short-lived immune stimulus; they don't reprogram the immune system or permanently shut down T-cells. My family has a long history of cancer going back generations. Literally every other member of my family has had cancer long before COVID. The idea that there is a low probability of two people in the same family getting cancer in the same year is unfortunately not as unlikely as you want to believe. That is perhaps a cold comfort but doctors and scientists aren't seeing the pattern you're worried about.

  That isn't to say there aren't side effects to the vaccine. Myocarditis and clotting problems are well documented but rare side-effects. In fact, someone I know about indirectly had a heart attack immediately after the COVID vaccine -- his family is genetically predisposed to this kind of heart attack but it was directly triggered by the shot (he survived). It's good to acknowledge those risks. But when you look at the big picture, health agencies estimate that the vaccines prevented millions of deaths. I sadly know of a few people who died from COVID prior to vaccine availability and have family members with permanent lung issues. They're currently struggling to get another COVID shot because they don't think they can survive getting it unprotected again.

  By rpiguy 2025-09-2322:331 reply

  I appreciate you.

  People have become more anti-Vax because the Covid vaccines were at best ineffective and as you said anything contra-narrative is buried or ignored.

  If you push a shitty product and force people to take it to keep their jobs it’s going to turn them into skeptics of all vaccines, even the very effective ones.

  More harm than good was done there. The government should have approved them for voluntary use so the fallout would not have been so bad.

  By OrvalWintermute 2025-09-2323:591 reply

  [flagged]

  By deepburner 2025-09-240:301 reply

  [flagged]

  By OrvalWintermute 2025-09-245:47

  [flagged]

  By cynicalkane 2025-09-2323:171 reply

  This is typical of Covid conspiracy theorists, or conspiracy theorists of any sort: one or two papers on one side prove something, but an overwhelming mountain of evidence on the other side does not prove something. The theorist makes no explanation as to how a planetful of scientists missed the obvious truth that some random dudes found; they just assert that it happened, or make some hand-waving explanation about how an inexplicable planet-wide force of censors is silencing the few unremarkable randos who somehow have the truth.

  The first paper seems to claim a very standard cohort study is subject to "immortal time bias", an effect whereby measuring outcomes can seem to change them. The typical example of sampling time bias is that slow-growing cancers are more survivable than fast-growing ones, but also more likely to be measured by a screening, giving a correlation between screening and survivablility. So you get a time effect where more fast-acting cancers do not end up in the measurement, biasing the data.

  But in measurements such that one outcome or the other does not bias the odds of that outcome being sampled, there can be no measurement time effect, which is why it's not corrected for in studies like this. The authors do not explain why measurement time effects would have anything to do with detecting or not detecting death rates in the abstract, or anywhere else in the paper, because they are quacks, who apply arbitrary math to get the outcome they want.

  As another commenter pointed out, randomized controlled trials -- which cannot possibly have this made-up time effect -- often clearly show a strongly positive effect for vaccination.

  I did not read the second paper.

  By lisbbb 2025-09-243:36

  [flagged]

  By kelnos 2025-09-258:06

  Please stop posting conspiracy theory garbage.

  A sibling read the your first link and noted the problems with it. I read just the abstract of the second link, and it's clear their methodology and description of what they're measuring can't actually support their conclusions.

  By vkou 2025-09-2321:571 reply

  > but left it to people to decide, the vast, vast majority of people would still have gotten the vaccine but we wouldn't have allowed anti-vaccine sentiment to fester.

  Nah, the same grifters who stand to make a political profit of turning everything into a wedge issue would have still hammered right into it. They've completely taken over public discourse on a wide range of subjects, that go well beyond COVID vaccines.

  As long as you can make a dollar by telling people that their (and your) ignorance is worth just as much - or more - than someone else's knowledge, you'll find no shortage of listeners for your sermon. And that popularity will build its own social proof. (Millions of fools can't all be wrong, after all.)

  By kypro 2025-09-2322:091 reply

  I agree. Again the vast majority would have gotten the vaccine.

  There's always going to be people for all kinds of reasons pushing out bad ideas. That's part of the trade-off of living in a free society where there is no universal "right" opinion the public must hold.

  > They've completely taken over public discourse on a wide range of subjects

  Most people are not anti-vax. If "they've" "taken over public discourse" in other subjects to the point you are now holding a minority opinion you should consider whether "they" are right or wrong and why so many people believe what they do.

  If can't understand their position and disagree you should reach out to people in a non-confrontational way, understand their position, then explain why you disagree (if you still do at that point). If we all do a better job at this we'll converge towards truth. If you think talking and debate isn't the solution to disagreements I'd argue you don't really believe in our democratic system (which isn't a judgement).

  By vel0city 2025-09-241:38

  While I do agree "most people are not anti-vax", the rates of opting out of vaccines or doing delayed schedules or being very selective have gone way up.

  Some of these public school districts in Texas have >10% of students objecting to vaccines. My kids are effectively surrounded by unvaccinated kids whenever they go out in public. There's a 1 in 10 chance that kid on the playground has never had a vaccine, and that rate is increasing.

  A lot of the families I know actively having kids are pretty crunchy and are at least vaccine hesitant if not outright anti-vax.

  https://www.dshs.texas.gov/sites/default/files/LIDS-Immuniza...

  By someNameIG 2025-09-2323:50

  It's more that people in general* connect to personal stories far more than impersonal factual data. It's easy to connect to seeing people say they had adverse reactions to a vaccine than statistical data showing it's safer to get vaccinated than not. It's also easier to believe conspiracies, its easier to think bad things happen due to the intent of bad people, than the world being a complex hard to understand place with no intent behind things happening.

  These are just things that some of the population will be more attracted to, I don't think it has anything to do with censorship, lockdowns, or mandates. At most the blame can be at institutions for lacking in their ability to do effective scientific communication.

  *And this skews more to less educated and intelligent.

  By nxm 2025-09-243:21

  Issue is when we weren't/aren't even allowed to question the efficacy or long-term side effects of any vaccine.

  By stefantalpalaru 2025-09-2322:05

  > one of the only things that actually worked to stop people dying was the roll out of effective vaccines

  "A total of 913 participants were included in the final analysis. The adjusted ORs for COVID-19 infection among vaccinated individuals compared to unvaccinated individuals were 1.85 (95% CI: 1.33-2.57, p < 0.001). The odds of contracting COVID-19 increased with the number of vaccine doses: one to two doses (OR: 1.63, 95% CI: 1.08-2.46, p = 0.020), three to four doses (OR: 2.04, 95% CI: 1.35-3.08, p = 0.001), and five to seven doses (OR: 2.21, 95% CI: 1.07-4.56, p = 0.033)." - ["Behavioral and Health Outcomes of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination: A Case-Control Study in Japanese Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises" (2024)](https://www.cureus.com/articles/313843-behavioral-and-health...)

  "the bivalent-vaccinated group had a slightly but statistically significantly higher infection rate than the unvaccinated group in the statewide category and the age ≥50 years category" - ["COVID-19 Infection Rates in Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Inmates: A Retrospective Cohort Study" (2023)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10482361/)

  "The risk of COVID-19 also varied by the number of COVID-19 vaccine doses previously received. The higher the number of vaccines previously received, the higher the risk of contracting COVID-19" - ["Effectiveness of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Bivalent Vaccine" (2022)](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.17.22283625v...)

  "Confirmed infection rates increased according to time elapsed since the last immunity-conferring event in all cohorts. For unvaccinated previously infected individuals they increased from 10.5 per 100,000 risk-days for those previously infected 4-6 months ago to 30.2 for those previously infected over a year ago. For individuals receiving a single dose following prior infection they increased from 3.7 per 100,000 person days among those vaccinated in the past two months to 11.6 for those vaccinated over 6 months ago. For vaccinated previously uninfected individuals the rate per 100,000 person days increased from 21.1 for persons vaccinated within the first two months to 88.9 for those vaccinated more than 6 months ago." - ["Protection and waning of natural and hybrid COVID-19 immunity" (2021)](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.04.21267114v...)

  By dotnet00 2025-09-2322:095 reply

  [flagged]

  By mrcwinn 2025-09-2323:073 reply

  If that were the case, wouldn’t we see vaccine skepticism in poorly educated, racist non-Western nations?

  By dotnet00 2025-09-2323:55

  As the other reply mentions, that's where the "in your face" part comes in. Many of the diseases that can be prevented by vaccines are in living memory for those countries.

  On top of that, 'poorly educated' in those countries often means never having been to a proper school, never having finished basic schooling, being illiterate, or lacking access to information (be it the internet or social programs). That kind of skepticism is easier to help, because it stems from a place of actual ignorance, rather than believing oneself to be smarter than everyone else.

  By Jensson 2025-09-2323:49

  You do see a lot of vaccine skepticism in such countries, this study found about half of Africans view vaccines negatively.

  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9903367/

  By braiamp 2025-09-2323:23

  You don't see those, because it's on their faces. Or more accurately on our faces. I live in such country, and we kill for having our kids vaccinated. We live these diseases, so we aren't so stupid to fall for misinformation.

  By xdennis 2025-09-2322:212 reply

  > I think the anti-vax thing is mostly because the average Western education level is just abysmal.

  What does the West have to do with it? Non-westerners are even more into folk medicine and witch doctors.

  By dotnet00 2025-09-2322:40

  They're into folk medicine, but their anti-vax issues generally come from people who don't have any means of knowing better (i.e. never been to school, dropped out at a very early grade, isolated, not even literate). Typically just education and having a doctor or a local elder respectfully explain to them that the Polio shot will help prevent their child from being paralyzed for life is enough to convince them.

  Meanwhile the 'educated' Westerner, to whom Polio is a third-world disease, will convince themselves that the doctor is lying for some reason, will choose to take the 75% chance of an asymptomatic infection because they don't truly appreciate how bad it can otherwise be, will use their access to a vast collection of humanity's information to cherry pick data that supports their position (most likely while also claiming to seek debate despite not intending to seriously consider opposing evidence), and if their gamble fails, will probably just blame immigrants, government or 'big pharma' for doing it.

  By andrewmcwatters 2025-09-2322:301 reply

  And yet, SEA and others are still better educated than us.

  By LeafItAlone 2025-09-2322:59

  >SEA and others are still better educated than us.

  Honest question: is this true? What’s the data around this? If it is true, why are there so many people from SEA in American universities? Wouldn’t they stay in their home country or another in the area?

  I’m truly trying to learn here and square this statement with what I’ve come to understand so far.

  By kypro 2025-09-2322:341 reply

  Anti-vax has never really been a thing though. I don't know what the data is these days, but it used to be like 1% of the population who were anti-vax.

  We have the same thing going on with racism in the West where people are convinced racism is a much bigger problem than it actually is.

  And whether it's anti-vax or racist beliefs, when you start attacking people for holding these views you always end up inadvertently encouraging people to start asking why that is and they end up down rabbit holes.

  No one believes peas cause cancer for example, but I guarantee one of best ways to make people start to believing peas cause cancer is for the media to start talking about how some people believe that peas do cause cancer, then for sites like YouTube and Facebook to starting ban people who talk about it. Because if they allow people to talk about UFOs and flat Earth conspiracies why are they banning people for suggesting that peas cause cancer? Is there some kind of conspiracy going on funded by big agriculture? You can see how this type of thinking happens.

  By dotnet00 2025-09-2323:00

  Anti-vax was enough of an issue that vaccine mandates were necessary for Covid.

  It also isn't convincing to be claiming that racism isn't as big in the West given all the discourse around H1Bs, Indians (the Trump base has been pretty open on this one, with comments on JD Vance's wife, the flood of anti-Indian racism on social media, and recently the joy taken in attempting to interfere with Indians forced to fly back to the US in a hurry due to the lack of clarity on the H1B thing), how ICE is identifying illegals, a senator openly questioning the citizenship of a brown mayoral candidate and so on.

  I agree that denying something is the easiest way to convince people of the opposite, but it's also understandable when social media companies decide to censor advice from well known individuals that people should do potentially harmful things like consume horse dewormer to deal with Covid. Basically, it's complicated, though I would prefer to lean towards not censoring such opinions.

  By logicchains 2025-09-2322:247 reply

  The anti-vax thing is because every single comparative study of vaccinated and unvaccinated children found a greater rate of developmental disorders in vaccinated children. They're also the only products for which you're not allowed to sue the manufacturers for liability, and the justification given by the manufacturers for requesting this liability protection was literally that they'd be sued out of business otherwise. If they were as safe as other treatments they wouldn't need a blanket liability immunity.

  Anthony R. Mawson, et al., “Pilot Comparative Study on the Health of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated 6 to 12-year-old U.S. Children,” Journal of Translational Science 3, no. 3 (2017): 1-12, doi: 10.15761/JTS.1000186

  Anthony R. Mawson et al., “Preterm Birth, Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Cross-Sectional Study of 6- to 12-Year-Old Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children,” Journal of Translational Science 3, no. 3 (2017): 1-8, doi:10.15761/JTS.1000187.

  Brian Hooker and Neil Z. Miller, “Analysis of Health Outcomes in Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children: Developmental Delays, Asthma, Ear Infections and Gastrointestinal Disorders,” SAGE Open Medicine 8, (2020): 2050312120925344, doi:10.1177/2050312120925344.

  Brian Hooker and Neil Z. Miller, “Health Effects in Vaccinated versus Unvaccinated Children,” Journal of Translational Science 7, (2021): 1-11, doi:10.15761/JTS.1000459.

  James Lyons-Weiler and Paul Thomas, “Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses along the Axis of Vaccination,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17, no. 22 (2020): 8674, doi:10.3390/ijerph17228674.

  James Lyons-Weiler, "Revisiting Excess Diagnoses of Illnesses and Conditions in Children Whose Parents Provided Informed Permission to Vaccinate Them" September 2022 International Journal of Vaccine Theory Practice and Research 2(2):603-618 DOI:10.56098/ijvtpr.v2i2.59

  NVKP, “Diseases and Vaccines: NVKP Survey Results,” Nederlandse Vereniging Kritisch Prikken, 2006, accessed July 1, 2022.

  Joy Garner, “Statistical Evaluation of Health Outcomes in the Unvaccinated: Full Report,” The Control Group: Pilot Survey of Unvaccinated Americans, November 19, 2020.

  Joy Garner, “Health versus Disorder, Disease, and Death: Unvaccinated Persons Are Incommensurably Healthier than Vaccinated,” International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice and Research 2, no. 2, (2022): 670-686, doi: 10.56098/ijvtpr.v2i2.40.

  Rachel Enriquez et al., “The Relationship Between Vaccine Refusal and Self-Report of Atopic Disease in Children,” The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology 115, no. 4 (2005): 737-744, doi:10.1016/j.jaci.2004.12.1128.

  By jawarner 2025-09-2322:42

  Mawson et al. 2017 (two papers) – internet survey of homeschoolers recruited from anti-vaccine groups; non-random, self-reported, unverified health outcomes. Retracted by the publisher after criticism.

  Hooker & Miller 2020/2021 – analysis of “control group” data also from self-selected surveys; same methodological problems.

  Lyons-Weiler & Thomas 2020, 2022 – data from a single pediatric practice run by one of the authors; serious selection bias.

  Joy Garner / NVKP surveys – activist-run online surveys with no verification.

  Enriquez et al. 2005 – a small cross-sectional study about allergy self-reports, not about overall neurodevelopment.

  Large, well-controlled population studies (Denmark, Finland, the U.S. Vaccine Safety Datalink, etc.) comparing vaccinated vs. unvaccinated children show no increase in autism, neurodevelopmental disorders, or overall morbidity attributable to recommended vaccines.

  By MSM 2025-09-2322:43

  I picked one at random (NVKP, "Diseases and Vaccines: NVKP Survey Results") and, while I needed to translate it to read it, it's clear (and loud!) about not actually being a scientific study.

  "We fully realize that a survey like this, even on purely scientific grounds, is flawed on all counts. The sample of children studied is far too small and unrepresentative, we didn't use control groups, and so on."

  Turns out the NVKP roughly translates to "Dutch Organization for those critical towards vaccines."

  I understand being skeptical about vaccines, but the skepticism needs to go both ways

  By lkey 2025-09-2322:461 reply

  "If they were as safe as other treatments they wouldn't need a blanket liability immunity." Citation very much needed for this inference.

  Even if I granted every single paper's premise here. I'd still much rather have a living child with a slightly higher chance of allergies or asthma or <insert survivable condition here> than a dead child. How quickly we forget how bad things once were. Do you dispute that vaccines also accounted for 40% of the decline in infant mortality over the last 50 years? And before that, TB, Flu, and Smallpox killed uncountably many people. Vaccines are a public good and one of the best things we've ever created as a species.

  Do you also have theories about autism you'd like to share with the class?

  By TimorousBestie 2025-09-2322:56

  A very good point. These studies should be comparing QALYs (quality-adjusted life years, a measure of disease burden) instead of relative prevalence of a handful of negative outcomes, the latter of which is much more vulnerable to p-hacking.

  By TimorousBestie 2025-09-2322:45

  > Anthony R. Mawson, et al., “Pilot Comparative Study on the Health of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated 6 to 12-year-old U.S. Children,” Journal of Translational Science 3, no. 3 (2017): 1-12, doi: 10.15761/JTS.1000186

  Retracted: https://retractionwatch.com/2017/05/08/retracted-vaccine-aut...

  If you edit down your list to journal articles that you know you be valid and unretracted, I will reconsider looking through it. However, journal access in general is too expensive for me to bother reading retracted articles.

  By conception 2025-09-2323:03

  Here’s where the “bad ideas out in the open get corrected” now is tested. There are 4 really good refutations of your evidence. Outside of the unspoken “perhaps vaccines cause some measurable bad outcomes but compare then to measles. And without the herd immunity vaccinations aren’t nearly as useful” argument.

  So the important question is: Are you now going to say “well, I guess i got some bad data and i have to go back and review my beliefs” or dig in?

  By barbazoo 2025-09-2323:26

  > If they were as safe as other treatments they wouldn't need a blanket liability immunity.

  Other treatments aren’t applied preventatively to the entire population which is why the risk presumably is lower.

  By tnias23 2025-09-2323:10

  The studies you cite are the typical ones circulated by antivaxers and are not considered credible by the medical community due to severe methodological flaws, undisclosed biases, retractions, etc.

  To the contrary, high quality studies consistently show that vaccines are not linked to developmental disability or worse health outcomes.

  By boxerab 2025-09-240:18

  Yes! This MUST be why the VAERS adverse event tracker went through the roof right after the rollout began, and why excess death remains sky high in many countries to this day - because a product that didn't stop you from catching or spreading the virus was one of the only things preventing deaths. Couldn't have been our, you know, immune system or anything like that, or that the average age at death was 80 along with several co-morbidities.

  By sazylusan 2025-09-2323:214 reply

  Perhaps free speech isn't the problem, but free speech x algorithmic feeds is? As we all know the algorithm favors the dramatic, controversial, etc. That creates an uneven marketplace for free speech where the most subversive and contrarian takes essentially have a megaphone over everyone else.

  By cptnapalm 2025-09-2323:461 reply

  As I understand it, Twitter has something called Community Notes. So people can write things, but it can potentially have an attached refutation.

  By prisenco 2025-09-240:161 reply

  Community notes is better than nothing, but they only relate to a single tweet. So if one tweet with misinformation gets 100k likes, then a community note might show up correcting it.

  But if 100 tweets each get 1000 likes, they're never singularly important enough to community note.

  By cptnapalm 2025-09-240:321 reply

  Fair enough on that. The problem I've seen (and don't have a good idea for how to fix) is on Reddit where the most terminally online are the worst offenders and they simply drown out everything else until non-crazy people just leave. It doesn't help that the subreddit mods are disproportionately also the terminally online.

  By n4r9 2025-09-2511:06

  Does the "freedom" in free speech mean freedom from censorship, or freedom from being drowned out? People often assume the former, but the latter is worth consideration.

  By hn_throwaway_99 2025-09-2323:291 reply

  Glad to see this, was going to make a similar comment.

  People should be free to say what they want online. But going down "YouTube conspiracy theory" rabbit holes is a real thing, and YouTube doesn't need to make that any easier, or recommend extreme (or demonstrably false) content because it leads to more "engagement".

  By squigz 2025-09-2323:58

  Online, sure. But online doesn't mean YouTube or Facebook.

  By AfterHIA 2025-09-240:081 reply

  I feel that this is the right approach-- the liability and toxicity of the platforms isn't due to them being communication platforms it's because in most practical or technical ways they are not: they are deliberate behavior modification schemes where-in companies are willfully inflaming their customer's political and social sentiments for profit in exchange for access to the addictive platform. It's like free digital weed but the catch is that it makes you angry and politically divisive.

  In this sense platforms like X need to be regulated more like gambling. In some ways X is a big roulette wheel that's being spun which will help stochastically determine where the next major school shooting will take place.

  By prisenco 2025-09-240:141 reply

  Right, engagement algorithms are like giving bad takes a rocket ship.

  The words of world renown epidemiologists who were, to be frank, boring and unentertaining could never possibly compete with crunchymom44628 yelling about how Chinese food causes covid.

  Bad takes have the advantage of the engagement of both the people who vehemently agree and the people who vehemently disagree. Everyone is incentivized to be a shock jock. And the shock jocks are then molded by the algorithm to be ever more shock jockish.

  Especially at a time when we were all thrown out of the streets and into our homes and online.

  And here I'll end this by suggesting everyone watch Eddington.

  By AfterHIA 2025-09-2414:00

  Just wiki'd Eddington and I'm adding it to my watch list. Thanks for the recommend prisenco.

  One of the sentiments I've been flirted with in posts below/above is the idea that while bad takes and their amplification are indeed a kind of societal evil-- in a society which was more effectively mediated bad takes might serve a vital purpose in the discourse. Societies committed to their own felicity might treat disagreements as an opportunity to extend the public discourse. This seems to be the crux of the thing-- we can take all day about checks and balances but unless a society is truly at some level committed to its own preservation and expansion those checks and balances will end up becoming tools for domination and exploitation as we see in the United States.

  It don't care how well you can bake you can't make apple pie with rotten apples. No amount of sugar will correct the rot. Th trick is growing healthy apples.

  By sazylusan 2025-09-2323:25

  Building on that, the crazy person spouting conspiracy theories in the town square, who would have been largely ignored in the past, suddenly becomes the most visible.

  The first amendment was written in the 1700s...

  By Aloha 2025-09-2322:132 reply

  I think it made sense as a tactical choice at the moment, just like censorship during wartime - I dont think it should go on forever, because doing so is incompatible with a free society.

  By llm_nerd 2025-09-2323:122 reply

  It didn't even make sense at the time. It tainted everything under a cloud that the official, accepted truth needed to suppress alternatives to win the battle of minds. It was disastrous, and it is astonishing seeing people (not you, but in these comments) still trying to paint it as a good choice.

  It massively amplified the nuts. It brought it to the mainstream.

  I'm a bit amazed seeing people still justifying it after all we've learned.

  COVID was handled terribly after the first month or so, and hopefully we've learned from that. We're going to endure the negative consequences for years.

  And to state my position like the root guy, I'm a progressive, pro-vaccine, medical science believer. I listen to my doctor and am skeptical if not dismissive of the YouTube "wellness" grifters selling scam supplements. I believe in science and research. I thought the worm pill people were sad if not pathetic. Anyone who gets triggered by someone wearing a mask needs to reassess their entire life.

  But lockdowns went on way too long. Limits on behaviour went on way too long. Vaccine compliance measures were destructive the moment we knew it had a negligible effect on spread. When platforms of "good intentions" people started silencing the imbeciles, it handed them a megaphone and made the problem much worse.

  And now we're living in the consequences. Where we have a worm-addled halfwit directed medicine for his child-rapist pal.

  By LeafItAlone 2025-09-2323:263 reply

  >It massively amplified the nuts. It brought it to the mainstream.

  >COVID was handled terribly after the first month or so, and hopefully we've learned from that. We're going to endure the negative consequences for years.

  In theory, I agree, kind of.

  But also - we were 10+ months into COVID raging in the US before Biden’s administration, the administration that enacted the policies the article is about, came to be. Vaccine production and approval were well under way, brought to fruition in part due to the first Trump administration. The “nuts” had long been mainstream and amplified before this “silencing” began. Misinformation was rampant and people were spreading it at a quick speed. Most people I know who ultimately refused the vaccines made up their minds before Biden took office.

  By jasonlotito 2025-09-242:24

  > But also - we were 10+ months into COVID raging in the US before Biden’s administration, the administration that enacted the policies the article is about, came to be.

  Google makes it very clear that these were choices they made, and were independent of whatever the government was asking. Suggesting these policies are anything other than Google's is lying.

  By llm_nerd 2025-09-2323:46

  Sure, but I'm not remotely blaming Biden[1]. A lot of tech companies took this on themselves, seeing themselves as arbiters of speech for a better world. Some admin (Trump admin) people might have given them suggestions, but they didn't have to do the strong-arm stuff, and the results weren't remotely helpful.

  We already had a pretty strong undercurrent of contrarianism regarding public health already -- it's absolutely endemic on here, for instance, and was long before COVID -- but it mainstreamed it. Before COVID I had a neighbour that would always tell me hushed tones that he knows what's really going on because he's been learning about it on YouTube, etc. It was sad, but he was incredibly rare. Now that's like every other dude.

  And over 80% of the US public got the vaccine! If we were to do COVID again, I doubt you'd hit even 40% in the US now. The problem is dramatically worse.

  [1] That infamous Zuck interview with Rogan, where Zuck licked Trump's anus to ingratiate himself with the new admin, was amazing in that he kept blaming Biden for things Meta did long before Biden's admin took office or even took shape. Things he did at the urging of the Trump admin pt 1. I still marvel that he could be so astonishingly deceptive and people don't spit in his lying face for it.

  By ioteg 2025-09-2322:41

  [dead]

  By Zanfa 2025-09-245:09

  IMO free speech requires moderation, but the "how" is an unsolved problem. In a completely unmoderated environment, free speech will be drowned out by propaganda from your adversaries. The decades of experience and the industrial scale that Russian (or similar) troll factories can manufacture grassroots content or fund influencers is not something that can be combated at an individual level.

  It would be a mistake to think such operations care too much about specific talking points, the goal is to drown out moderate discussion to replace it with flamewars. It's a numbers game, so they'll push in hundreds of different directions until they find something that sticks and also both sides of the same conflict.

  By theshrike79 2025-09-249:38

  The problem is the algorithm.

  Content that makes people angry (extreme views) brings views.

  Algorithims optimise for views -> people get recommended extreme views.

  You can test this with a fresh account, it doesn't take many swipes on Youtube Shorts to get some pretty heinous shit if you pretend to be a young male to the algorithm.

  By tonfreed 2025-09-2322:015 reply

  The best disinfectant is sunlight. I'm similarly appalled by some of the behaviour after a certain political activist was murdered, but I don't want them to get banned or deplatformed. I'm hoping what we're seeing here is a restoration of the ability to disagree with each other

  By LeafItAlone 2025-09-2322:531 reply

  >The best disinfectant is sunlight.

  Is it? How does that work at scale?

  Speech generally hasn’t been restricted broadly. The same concepts and ideas removed from YouTube still were available on many places (including here).

  Yet we still have so many people believing falsehoods and outright lies. Even on this very topic of COVID, both sides present their “evidence” and and truly believe they are right, no matter what the other person says.

  By TeeMassive 2025-09-2323:001 reply

  What's your alternative? The opposite is state dictated censorship and secrecy and those have turned very wrong every single time.

  By LeafItAlone 2025-09-2323:071 reply

  I honestly don’t know. My libertarian foundation want me to believe that any and all ideas should be able to be spread. But with the technological and societal changes in the past 10-15 years, we’ve seen how much of a danger this can be too. A lie or mistrust can be spread faster than ever to a wider audience than previously ever possible. I don’t have solution, but what we have not is clearly not working.

  By api 2025-09-240:13

  The root problem is that people don’t trust authorities. Why? Because they burned that trust.

  People don’t believe the scientific consensus on vaccines because there were no WMDs in Iraq, to give one of many huge examples.

  “But those were different experts!”

  No they weren’t. Not to the average person. They were “the authorities,” and “the authorities” lied us into a trillion dollar war. Why should anyone trust “the authorities” now?

  Tangentially… as bad as I think Trump is, he’s still not as bad as George W Bush in terms of lasting damage done. Bush II was easily the worst president of the last 100 years, or maybe longer. He is why we have a president Trump.

  By tzs 2025-09-241:12

  > The best disinfectant is sunlight

  Have you actually tried to shine sunlight on online misinformation? If you do you will quickly find it doesn't really work.

  The problem is simple. It is slower to produce factually correct content. A lot slower. And when you do produce something the people producing the misinformation can quickly change their arguments.

  Also, by the time you get your argument out many of the people who saw the piece you are refuting and believed it won't even see your argument. They've moved on to other topics and aren't going to revisit that old one unless it is a topic they are particularly interested in. A large number will have noted the original misinformation, such as some totally unsafe quack cure for some illness that they don't currently have, accepted it as true, and then if they ever find themselves with that illness apply the quack cure without any further thought.

  The debunkers used to have a chance. The scammers and bullshitters always had the speed advantage when it came to producing content but widespread distribution used to be slow and expensive. If say a quack medical cure was spreading the mainstream press could ask the CDC or FDA about it, talk to researchers, and talk to doctors dealing with people showing up in emergency rooms from trying the quack cure, and they had the distribution networks to spread this information out much faster than the scammers and bullshitters.

  Now everyone has fast and cheap distribution through social media, and a large number of people only get their information from social media and so the bullshitters and scammers now have all the advantages.

  By DangitBobby 2025-09-240:06

  And not letting the disease spread to begin with is better than any disinfectant.

  By slater- 2025-09-2322:18

  >> The best disinfectant is sunlight.

  Trump thought so too.

  By thrance 2025-09-2322:251 reply

  How's that working out? The worst ideas of the 20th century are resurfacing in plain sunlight because the dem's couldn't pluck their heads out of the sand and actually fight them.

  Now vaccines are getting banned and the GOP is gerrymandering the hell out of the country to ensure the end of the democratic process. Sure, let's do nothing and see where that brings us. Maybe people will magically come to their senses.

  By andrewmcwatters 2025-09-2322:29

  Well, people literally died. So, I think we all know how it played out.

  The same thing since time eternal will continue to occur: the educated and able will physically move themselves from risk and others will suffer either by their own volition, or by association, or by lot.

  By yojo 2025-09-2323:14

  I think there's a difference between silencing people, and having an algorithm that railroads people down a polarization hole.

  My biggest problem with YouTube isn't what it does/doesn't allow on its platform, it's that it will happily feed you a psychotic worldview if it keeps you on the site. I've had several family members go full conspiracy nut-job after engaging heavily with YouTube content.

  I don't know what the answer is. I think many people would rightly argue that removing misinformation from the recommendation engine is synonymous with banning it. FWIW I'd be happy if recommendation engines generally were banned for being a societal cancer, but I'm probably in the minority here.

  By tmaly 2025-09-2521:51

  The issue for me is that kids are on YouTube, and I think there should be some degree of moderation.

  By electriclove 2025-09-2323:551 reply

  I agree and I’m pro vaccines but want the choice on if/when to vaccinate my kids. I believe there were election discrepancies but not sure if it was stolen. I felt the ZeroHedge article about lab leak was a reasonable possibility. All these things were shutdown by the powers that be (and this was not Trump’s fault). The people shutting down discourse are the problem.

  By amanaplanacanal 2025-09-241:211 reply

  You pretty much have the choice about vaccinating your kids. You might not be able to send them to public school without vaccinations though, depending on your local laws.

  By electriclove 2025-09-245:17

  In California, it is required for public schools and many private schools also require it, so effectively it isn't much of a choice.

  By trinsic2 2025-09-240:191 reply

  They don't silence people to stop narratives. People are silenced to cause divisions and to exert control over the population. When people stop using tech they don't control and supporting people or systems that do not have their best interests a heart, only then will we see reach change.

  By brookst 2025-09-240:281 reply

  There is no conspiracy. It’s all emergent behavior by large groups of uncoordinated dunces who can’t keep even the most basic of secrets.

  By trinsic2 2025-09-2416:34

  Its known strategy that happens all the time by corrupt individuals in governments around the world. Its so pervasive, im not going to even to bother posting links.

  By dakial1 2025-09-2413:41

  I used to think like you, believing that, on average, society would expurge the craziness, but the last decade and the effect of social media and the echo chambers in groups made me see that I was completely wrong.

  By hash872 2025-09-2321:484 reply

  It's their private property, they can ban or promote any ideas that they want to. You're free to not use their property if you disagree with that.

  If 'silencing people' doesn't work- so online platforms aren't allowed to remove anything? Is there any limit to this philosophy? So you think platforms can't remove:

  Holocaust denial? Clothed underage content? Reddit banned r/jailbait, but you think that's impermissible? How about clothed pictures of toddlers but presented in a sexual context? It would be 'silencing' if a platform wanted to remove that from their private property? Bomb or weapons-making tutorials? Dangerous fads that idiotic kids pass around on TikTok, like the blackout game? You're saying it's not permissible for a platform to remove dangerous instructionals specifically targeted at children? How about spam? Commercial advertising is legally speech in the US. Platforms can't remove the gigantic quantities of spam they suffer from every day?

  Where's the limiting principle here? Why don't we just allow companies to set their own rules on their own private property, wouldn't that be a lot simpler?

  By softwaredoug 2025-09-2322:041 reply

  I used to believe this. But I feel more and more we need to promote a culture of free speech that goes beyond the literal first amendment. We have to tolerate weird and dangerous ideas.

  By andrewmcwatters 2025-09-2322:271 reply

  Better out in the open with refutations or warnings than in the dark where concepts become physical dangers.

  By benjiro 2025-09-2323:041 reply

  Refuting does not work... You can throw scientific study upon study, doctor upon doctor, ... negatives run deeper then positives.

  In the open, it becomes normalized, it draws in more people. Do you rather have some crazies in the corner, or 50% of a population that believes something false, as it became normalized.

  The only people benefiting from those dark concepts are those with financial gains. They make money from it, and push the negatives to sell their products and cures. Those that fight against it, do not gain from it and it cost them time/money. That is why is a losing battle.

  By int_19h 2025-09-240:18

  Whether something is normalized or not is mostly down to public opinion, not to censorship (whether by the government or by private parties).

  Few countries have more restrictions on Nazi speech than Germany. And yet not only AfD is a thing, but it keeps growing.

  By TeeMassive 2025-09-2322:591 reply

  > It's their private property, they can ban or promote any ideas that they want to. You're free to not use their property if you disagree with that.

  1) They are public corporations and are legal creation of the state and benefit from certain protections of the state. They also have privileged access to some public infrastructures that other private companies do not have.

  2) By acting on the behest of the government they were agent of the government for free speech and censorship purposes

  3) Being monopolies in their respective markets, this means they must respect certain obligations the same way public utilities have.

  By hash872 2025-09-2323:412 reply

  Re: 1- one certain protection of the state that they benefit from is the US Constitution, which as interpreted so far forbids the government to impair their free speech rights. Making a private actor host content they personally disagree with violates their right of free speech! That's what the 1st Amendment is all about

  2. This has already been adjudicated and this argument lost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri

  3. What market is Youtube a monopoly in?

  By themaninthedark 2025-09-246:48

  2. This has already been adjudicated and this argument lost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri

  The 6–3 majority determined that neither the states nor other respondents had standing under Article III, reversing the Fifth Circuit decision.

  In law, standing or locus standi is a condition that a party seeking a legal remedy must show they have, by demonstrating to the court, sufficient connection to and harm from the law or action challenged to support that party's participation in the case.

  Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the opinion, stating: "To establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek. Because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction."

  The Supreme Court did not say that what was done was legal, they only said that the people who were asking for the injunction and bringing the lawsuit could not show how they were being or going to be hurt.

  By TeeMassive 2025-09-2417:52

  1. By accepting unique protections and benefice of and from the state, they are no longer entirely private. 2. See comments below. It doesn't say what you think it says. 3. Google has a quasi monopoly (it doesn't require having full control) and abused it with YouTube with its search result. While it's true that it's not YT entirely by itself.

  By drak0n1c 2025-09-2322:35

  Read the article, along with this one https://reclaimthenet.org/google-admits-biden-white-house-pr...

  In this case it wasn't a purely private decision.

  By rahidz 2025-09-2322:18

  "Where's the limiting principle here?"

  How about "If the content isn't illegal, then the government shouldn't pressure private companies to censor/filter/ban ideas/speech"?

  And yes, this should apply to everything from criticizing vaccines, denying election results, being woke, being not woke, or making fun of the President on a talk show.

  Not saying every platform needs to become like 4chan, but if one wants to be, the feds shouldn't interfere.

  By krapp 2025-09-2323:34

  >A lot of people will say all kinds of craziness, and you just have to let it ride so most of us can roll our eyes at it.

  Except many people don't roll their eyes at it, that's exactly the problem. QAnon went from a meme on 4chan to the dominant political movement across the US and Europe. Anti-vax went from fringe to the official policy position of the American government. Every single conspiracy theory that I'm aware of has only become more mainstream, while trust in any "mainstream" source of truth has gone down. All all of this in an environment of aggressive skepticism, arguing, debating and debunking. All of the sunlight is not disinfecting anything.

  We're literally seeing the result of the firehose of misinformation and right-wing speech eating people's brains and you're saying we just have to "let it ride?"

  Silencing people alone doesn't work, but limiting the damage misinformation and hate speech can do while pushing back against it does work. We absolutely do need to preserve the right of platforms to choose what speech they spread and what they don't.

  By braiamp 2025-09-2323:21

  > But I think we have to realize silencing people doesn't work

  It actually does work. You need to remove ways for misinformation to spread, and suppressing a couple of big agents works very well.

  - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07524-8 - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1... - https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3479525 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.11864

  Obviously, the best solution would be prevention, by having good education systems and arming common people with the weapons to assess and criticize information, but we are kinda weak on that front.

  By wvenable 2025-09-2323:40

  > But I think we have to realize silencing people doesn't work.

  Doesn't it though? I've seen this repeated like it's fact but I don't think that's true. If you disallowed all of some random chosen conspiracy off of YouTube and other mainstream platforms I think it would stop being part of the larger public consciousness pretty quickly.

  Many of these things arrived out of nothing and can disappear just as easily.

  It's basic human nature that simply hearing things repeated over and over embeds it into your consciousness. If you're not careful and aware of what you're consuming then that becomes a part of your world view. The most effective way to bring people back from conspiratorial thinking (like QAnon) is to unplug them from that source of information.

  By ants_everywhere 2025-09-2323:23

  These policies were put in place because the anti-vax and election skepticism content was being promoted by military intelligence organizations that were trying to undermine democracy and public healthy in the US.

  The US military also promoted anti-vax propaganda in the Philippines [0].

  A lot of the comments here raise good points about silencing well meaning people expressing their opinion.

  But information warfare is a fundamental part of modern warfare. And it's effective.

  An American company or individual committing fraud can be dealt with in the court system. But we don't yet have a good remedy for how to deal with a military power flooding social media with information intentionally designed to mislead and cause harm for people who take it seriously.

  So

  > I think we have to realize silencing people doesn't work

  it seems to have been reasonably effective at combating disinformation networks

  > It just causes the ideas to metastasize

  I don't think this is generally true. If you look at old disinformation campaigns like the idea that the US faked the moon landings, it's mostly confined to a small group of people who are prone to conspiracy thinking. The idea of a disinformation campaign is you make it appear like a crazy idea has broad support. Making it appear that way requires fake accounts or at least boosters who are in on the scheme. Taking that away means the ideas compete on their own merit, and the ideas are typically real stinkers.

  [0] https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/167919/20240727/u-s-ad...

  By vkou 2025-09-2321:441 reply

  > But I think we have to realize silencing people doesn't work.

  We also tried letting the propaganda machine full-blast those lies on the telly for the past 5 years.

  For some reason, that didn't work either.

  What is going to work? And what is your plan for getting us to that point?

  By _spduchamp 2025-09-2323:221 reply

  Algorithmic Accountability.

  People can post all sorts of crazy stuff, but the algorithms do not need to promote it.

  Countries can require Algorithmic Impact Assements and set standards of compliance to recommended guidelines.

  By amanaplanacanal 2025-09-241:39

  This seems unlikely to be constitutional in the US.

  By lkey 2025-09-2322:552 reply

  I think you are granting false neutrality to this speech. These misinfo folks are always selling a cure to go with their rejection of medicine. It's a billion dollar industry built off of spreading fear and ignorance, and youtube doesn't have any obligation to host their content. As an example, for 'curing' autism, the new grift is reject Tylenol and buy my folic acid supplement to 'fix' your child. Their stores are already open and ready.

  By lkey 2025-09-2322:59

  To finish the thought, scientists at the CDC (in the before times) were not making money off of their recommendations, nor were they making youtube videos as a part of their day job. There's a deep asymmetry here that's difficult to balance if you assume the premise that 'youtube must accept every kind of video no matter what, people will sort themselves out'. Reader, they will not.

  By mvdtnz 2025-09-2322:571 reply

  And silencing these people only lends credence to their "they don't want you to know this" conspiracy theories. Because at that point it's not a theory, it's a proven fact.

  By lkey 2025-09-2323:071 reply

  These people will claim they were 'silenced' regardless. Even as they appear with their published bestseller about being silenced on every podcast and news broadcast under the sun, they will speak of the 'conspiracy' working against them at every step. The actual facts at hand almost never matter. Even at a press conference where the President is speaking on your behalf they'll speak of the 'groups' that are 'against' them, full of nefarious purpose. There is no magical set of actions that changes the incentive they have to lie, or believe lies. (except regulation of snake oil, which is not going to happen any time soon)

  By mvdtnz 2025-09-2323:121 reply

  And most people roll their eyes and don't believe it. Which is why it's a good idea not to make it true.

  By lkey 2025-09-2323:28

  Conspiratorial thinkers are more likely to believe that Osama Bin Laden was already dead and is still alive rather than the official narrative that he was killed on the day reported. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235449075_Dead_and_...

  In general, you can't argue or 'fact' people out of beliefs they were not argued into. The best you can do is give them a safe place to land when disconfirmation begins. Don't be too judgy, no one is immune to propaganda.

  By fullshark 2025-09-240:33

  It works 99% of the time and you are overindexing on the 1% of the time it doesn’t to draw your conclusion.

  By dyauspitr 2025-09-247:10

  Silencing people is the only thing that works is what I’ve learned on the internet.

  By aesthethiccs 2025-09-244:27

  Yes we should be allowed to bully idiots into the ground.

  By deegles 2025-09-2322:541 reply

  no, letting misinformation persist is counterproductive because of the illusory truth effect. the more people hear it, the more they think (consciously or not) "there must be something to this if it keeps popping up"

  By NullCascade 2025-09-2323:10

  Elon Musk's takeover of X is already a good example of what happens with unlimited free speech and unlimited reach.

  Neo-nazis and white nationalists went from their 3-4 replies per thread forums, 4chan posts, and Telegram channels, to now regularly reaching millions of people and getting tens of thousands of likes.

  As a Danish person I remember how American media in the 2010s and early 2020s used to shame Denmark for being very right-wing on immigration. The average US immigration politics thread on X is worse than anything I have ever seen in Danish political discussions.

  By bencorman 2025-09-2323:42

  I wish someone could have seen the eye roll I just performed reading this comment.

  Silencing absolutely works! How do you think disinformation metastasized!?

  By benjiro 2025-09-2322:58

  Funny thing, several person that counter responded and disagreed got grayed out (aka negative downvoted ... as in censored).

  Reality is, i have personally seen what this type of uncontrolled anti-vax stuff does. The issue is that its harder to disprove a negative with a positive, then people realize.

  The moment you are into the youtube, tiktok or whatever platform algorithm, you are fed a steady diet of this misinformation. When you then try to argue with actual factual studies, you get the typical response from "they already said that those studies are made up"... How do you fight that? Propaganda works by flooding the news and over time, people believe it.

  That is the result of uncensored access because most people do not have the time to really look up a scientific study. The amount of negative channels massive out way positive / fact based channels because the later is "boring". Its the same reason why your evening news is 80% deaths, corruptions, thefts, politicians and taxes or other negative world news. Because it has been proven that people take in negative news much more. Clickbait titles that are negative draw in people.

  There is a reason why holocaust denial is illegal in countries. Because the longer some people can spew that, the more people actually start to believe it.

  Yes, i am going to get roasted for this but people are easily influenced and they are not as smart as they think themselves are. We have platforms that cater to people's short attention span with barely 1~3 min clips. Youtube video's longer then 30min are horrible for the youtubers income as people simply do not have the attention span and resulting lost income.

  Why do we have laws like seatbelt, speed limits, and other "control" over people. Because people left to their own devices, can be extreme uncaring about their own family, others, even themselves.

  Do i like the idea of censorship for the greater good, no. But when there are so many that spew nonsense just to sell their powders, and their homemade vitamine C solutions (made in China)... telling people information that may hurt or kills themselves, family or others.

  Where is the line of that unbridled free speech? Silencing people works as in, your delaying the flow of shit running down a creek, will it stop completely? No, but the delay helps people downstream. Letting it run uninterrupted, hoping that a few people downstream with a mop will do all the work, yea ...

  We only need to look at platforms like X, when "censorship" got removed (moderation). Full of free speech, no limits and it turned into a soak pit extreme fast (well, bigger soak pit).

  Not sure why i am writing this because this is a heated topic but all i can say is, I have seen the damage that anti-vax did on my family. And even to this day, that damage is still present. How a person who never had a issue with vaccinations, never had a bad reaction beyond the sour arm for a day, turned so skeptical to everything vaccination. All because those anti-vax channels got to her.

  The anti-vax movement killed people. There is scientific study upon study how red states in the US ended up with bigger amounts of deaths given the time periodes. And yet, not a single person was ever charged for this, ... all simply accepted this and never looked back. Like it was a natural thing, that people's grandparents, family members died that did not need to die.

  The fact that people have given up, and now accept to let those with often financial interests, spew nonsense as much as they like. Well, its "normal".

  I weep for the human race because we are not going to make it.

  By breadwinner 2025-09-2322:384 reply

  > silencing people doesn't work

  I agree, but how do you combat propaganda from Putin? Do you match him dollar for dollar? I am sure YouTube would like that, but who has deep enough pockets to counter the disinformation campaigns?

  Similar issue with Covid... when you are in the middle of a pandemic, and dead bodies are piling up, and hospitals are running out of room, how do you handle misinformation spreading on social media?

  By JumpCrisscross 2025-09-2322:382 reply

  Slow down our algorithmic hell hole. Particularly around elections.

  By LeafItAlone 2025-09-2322:482 reply

  >Slow down our algorithmic hell hole.

  What are your suggestions on accomplishing this while also bent compatible with the idea that government and big tech should not control ideas and speech?

  By JumpCrisscross 2025-09-2322:501 reply

  > What are your suggestions on accomplishing this while also bent compatible with the idea that government and big tech should not control ideas and speech?

  Time delay. No content based restrictions. Just, like, a 2- to 24-hour delay between when a post or comment is submitted and when it becomes visible, with the user free to delete or change (in this case, the timer resets) their content.

  I’d also argue for demonetising political content, but idk if that would fly.

  By LeafItAlone 2025-09-2323:031 reply

  Ok, but how does that get implemented? Not technically, but who makes it happen and enforces the rules? For all content or just “political”? Who decides what’s “political”? Information about the disease behind a worldwide pandemic isn’t inherently “political”, but somehow it became so.

  Who decides agar falls in this bucket. The government? That seems to go against the idea of restricting speech and ideas.

  By JumpCrisscross 2025-09-2323:05

  > who makes it happen and enforces the rules?

  Congress for the first. Either the FCC or, my preference, private litigants for the second. (Treble damages for stupid suits, though.)

  > For all content or just “political”?

  The courts can already distinguish political speech from non-political speech. But I don’t trust a regulator to.

  I’d borrow from the French. All content within N weeks of an in the jurisdiction. (I was going to also say any content that mentions an elected by name, but then we’ll just get meme names and nobody needs that.)

  Bonus: electeds get constituent pressure to consolidate elections.

  Alternative: these platforms already track trending topics. So an easy fix is to slow down trending topics. It doesn’t even need to be by that much, what we want is for people to stop and think and have a chance to reflect on what they do, maybe take a step away from their device while at it.

  By breadwinner 2025-09-2323:491 reply

  Easy solution: Repeal Section 230.

  Allow citizens to sue social media companies for the harm caused to them by misinformation and disinformation. The government can stay out of this.

  By JumpCrisscross 2025-09-240:051 reply

  > Easy solution: Repeal Section 230

  May I suggest only repealing it for companies that generate more than a certain amount of revenue from advertising, or who have more than N users and have algorithmic content elevation?

  By breadwinner 2025-09-240:10

  That seems like a reasonable middle ground.

  By breadwinner 2025-09-2322:441 reply

  If the government asks private companies to do that, then that's a violation of 1st amendment, isn't it?

  This is the conundrum social media has created. In the past only the press, who were at least semi-responsible, had the ability to spread information on a massive scale. Social media changed that. Now anyone can spread information instantly on a massive scale, and often it is the conspiracy theories and incorrect information that people seek out.

  "We were a bit naive: we thought the internet, with the availability of information, would make us all a lot more factual. The fact that people would seek out—kind of a niche of misinformation—we were a bit naive." -- Bill Gates to Oprah, on "AI and the Future of us".

  By JumpCrisscross 2025-09-2322:461 reply

  > If the government asks private companies to do that, then that's a violation of 1st amendment, isn't it?

  Yes. An unfortunate conclusion I’m approaching (but have not reached, and frankly don’t want to reach) is the First Amendment doesn’t work in a country that’s increasingly illiterate and addicted to ad-powered algorithmic social media.

  By breadwinner 2025-09-2323:43

  It is social media that is the root problem.

  On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. Sacha Baron Cohen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

  Excerpts:

  Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people.

  Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.

  Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.

  By TeeMassive 2025-09-2322:51

  Have you heard about Tik Tok? And you think governments' intelligence agencies are not inserting their agents in key positions at bit tech companies?

  By altruios 2025-09-2322:571 reply

  Censorship is a tool to combat misinformation.

  It's taking a sword to the surgery room where no scalpel has been invented yet.

  We need better tools to combat dis/mis-information.

  I wish I knew what that tool was.

  Maybe 'inoculating information' that's specifically stickier than the dis/mis-info?

  By breadwinner 2025-09-2323:461 reply

  Easy solution: Repeal Section 230.

  Social media platforms in the United States rely heavily on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides them immunity from liability for most user-generated content.

  By DangitBobby 2025-09-240:131 reply

  This would cause widespread censorship of anything remotely controversial, including the truth. We'd be in a "censor first, ask questions later" society. Somehow that doesn't seem healthy either.

  By breadwinner 2025-09-240:271 reply

  Have you visited nytimes.com in recent months? Just this morning the top headline was about the lies Trump told at the UN. That's pretty controversial - the newspaper of record calling the sitting president a liar. That's not allowed in many or most countries, but it is allowed in the US. And Trump is suing New York Times for $15 billion, for defamation. That didn't intimidate NYT. They are willing to stand behind the articles they publish. If you can't stand behind what you publish, don't publish them.

  By DangitBobby 2025-09-240:33

  Publishing your own story is not the same thing.

  By homeonthemtn 2025-09-240:036 reply

  You are on a platform that polices speech. It is evidence that policing speech helps establish civility and culture. There's nothing wrong with policing speech, but it can certainly be abused.

  If you were on the early Internet, you were self policing with the help of admins all the time. The difference was you had niche populations that had a stake in keeping the peace and culture of a given board

  We broke those boundaries down though and now pit strangers versus strangers for clicks and views, resulting in daily stochastic terrorism.

  Police the damn speech.

  By softwaredoug 2025-09-240:345 reply

  For inciting violence. Sure. Free speech isn’t absolute.

  But along with fringe Covid ideas, we limited actual speech on legitimate areas of public discourse around Covid. Like school reopening or questioning masks and social distancing.

  We needed those debates. Because the unchecked “trust the experts” makes the experts dumber. The experts need to respond to challenges.

  (And I believe those experts actually did about as best they could given the circumstances)

  By scuff3d 2025-09-247:37

  Try to post a meme here, see how long it stays up.

  More seriously, it's just not this simple man. I know people really want it to be, but it's not.

  I watched my dad get sucked down a rabbit hole of qanon, Alex Jones, anti-vax nonsense and God knows what other conspiracy theories. I showed him point blank evidence that qanon was bullshit, and he just flat out refuses to believe it. He's representative of a not insignificant part of the population. And you can say it doesn't do any damage, but those people vote, and I think we can see clearly it's done serious damage.

  When bonkers ass fringe nonsense with no basis in reality gets platformed, and people end up in that echo chamber, it does significant damage to the public discourse. And a lot of it is geared specifically to funnel people in.

  In more mainstream media climate change is a perfect example. The overwhelming majority in the scientific community has known for a long time it's an issue. There were disagreement over cause or severity, but not that it was a problem. The media elevated dissenting opinions and gave the impression that it was somehow an even split. That the people who disagree with climate change were as numerous and as well informed, which they most certainly weren't, not by a long shot. And that's done irreparable damage to society.

  Obviously these are very fine lines to be walked, but even throughout US history, a country where free speech is probably more valued than anywhere else on the planet, we have accepted certain limitations for the public good.

  By homeonthemtn 2025-09-240:463 reply

  If I were trying to govern during a generational, world stopping epoch event, I would also not waste time picking through the trash to hear opinions.

  I would put my trust in the people I knew were trained for this and adjust from there.

  I suspect many of these opinions are born from hindsight.

  By xboxnolifes 2025-09-241:372 reply

  Letting fringe theories exist on YouTube does not stop you from accessing the WHO or CDC website.

  By fzeroracer 2025-09-248:191 reply

  Those fringe theories have now embedded themselves into the government itself and directly have contributed to the rot of our public health institutions. So in many ways yes, they do.

  By xboxnolifes 2025-09-2421:12

  That happened while Youtube was not allowing it as well.

  By jdiff 2025-09-2419:18

  Fringe theories existing and being allowed to persist has led to wide takedowns of information from government sites including the CDC.

  By themaninthedark 2025-09-244:391 reply

  Luckily, it is possible for you to just listen to those you trust. No need for you go pick through other people's opinions.

  I don't see how that turns into you needing to mandate what I read and who's opinions I hear.

  By scuff3d 2025-09-247:44

  There has been a massive uptick in anti-vax rhetoric over the last decade. As a result some Americans have decided to not vaccinate, and we are seeing a resurgence in diseases that should be eradicated.

  I have a three month old son. At the time he was being born, in my city, there was an outbreak of one of those diseases that killed more then one kid. Don't tell me this stuff doesn't have a direct impact on people.

  By zmgsabst 2025-09-240:511 reply

  Really?

  Experts have a worse track record than open debate and the COVID censorship was directed at even experts who didn’t adhere to political choices — so to my eyes, you’re saying that you’d give in to authoritarian impulses and do worse.

  By judahmeek 2025-09-241:594 reply

  The problem with debate is that it hinders organized action.

  At some point in any emergency, organized action has to be prioritized over debate.

  Maybe that is still authoritarian, but they do say to have moderation in all things!

  By zmgsabst 2025-09-243:57

  That’s not at all how you’re taught to handle emergencies.

  From health emergencies to shootings to computer system crashes to pandemics — doing things without a reason to believe they’ll improve the situation is dangerous. You can and many have made things worse. And ignoring experts shouting “wait, no!” is a recipe for disaster.

  When we were responding to COVID, we had plenty of time to have that debate in a candid way. We just went down an authoritarian path instead.

  By Gud 2025-09-244:56

  No it doesn't. It allows for correct action to be taken.

  By SV_BubbleTime 2025-09-243:45

  > The problem with debate is that it hinders organized action.

  Ah… so… ”we must do something! Even if it’s the wrong thing”

  Hot take.

  By aianus 2025-09-244:37

  God forbid someone hinder some retarded organized action before enough peoples’ lives are ruined that our majestic rulers notice and gracefully decide to stop.

  By McGlockenshire 2025-09-240:56

  The "debate" ended up doing nothing but spreading misinformation.

  Society as a whole has a responsibility to not do that kind of shit. We shouldn't be encouraging the spread of lies.

  By fzeroracer 2025-09-248:18

  > We needed those debates. Because the unchecked “trust the experts” makes the experts dumber. The experts need to respond to challenges.

  We've had these debates for decades. The end result is stuff like Florida removing all vaccine mandates. You can't debate a conspiracy or illogical thinking into to going away, you can only debate it into validity.

  By epistasis 2025-09-242:071 reply

  Really, discussion was limited? Or blatant lies were rightly excluded from discourse?

  There's a big difference, and in any healthy public discourse there are severe reputations penalties for lies.

  If school reopening couldn't be discussed, could you point to that?

  It's very odd how as time goes on my recollection differs so much from others, and I'm not sure if it's because of actual different experiences or because of the fog of memory.

  By mixmastamyk 2025-09-243:121 reply

  Blatant truths were excluded as well, and that's the main problem. See replies to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45353884

  By epistasis 2025-09-243:591 reply

  That's a really long thread and I'm not sure where blatant truths were excluded.

  By mixmastamyk 2025-09-2415:341 reply

  Each top level reply responds with an example of a truth suppressed.

  By epistasis 2025-09-2416:36

  The top comment is emphatically not that:

  >As super low hanging fruit: > June 8, 2020: WHO: Data suggests it's "very rare" for coronavirus to spread through asymptomatics [0] > June 9, 2020: WHO expert backtracks after saying asymptomatic transmission 'very rare' [1] > 0: https://www.axios.com/2020/06/08/who-coronavirus-asymptomati... 1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/who-expert-bac... > 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.

  My hypotheses for our discrepant viewpoints were 1) my aging memory, or 2) different experiences, but it's actually 3) not using words to have the same meaning!

  Citing this as "blatant truth suppression" weakens my view of any other evidence or argument you put forward, because I no longer trust that we can use words in ways that are compatible with each other.

  By jader201 2025-09-242:511 reply

  > Police the damn speech.

  What happens when the “police” disagrees with and silences what you believe is true? Or when they allow the propagation of what you believe to be lies?

  Who gets to decide what’s the truth vs. lies? The “police”?

  By palmfacehn 2025-09-243:51

  >Who gets to decide what’s the truth vs. lies? The “police”?

  This keeps coming up on this site. It seems like a basic premise for a nuanced and compassionate worldview. Humility is required. Even if we assume the best intentions, the fallible nature of man places limits on what we can do.

  Yet we keep seeing posters appealing to Scientism and "objective truth". I'm not sure it is possible to have a reasonable discussion where basic premises diverge. It is clear how these themes have been used in history to support some of the worst atrocities.

  By StanislavPetrov 2025-09-241:41

  Policing speech for civility or spam is very different than policing speech for content that you disagree with. I was on the early internet, and on the vast majority of forums policing someone's speech for content rather than vulgarity or spam was almost universally opposed and frowned upon.

  By frollogaston 2025-09-242:081 reply

  Depends who is doing the policing. In this case, White House was telling Google who to ban.

  By aeternum 2025-09-245:141 reply

  I think it was even slightly worse. The White House was effectively delegating the decision of who to ban/police to the NIH/NIAID, an organization that was funding novel coronavirus research in Wuhan.

  It's easy to see how at minimum there could be a conflict of interest.

  By frollogaston 2025-09-2419:571 reply

  Did I miss somewhere in the article or Google's statement that the NIH was involved?

  By aeternum 2025-09-2421:14

  Both administrations (Trump 2016 + Biden) adopted the guidance of Fauci and others at the NIH/NIAID more or less directly. So the guidance came through the administrations but originated with the NIH/NIAID.

  You had direct statements like this from scientific experts, those experts turned out to be the middleman group that was funding Wuhan via NIH grants.

  Peter Daszak, a zoologist and president of the EcoHealth Alliance, who has been among the most vocal critics of the idea of a lab leak, wrote, “I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

  Given an expert statement like that, youtube can and did take down lableak videos because they were misinformation (contrary to the information provided by the experts).

  By nostromo 2025-09-240:363 reply

  You've missed the point entirely.

  It’s not if Google can decide what content they want on YouTube.

  The issue here is that the Biden Whitehouse was pressuring private companies to remove speech that they otherwise would host.

  That's a clear violation of the first amendment. And we now know that the previous Whitehouse got people banned from all the major platforms: Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc.

  By dotnet00 2025-09-243:451 reply
  They claim that the Biden admin pressured them to do it, except that they had been voluntarily doing it even during Trump's initial presidency.
  The current administration has been openly threatening companies over anything and everything they don't like, it isn't surprising all of the tech companies are claiming they actually support the first amendment and were forced by one of the current administration's favorite scapegoats to censor things.
  By homeonthemtn 2025-09-240:431 reply
  [flagged]
  By nostromo 2025-09-240:471 reply
  Thankfully the constitution explicitly forbids that in the US.
  By homeonthemtn 2025-09-240:503 reply
  [flagged]
  By themaninthedark 2025-09-241:131 reply
  Huh, last I heard was that Jimmy Kimmel is back on air.
  If the Trump administration had decided to follow through with their threats, ABC could have sued and won.
  Lastly, Jimmy Kimmel could have(and still possibly might be able to) sue for tortious interference.
  By abracadaniel 2025-09-241:361 reply

  Nexstar and Sinclair are still blocking their stations from airing him which accounts for a quarter of the US.

  By frollogaston 2025-09-242:10

  They're private companies. If the reason they're doing this is govt pressure (FCC licenses?), that's not ok though.
  By mensetmanusman 2025-09-241:08
  That was abc, and they just put him back.
  By SV_BubbleTime 2025-09-243:471 reply
  [flagged]

  By zmgsabst 2025-09-240:492 reply

  [flagged]

  By z0r 2025-09-241:49

  There is no mass Marxist movement in the USA. There is a left wing crippled by worse than useless identity politics.

  By homeonthemtn 2025-09-240:51

  [flagged]

  By TacticalCoder 2025-09-240:10

  [dead]

  By heavyset_go 2025-09-2322:24

  [flagged]

  By thrance 2025-09-2322:20

  [flagged]

  By felixgallo 2025-09-2321:424 reply

  [flagged]

  By putzdown 2025-09-2321:512 reply

  No. This perspective is wrong in both directions: (1) it is bad medicine and, (2) the medicine doesn't treat the disease. If we could successfully ban bad ideas (assuming that "we" could agree on what they are) then perhaps we should. If the damage incurred by the banning of ideas were sufficiently small, perhaps we should. But both of these are false. Banning does not work. And it brings harm. Note that the keepers of "correct speech" doing the banning today (eg in Biden's day) can quickly become the ones being banned another day (eg Trump's). It's true that drowning the truth through volume is a severe problem, especially in a populace that doesn't care to seek out truth, to find needles in haystacks. But again, banning doesn't resolve this problem. The real solution is develop a populace that cares about, seeks out, and with some skill identifies the truth. That may not be an achievable solution, and in the best case it's not going to happen quickly. But it is the only solution. All of the supply-based solutions (controlling speech itself, rather than training good listeners) run afoul of this same problem, that you cannot really limit the supply, and to the extent you can, so can your opponents.

  By paulryanrogers 2025-09-2322:061 reply

  What do you think about measures that stop short of banning? Like down ranking, demonetizing, or even hell 'banning' that just isolates cohorts that consistently violate rules?

  By rahidz 2025-09-2322:21

  Not OP, but my opinion is that if a platform wants to do so, then I have zero issues with that, unless they hold a vast majority of market share for a certain medium and have no major competition.

  But the government should stay out of it.

  By felixgallo 2025-09-241:39

  No. You are objectively wrong. It's great medicine that works -- for example, in Germany, and in the US, and elsewhere, it has stemmed the flow of violent extremism historically to stop the KKK and the Nazis. You can't even become a citizen if you have been a Nazi. Even on the small scale, like reddit, banning /r/fatpeoplehate was originally subject to much handwringing and weeping by the so-called free speech absolutists, but guess what -- it all went away, and the edgelords and bullies went back to 4chan to sulk, resulting in the bullshit not being normalized and made part of polite society.

  If you want to live in a society where absolutely anything goes at all times, then could I recommend Somalia?

  By unclad5968 2025-09-2322:003 reply

  Can we stop with the Nazi stuff. I don't know if they stopped teaching history, but there is nothing happening in the US that is within an order of magnitude of the evil the Nazi's perpetrated. Being anti-vax is not comparable to genocide.

  By jjk166 2025-09-2322:241 reply

  The Nazis in 1933 hadn't done anything within an order of magnitude of the evil they would perpetrate in 1943. They nevertheless were still Nazis, and everyone who did not actively condemn them then was in part responsible for what they did later.

  Many evil people weren't Nazis; some Nazis weren't necessarily evil. Evil is not part of the definition of Nazism. Promoting authoritarianism, exclusionary nationalism, institutional racism, autarky, anti-liberalism and anti-socialism are the hallmarks of Nazism. Anyone who holds the beliefs of the Nazis is a Nazi, regardless of what level of success they have to date achieved in carrying out their aims.

  By unclad5968 2025-09-2322:521 reply

  > The Nazis in 1933 hadn't done anything within an order of magnitude of the evil they would perpetrate in 1943. They nevertheless were still Nazis, and everyone who did not actively condemn them then was in part responsible for what they did later.

  Only because what they did in 1943 surpassed anything imaginable. In 1933 the Nazi party immediately banned all political parties, arrested thousands of political opponents, started forcing sterilization of anyone with hereditary illnesses, and forced abortions of anyone with hereditary illness. Evil is absolutely an identifying part of Nazis. The idea that Nazis are just anti-liberals is exactly why we cannot go around calling everyone we don't like Nazis. The Nazis were not some niche alt-right organization.

  If you genuinely think there are Nazis controlling youtube or the government, and all you're doing is complaining about it on hackernews, you're just as complicit as you're claiming those people were.

  By jjk166 2025-09-2323:141 reply

  One is not immune to being a Nazi because they are not evil, being a Nazi makes people evil. Much of the horror of the Nazis was that seemingly normal, reasonable people committed those atrocities; many without even considering that what they were doing was wrong until after the fact.

  We do not call people Nazis because we dislike them, we dislike them because they are Nazis. Most non-Nazis, when accused of being a Nazi, point out how their views differ from the Nazis. I won't claim it's always the case, but the people who argue they can't possibly be Nazis because Nazis are bad, and they are not, typically are.

  The Nazis very much were an alt-right, anti-liberal group. They were more than that; I gave a whole list of core tenets to their beliefs. Overlapping some tiny amount doesn't make someone a Nazi. Hitler being a vegetarian is not an indictment of vegetarians. But if a person were to go through the list of those 6 things the Nazis championed and find themselves championing 4 or 5 of them, it should be cause for alarm.

  By unclad5968 2025-09-241:271 reply

  Listing "anti-liberalism" as one of the worst characteristics of a group that committed genocide, eugenics, enslaved minority groups, and attempted racial extermination is the issue. The idea that being anti-liberal is what makes you a Nazi and not the other stuff is ignorant at best, which is my original point about education.

  By Dylan16807 2025-09-243:23

  That wasn't a list of the worst characteristics. It was a list of useful identifying characteristics. And Nazis were Nazis before they did any genocide.

  By epakai 2025-09-2323:18

  We read the history, a lot of it rhymes. Conservatives failed, and exchanged their values for a populist outsider to maintain power (see Franz von Papen). The outsider demeans immigrants and 'sexual deviants'. The outsider champions nationalism. He pardons the people who broke the law to support him. Condemns violence against the party while ignoring the more common violence coming out of the those aligned with the party. Encourages the language of enemies when discussing political opponents and protestors.

  Nazi has a lot more connotations than genocide. I'm not sure it is worth nitpicking over. Even if you tone it down to Fascist or Authoritarian there will be push back.

  By tehjoker 2025-09-2322:041 reply

  [flagged]

  By unclad5968 2025-09-2322:37

  [flagged]

  By dotnet00 2025-09-2321:482 reply

  How can you say that banning Nazis has worked well considering everything so far this year?

  By felixgallo 2025-09-2322:53

  Europe is sliding, but has done ok so far. Crossing fingers.

  By miltonlost 2025-09-2321:503 reply

  Well it would if we would actually ban Nazis instead of platform them. They haven't been banned. That's the problem.

  By dotnet00 2025-09-2321:571 reply

  You'd have to ban them from society outright without somehow devolving into an authoritarian hellhole in the process (impossible). Trump still primarily posts on a platform specifically created to be a right wing extremist echo chamber.

  By felixgallo 2025-09-241:411 reply

  the choice is not 'devolving into an authoritarian hellhole' or 'give the nazis the ability to do whatever they want'. There is a middle ground that we have lived in for many decades effectively, until recently.

  By dotnet00 2025-09-245:53

  What changed recently? Until the latest admins, most platforms didn't change their stance on what is and is not allowed all too much. I'm not trying to imply that dichotomy, just saying that simply banning nazis is not effective, because they just retreat into their echo chambers and fester until they can trick enough people into giving them power. I don't know what the ideal solution is, but simply banning them doesn't seem to be it, and neither do the two extremes mentioned seem reasonable.

  By cpursley 2025-09-2322:001 reply

  What is a Nazi?

  By indy 2025-09-2322:28

  For a lot of people it's "anyone who I disagree with".

  By knifemaster 2025-09-2322:12

  [flagged]

  By tehjoker 2025-09-2322:031 reply

  [flagged]

  By indy 2025-09-2322:291 reply

  Perhaps not the wisest comment to make in light of recent events

  By tehjoker 2025-09-2323:13

  I didn't say violence. Whatever you read into that comment is a projection. I'm not even sure violence is effective, but something more muscular than op-eds is called for. For example, labor organizing and various forms of self-defense organizations, of which there are many kinds, not only militias. For example, anti-ICE organizing which protects vulnerable people from the gestapo.

  By breadwinner 2025-09-2323:551 reply

  The government created this problem when they enacted Section 230. This is at the root of the misinformation and disinformation... social media companies are not responsible for the harm.

  The simple solution is repeal Section 230. When information can be transmitted instantly on a massive scale, somebody need to responsible for the information. The government should not police information but citizens should be allowed to sue social media companies for the harm caused to them.

  By int_19h 2025-09-240:211 reply

  The practical end result of repealing Section 230 is that companies will crack down on any even remotely controversial speech because that's the only way to avoid lawsuits.

  By breadwinner 2025-09-240:33

  The New York Times has published plenty of stories you could call controversial. Just this morning the top headline was that Trump lied at the UN. Trump has sued the Times for defamation, yet the paper stands by its reporting. That’s how publishing works: if you can’t defend what you publish, don’t publish it. The Section 230 debate is about whether large online platforms such as Facebook should bear similar accountability for the content they distribute. I think they should. That's the only way we can control misinformation and disinformation.

  By dawnerd 2025-09-2323:19

  It also turns into a talking point for them. A lot of these weird conspiracies would have naturally died out if some people didn’t try to shut them down so much.

  By stinkbeetle 2025-09-242:101 reply

  For that matter why is it even such a crazy wild idea for anybody to dare to question medicines and motives from pharmaceutical companies? Or question elections?

  Both have always been massively shady. I'm old enough to remember the big stink around the Al Gore election loss, or the robust questioning of the 2016 election for that matter. So ridiculous for self-proclaimed defenders of democracy to want to ban the discussion and disagreement about the facts around elections. Democratic processes and institutions should be open to doubt, questioning, and discussion.

  The response to covid vaccines was actually extremely rational. They were highly taken up by the elderly who were shown to have the greatest risk, despite that demographic skewing more conservative (and arguably could be most at risk of "misinformation" from social media). And they were not able to stop transmission or provide much benefit to children and younger people, so they didn't get taken up so much among those groups. So there was really no need for this massive sustained psychological campaign of fearmongering, divisiveness, censorship, and mandates. They could have just presented the data and the facts as they came to hand, and be done with it.

  By dotnet00 2025-09-244:011 reply

  With medicine there's pushback because the vast majority of the time, someone's scamming you and you likely don't actually know what you're talking about, we had a ton of this during covid, radioactive jewelery that was supposed to protect you, cow piss (I personally know people who tried this...), 5G towers (actual damage done to all sorts of towers), Ivermectin, Hydrochloroquine and more. People who are sick or have a sick loved one are especially vulnerable to these sorts of things (there's an example of such a victim in the comments), and often end up making things worse by waiting too long or causing further damage.

  With questioning elections, I think Jan 6 would be a pretty good indication of why it wasn't appropriate? This wasn't how questioning the results of elections goes in democracies. Instead, even after courts had investigated, the outgoing president refused to accept the result without any substantiated evidence.

  By stinkbeetle 2025-09-245:091 reply

  > With medicine there's pushback because the vast majority of the time, someone's scamming you and you likely don't actually know what you're talking about, we had a ton of this during covid, radioactive jewelery that was supposed to protect you, cow piss (I personally know people who tried this...), 5G towers (actual damage done to all sorts of towers), Ivermectin, Hydrochloroquine and more. People who are sick or have a sick loved one are especially vulnerable to these sorts of things (there's an example of such a victim in the comments), and often end up making things worse by waiting too long or causing further damage.

  Pushback on what? There's always been new age hippy garbage, Chinese medicine, curing cancer with berries, and that kind of thing around. I don't see that causing much damage and certainly not enough to warrant censorship. People can easily see through it and in the end they believe what they want to believe.

  Far far more dangerous and the cause of real damage that I have seen come from the pharmaceutical industry and their captured regulators. Bribing medical professionals, unconscionable public advertising practices, conspiring to push opioids on the population, lying about the cost to produce medications, and on and on. There's like, a massive list of the disasters these greedy corporations and their spineless co-conspirators in government regulators have caused.

  Good thing we can question them, their motives, their products.

  > With questioning elections, I think Jan 6 would be a pretty good indication of why it wasn't appropriate?

  I don't understand your question. Can you explain why you think Jan 6 would be a pretty good indication that discussion and disagreement about elections should be censored?

  > This wasn't how questioning the results of elections goes in democracies. Instead, even after courts had investigated, the outgoing president refused to accept the result without any substantiated evidence.

  I never quite followed exactly were the legal issues around that election. Trump was alleged to have tried to illegally influence some election process and/or obstructed legal transfer of power. Additionally there was a riot of people who thought Trump won and some broke into congress and tried to intimidate law makers.

  I mean taking the worst possible scenario, Trump knew he lost and was scheming a plan to seize power and was secretly transmitting instructions to this mob to enter the building and take lawmakers hostage or something like that. Or any other scenario you like, let your imagination go wild.

  I still fail to see how that could possibly justify censorship of the people and prohibiting them from questioning the government or its democratic processes. In fact the opposite, a government official went rogue and committed a bunch of crimes so therefore... the people should not be permitted to question or discuss the government and its actions?

  There are presumably laws against those actions of rioting, insurrection, etc. Why, if the guilty could be prosecuted with those crimes, should the innocent pay with the destruction of their human rights, in a way that wouldn't even solve the problem and could easily enable worse atrocities be committed by the government in future?

  Should people who question the 2024 election be censored? Should people who have concerns with the messages from the government's foremost immigration and deportation "experts" be prohibited from discussing their views or protesting the government's actions?

  By dotnet00 2025-09-245:401 reply

  Robbery is a crime, so why should people take any measures to protect their things from being stolen? Murder is a crime, so why care about death threats?

  New age medicine has been around forever, yes. But the effects are only known to be negligible outside of pandemics. We know from history that people did many irrational things during past pandemics due to fear and social contagion.

  It's a tough problem, everyone believes themselves an expert on everything, plus trolls and disinformation campaigns. There's also a significant information asymmetry.

  It's funny you mention opioids as I just recently came across a tweet claiming that Indians were responsible for getting Americans addicted to them via prescription. In one of the buried reply chains, the poster admits they have no evidence and are just repeating a claim someone made to them sometime. But how many people will read that initial post and reinforce their racist beliefs vs see that the claim was unsubstantiated? And when that leads to drastic action by a madman, who's going to be the target of the blame? The responsibility is too diffused to target any specific person, the government obviously won't, madmen don't act in a vacuum and so the blame falls on the platform.

  Yes, no one should have the power to determine what ideas are and are not allowed to propagate, but on the other hand, you could still go to other platforms and are not entitled to the reach of the major platforms, but then again, these platforms are extremely influential. At the same time there's also the problem that people in part view the platforms as responsible when they spread bad ideas, the platform operators also feel some level of social responsibility, while the platform owners don't want legal responsibility.

  By stinkbeetle 2025-09-2411:34

  > Robbery is a crime, so why should people take any measures to protect their things from being stolen? Murder is a crime, so why care about death threats?

  I don't understand how your question relates to the discussion. Perhaps you could answer my earlier questions first and it might clear things up for me.

  Being censored by the robber from discussing the burglary is not a measure to protect your belongings any more than giving the government the power to prevent freely speaking about their carrying out the democratic processes is a measure to protect democracy from abuse by government officials.

  Should Trump have had the power to censor news and discussion of the 2016 election when there were a lot of election deniers and conspiracy theorists concerned about the legitimacy of the election and conspiracies with Russia? Absolutely not.

  > New age medicine has been around forever, yes. But the effects are only known to be negligible outside of pandemics. We know from history that people did many irrational things during past pandemics due to fear and social contagion.

  There are unfounded claims about how much damage was caused by people exercising their right to speak about covid, and they all come from authoritarians who sound like they have ravenous thirst to gain the power to silence their critics and the population at large. So I consider them totally unreliable handwaving at best, and more likely fraudulent fabrications. I actually don't think there's anything wrong with letting them use social media platforms like anybody else. It's fine if those companies decided to decide whose message to amplify or create their own terms of use, but having governments pressure corporations to carry out this censorship is a crazy overreach and violation of human rights by the government.

  The response, policies and messaging and communication by governments and bureaucrats has caused far more damage to society, to public health, to trust in institutions and trust in vaccines and medical science than common people talking about it.

• By cactusplant7374 2025-09-2321:383 reply

  > From President Biden on down, administration officials “created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation,” Alphabet said, claiming it “has consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds.”

  This actually surprised me because I thought (and maybe still think) that it was Google employees that led the charge on this one.

  By softwaredoug 2025-09-2321:401 reply

  It's in their interests now to throw Biden under the bus. There may be truth to this, but I'm sure its exaggerated for effect.

  By nitwit005 2025-09-240:21

  Worth noting that Trump directly threatened to put Zuckerberg in prison for life in relation to this: https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/31/politics/video/smr-trump-zuck...

  I wouldn't trust any public statement from these companies once that kind of threat has been thrown around. People don't exactly want to go to prison forever.

  By HankStallone 2025-09-2321:472 reply

  It was. At the time, they felt like they were doing the right thing -- the heroic thing, even -- in keeping dangerous disinformation away from the public view. They weren't shy about their position that censorship in that case was good and necessary. Not the ones who said it on TV, and not the ones who said it to me across the dinner table.

  For Google now to pretend Biden twisted their arm is pretty rich. They'd better have a verifiable paper trail to prove that, if they expect anyone with a memory five years long to believe it.

  By dotnet00 2025-09-2321:501 reply

  To be fair, even if they were being honest about Biden twisting their arm (I don't buy it), the timing makes it impossible to believe their claim.

  By CSMastermind 2025-09-2323:162 reply

  Why wouldn't you buy it?

  The Twitter files showed direct communications from the administration asking them ban specific users like Alex Berenson, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Andrew Bostom: https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/twitter-files-10th-i...

  Meta submitted direct communications from the administration pressuring them to ban people as part of a congressional investigation: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/27/did-bidens-white-ho...

  It would be more surprising if they left Google alone.

  By dotnet00 2025-09-2323:301 reply

  The implication of saying they were "pressed" by the Biden admin (as they claim in the letter) is that Google was unwilling. I don't buy that. They were complicit and are now throwing the Biden admin under the bus because it is politically convenient. Just like how the Twitter files showed that Twitter was complicit in it.

  By db48x 2025-09-241:061 reply

  Well of course they’re going to say that they resisted doing the bad thing, even though they still did the bad thing. All it took to get them to do the bad thing was for someone to ask them to do it, but they really resisted as hard as they could, honest.

  By braiamp 2025-09-241:291 reply

  Note, that in their letter they carefully avoided mention what happened during Trump 1.0 administration. Their policies started before Biden was president, so this is 100% throwing Biden admin under the bus.

  By db48x 2025-09-241:501 reply

  Do you think that they should omit those facts? That they should fail to mention that the Biden administration used them to censor Americans?

  By dotnet00 2025-09-242:081 reply

  The language they're using implies the Biden admin pressured them to censor (which, as pointed out, doesn't make sense because they were doing it before Biden too), rather than just admitting that they were complicit with the Biden admin to do it.

  By db48x 2025-09-244:131 reply

  Yea, but we can see through their self-serving language. The fact is they decided on a policy of banning “misinformation” that the Biden administration turned into a censorship machine. One is misguided, the other is a crime.

  By dotnet00 2025-09-244:311 reply

  The 1st amendment doesn't prevent the government from making suggestions to private companies. They aren't allowed to coerce them into censoring things. So it still isn't a crime.

  What the Biden admin did was not acceptable, and even at the time I got plenty of heat from HN for thinking that it was a sketchy loophole for the government to use, that it was against the spirit of the law.

  I'm trying to emphasize the distinction because the companys' self-serving language is going to be abused to claim that the current admin - that has just threatened to sue a TV channel for bringing back a show they tried to threaten the channel into getting rid of - is actually a defender of free speech.

  By db48x 2025-09-2610:58

  Ok, I see what you are saying, but I don’t think that there is a loophole here.

  The Executive Branch may only take actions that the Constitution allows (same as the Legislative). These are called the Enumerated Powers. Some of them are simple, like requiring the President to give a State of the Union Address. Others are more complex, like allowing the Executive Branch to negotiate treaties. But it then says “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” So anything not in the Executive Branch’s enumerated powers is illegal for them to do.

  Of course, one of their enumerated powers is to execute any law passed by the Legislature. That is quite open–ended, because Congress can pass any kind of law that they want, right? Well, no. The First Amendment specifically says “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” So we know that there is no law authorizing the the Executive Branch from censoring speech or the press. Thus, the actions of the Biden Administration were illegal. They were explicitly forbidden from taking those actions by the Constitution, and they did it anyway.

  By braiamp 2025-09-2323:261 reply

  If you read those documents, you will see that the administration was telling them that those accounts were in violation of Twitter TOS. They simply said "hey, this user is violating your TOS, what are you gonna do about it?", and Twitter simply applied their rules.

  By db48x 2025-09-241:081 reply

  That was after they had changed the TOS to make it against the rules to talk about certain topics, such as gain of function research at Chinese labs that was funded by researchers that were themselves funded by the US government.

  By braiamp 2025-09-241:281 reply

  Which is still a debunked theory. Nobody created SARS-CoV-2 for nefarious purposes. The best theory we have is that there was a failure in the contention. But people pushing for that theory wanted to have a conspiration instead, when plain human failures explain everything.

  By db48x 2025-09-241:421 reply

  I never said that it was created for nefarious purposes. That was you projecting or creating a straw man to attack.

  By braiamp 2025-09-242:172 reply

  What part of "people pushing for that theory wanted to have a conspiration instead" was missed? I don't care what you think it happened, I just don't want to hear more conspiration. I'm tired of that. We are humans, therefore, we are stupidly imperfect creatures. There isn't anything to learn about the event, other than humans gonna human.

  By tbrownaw 2025-09-244:28

  > There isn't anything to learn about the event, other than humans gonna human.

  US money wasn't supposed to be used to fund that kind of research. So people violated policy and evaded detection until the leak happened. How? Who? Would different audit controls have helped?

  The was a cover-up after the fact. Again, how did it work and who was involved? What could have made it less effective?

  The lab accident itself is the least interesting part, it's all the bureaucratic stuff that really matters. For boring generic bureaucratic-effectiveness reasons, not any "someone tried to do a bioweapon" silliness.

  By db48x 2025-09-244:16

  Except that a lot of what was banned were _not_ conspiracy theories. The truth is that the NIH _did_ fund gain of function research and that research _was_ conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Those are the facts that the government worked so hard to suppress our knowledge of. And they were able to use Google’s policies of suppressing “misinformation” to do it for several years.

  By tstrimple 2025-09-2417:10

  They don't need a paper trail. Conservatives will believe anything damning they see about liberals. Just vague accusations or outright lies work plenty well to keep conservatives foaming at the mouth over imagined issues.

  By frollogaston 2025-09-242:12

  It's been known for years that the White House was pressuring Google on this. One court ordered them to cease temporarily. I wanted to link the article, but it's hard to find because of the breaking news.

• By diego_sandoval 2025-09-2322:564 reply

  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.

  [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52388586

  By danparsonson 2025-09-2323:243 reply

  > 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.

  By rogerrogerr 2025-09-240:164 reply

  As super low hanging fruit:

  June 8, 2020: WHO: Data suggests it's "very rare" for coronavirus to spread through asymptomatics [0]

  June 9, 2020: WHO expert backtracks after saying asymptomatic transmission 'very rare' [1]

  0: https://www.axios.com/2020/06/08/who-coronavirus-asymptomati... 1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/who-expert-bac...

  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.

  By margalabargala 2025-09-240:285 reply

  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

  By zmgsabst 2025-09-240:412 reply

  You’re removing people who were correct before the WHO revised their position.

  By noncoml 2025-09-2411:29

  Were they correct because they studied the data or because it just happened that their propaganda for once aligned with the truth?

  A broken clock says the right time twice a day, that doesn’t mean much.

  ps: I don’t support the bans but you argument seems flawed to me.

  By margalabargala 2025-09-240:53

  That is the problem I discuss in my third paragraph, yes.

  By naasking 2025-09-240:533 reply

  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?

  By xracy 2025-09-244:25

  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.

  By margalabargala 2025-09-240:591 reply

  > 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.

  By gjsman-1000 2025-09-241:011 reply

  Screw that; and HN needs a place to frame the most incredible takes so we never forget.

  By margalabargala 2025-09-241:10

  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?

  By IIAOPSW 2025-09-246:272 reply

  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.

  By naasking 2025-09-2412:301 reply

  > 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.

  By mrbombastic 2025-09-2419:57

  "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 :).

  By Ray20 2025-09-2418:50

  > It is still a good idea to censor the people in category two.

  I mean how can you censor the WHO?

  > WHO initially got wrong

  But they don't got something wrong, they, as you put it, were "bullshitting", and it was obvious to any person with a three-digit IQ

  By brailsafe 2025-09-241:30

  > 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.

  By natch 2025-09-242:381 reply

  They would not utter the word Taiwan. That’s an huge red flag that they are captured and corrupt. Are you claiming this has changed?

  By margalabargala 2025-09-244:04

  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?

  By dazilcher 2025-09-246:21

  > 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.

  By danparsonson 2025-09-241:462 reply

  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?

  By stinkbeetle 2025-09-241:572 reply

  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?

  By danparsonson 2025-09-246:221 reply

  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.

  By stinkbeetle 2025-09-2411:36

  They did contradict themselves. The assertion about "new data" isn't credible, they fucked up.

  By pests 2025-09-243:111 reply

  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.

  By stinkbeetle 2025-09-243:381 reply

  > Did the WHO push for censorship or was it YouTube/Google/others?

  Quite likely the WHO directly or by proxy with members who are also part of bureaucracy and governments in member states.

  There is no question the WHO loves censorship and take an authoritarian approach to their "authority".

  https://healthpolicy-watch.news/the-world-health-organizatio...

  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/13/who-drops-cens...

  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.

  By Jensson 2025-09-247:29

  > 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...

  By f33d5173 2025-09-241:511 reply

  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.

  By danparsonson 2025-09-246:201 reply

  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.

  By f33d5173 2025-09-2416:08

  You're arguing over language, which is arbitrary. We can choose to define the words however we like. Utterly pointless

  By brookst 2025-09-240:231 reply

  Is there a difference between an expert opinion in the midst of a pandemic and an organizational recommendation?

  By rogerrogerr 2025-09-240:231 reply

  Sure seemed like you'd get kicked off YouTube equally fast for questioning either one.

  By thinkingtoilet 2025-09-240:502 reply

  Oh stop it. There was rampant misinformation on youtube all through out the pandemic.

  By rogerrogerr 2025-09-242:402 reply

  Like that the novel coronavirus first seen in Wuhan may have come from the Wuhan Novel Coronavirus Lab?

  Yeah, that was banished to the dark corners of Reddit until Jon Stewart said the obvious, and he was considered too big to censor.

  By Dylan16807 2025-09-242:531 reply

  No. People were talking about it all over.

  By alex989 2025-09-260:14

  And a lot of them got banned on social media for it. It was considered racist and dangerous misinformation for a long time.

  By thinkingtoilet 2025-09-2411:31

  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.

  By mensetmanusman 2025-09-241:021 reply

  And unfortunately much of it was spread by official institutions like the WHO.

  By pylotlight 2025-09-241:48

  and the governments, all of which who were bought and paid for by...... big pharma. This comment was brought to you by Pfizer

  By 1oooqooq 2025-09-241:102 reply

  they also changed the symptoms definitions, so ...

  By danparsonson 2025-09-241:511 reply

  So as researchers learned more about COVID the WHO should've just ignored any new findings and stuck to their initial guidance? This is absurd.

  By 1oooqooq 2025-09-2620:13

  no and that was my point. parent connect was stuck on one change and ignoring the other, when it makes perfect sense when you see all changes

  By wdr1 2025-09-243:481 reply

  > Did they?

  They said it was a fact that COVID is NOT airborne. (It is.)

  Not they believed it wasn't airborne.

  Not that data was early but indicated it wasn't airborne.

  That it was fact.

  In fact, they published fact checks on social media asserting that position. Here is one example on the official WHO Facebook page:

  https://www.facebook.com/WHO/posts/3019704278074935/?locale=...

  By danparsonson 2025-09-246:24

  None of that argues that they contradicted themselves. You and several others have just hijacked this thread to pile on the WHO.

  Argue that they were incompetent in their handling of it, sure, whatever. That's not the comment you're replying to.

  By Manuel_D 2025-09-2415:01

  Some WHO reports were suggesting that lockdowns do more harm than good as early as late 2020.

  By kevin_thibedeau 2025-09-240:286 reply

  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.

  By zeven7 2025-09-244:49

  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.

  By amanaplanacanal 2025-09-240:452 reply

  My memory is that the "lab leak" stuff I saw back then was all conspiracy theories about how it was a Chinese bioweapon.

  Eventually I started seeing some serious discussion about how it might have been accidentally created through gain of function research.

  By api 2025-09-240:56

  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!”

  By naasking 2025-09-241:001 reply

  > 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.

  By gusgus01 2025-09-244:32

  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".

  By potsandpans 2025-09-240:34

  I called this out in this thread and was immediately downvoted

  By McGlockenshire 2025-09-240:51

  > because a global entity was pulling the strings at the WHO'

  excuse me I'm sorry what?

  By cmilton 2025-09-240:407 reply

  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.

  By pton_xd 2025-09-242:243 reply

  > 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.

  By aeternum 2025-09-245:06

  Yes, Jon Stewart really nailed this point, it's a great clip and worth the re-watch.

  By j_w 2025-09-2412:001 reply

  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.

  By kevin_thibedeau 2025-09-2415:15

  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.

  By cmilton 2025-09-2412:111 reply

  Correlation does not equal causation my friend.

  Plenty of people were able to talk about lab leak conspiracies. That is why we are still debating it today.

  By mk89 2025-09-2419:311 reply

  Well, conspiracy theories made by Germany and US I guess? [0]

  I doubt it.

  [0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7vypq31z7o

  By cmilton 2025-09-251:181 reply

  >It assessed the lab theory as "likely", although it did not have definitive proof.

  By mk89 2025-09-2518:56

  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.

  By mayama 2025-09-242:43

  > 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.

  By potsandpans 2025-09-241:021 reply

  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.

  By blooalien 2025-09-246:41

  > "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... :(

  By mensetmanusman 2025-09-241:04

  It’s not a bold claim. The Fauci emails showed he and others were discussing this as a reasonable possibility.

  By naasking 2025-09-241:131 reply

  > 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.

  By tbrownaw 2025-09-243:04

  > Suppressing discussion of this very reasonable observation was beyond dumb.

  I thought it wasn't so much an error as a conflict of interest.

  By themaninthedark 2025-09-244:32

  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.

  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid...

  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.

  https://www.deseret.com/coronavirus/2021/5/24/22451233/coron...

  (..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.

  https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2305081

  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."

  https://www.who.int/news/item/27-06-2025-who-scientific-advi...

  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.

  By natch 2025-09-242:44

  But there is no proof of any real wet lab connection and evidence points to the lab as a source.

  By hyperhopper 2025-09-2323:134 reply

  The united states also said not to buy masks and that they were ineffective during the pandemic.

  Placing absolute trust in these organizations and restricting freedom of speech based on that is a very bootlicking, anti-freedom stance

  By anonymousiam 2025-09-242:594 reply

  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.

  https://egc.yale.edu/research/largest-study-masks-and-covid-...

  (Before you tell me that the story I cited above says the opposite, look at the effectiveness percentages they claim for each case.)

  There's also this: https://x.com/RandPaul/status/1970565993169588579

  By iyn 2025-09-247:47

  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])

  [0] https://www.mpg.de/17916867/coronavirus-masks-risk-protectio...

  [1] https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/upgrading-ppe-for-staff-...

  By dotnet00 2025-09-243:39

  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.

  By pixxel 2025-09-246:01

  [dead]

  By lisbbb 2025-09-243:233 reply

  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.

  By jbm 2025-09-243:39

  I'm sorry about your wife.

  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.

  https://www.concordia.ca/news/stories/2021/07/26/surgical-ma...

  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.

  By D-Machine 2025-09-243:38

  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.

  By iyn 2025-09-247:56

  > 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.

  [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21477136/

  [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19652172/

  By amanaplanacanal 2025-09-240:461 reply

  Yeah they burned a lot of trust with that, for sure.

  By lisbbb 2025-09-243:242 reply

  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.

  By aeternum 2025-09-245:00

  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.

  By alphabettsy 2025-09-243:58

  He’s just bringing different lies with new sponsors.

  By dakial1 2025-09-2413:38

  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.

  But who watches the watchmen?

  By sterlind 2025-09-2323:315 reply

  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.

  By YZF 2025-09-243:39

  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.

  By adiabatichottub 2025-09-2323:382 reply

  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.

  By tbrownaw 2025-09-243:11

  I'd expect questions with that label to have the sort of answers that are a pain to grade.

  By cultofmetatron 2025-09-2323:431 reply

  [flagged]

  By Jensson 2025-09-240:132 reply

  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.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haifa_Oil_Refinery_massacre

  By margalabargala 2025-09-240:35

  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.

  By SamBam 2025-09-240:372 reply

  > Both sides were absolutely abhorrent

  ...and I think OP's point was that they were only showing one side.

  By cultofmetatron 2025-09-241:041 reply

  > I think OP's point was that they were only showing one side.

  exactly my point

  By Jensson 2025-09-241:171 reply

  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?

  By cultofmetatron 2025-09-241:571 reply

  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.

  By Jensson 2025-09-247:481 reply

  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.

  By cultofmetatron 2025-09-2416:55

  >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.

  By tjpnz 2025-09-240:51

  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.

  By blooalien 2025-09-246:29

  > "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... ;)

  By Aurornis 2025-09-244:40

  > 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.