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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

By that logic can they remove videos claiming masks are effective at protecting yourself and society from the virus? Because I seem to recall the WHO (or I think it was the CDC?) blatantly lying about the efficacy of masks in order to keep them available to health professionals.

I think this underscores why I'm so uncomfortable with YouTube doing censorship (or anyone doing it). The official narrative is not always right.

In fact anytime we have a new discovery in science it starts out in contrary to the official accepted explanation and only gradually and often grudgingly gains acceptance over time. If you silence dissenting voices you also silence progress. Which is maybe why China struggles to innovate compared to the West.

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My understanding has always been that good science is supposed to be falsifiable. If the new rules are science can only be dictated by authoritative institutions and cannot be publicly questioned, is it still science?

The primary issue is that "dictating" has been implemented with owning the channels and making bad decisions with the channels consensus process. The Internet needs to be reworked to get rid of these large corporations being able to own channels, but Hell if I know how to do it.

>By that logic can they remove videos claiming masks are effective at protecting yourself and society from the virus?

Cry wolf when this actually happens. I try not to be dismissive, but the repeated harping about masks strikes me as a lack of original thought at best and a coordinated smear campaign at face value.

We get it: the WHO should've recommended masks full-throatedly. But your interpretation that a YouTube policy will be applied maliciously without any justification for why doesn't convince me.

I doubt it will be, or least I hope not. But at some point they'll cross the line, they may have already done so and I just don't know about it.

I don't like censorship. It's dangerous. It's the tool of choice of authoritarians everywhere. Free speech, even of opinions we find distasteful or downright ugly, is still worth upholding.

I want to add that hate speech is a different thing, but where one draws the line there is also a slippery slope.

Look at deplatforming of people like Steven Pinker or Jordan Peterson to see how actually quite moderate, well reasoned, well spoken people are getting censored. That's a disturbing trend.

Because I seem to recall the WHO (or I think it was the CDC?) blatantly lying about the efficacy of masks in order to keep them available to health professionals.

WHO is still lying, CDC has done a 180 and now recommends masks. So I suppose we should expect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPx1yqvJgf4 to get taken down anytime now.

Good; I just reported it for “harmful and dangerous acts.”

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