They said they're culling misinformation and they're doing it. I don't see what's terrifying about this. Maybe unsettling if you're aggressively pro-free speech, but 'terrifying' is very hyperbolic.
Yes - get banned on YouTube for disagreeing with WHO
No - go against the data we have so far
The thing with not valuing free speech is that eventually you will find that a rational position you hold (regardless of whether it is actually rational or if you just feel it is) will run afoul of the censors and you will be left without a voice.
"Misinformation" may seem obvious at times. But its classification can very be easily be bent towards any kind of political agenda.
Take one afternoon of your time and just google information on how China identifies videos on their platforms for a variety of reasons and pulls them. Heck, if you make a dumb enough video saying certain things in China, they’ll pull it and give you a little visit. It’s a super slippery slope once you decide ‘we have to do this because we need to protect the public, we know better’.
Here is a larger scenario. I personally think a lab oversight in the Wuhan region could have led to a virus outbreak, enough to at least discuss it. This theory could be deemed by WHO, which could be heavily influenced by Chinese investment, to be lies. With YouTube’s blanket policy, they would be doing the Chinese government’s bidding by getting rid of this lab virus narrative from Youtube (all under the guise of following WHO guidelines).
Anyway, you cannot censor based on an organization or a government’s guidelines.
What’s terrifying about this is that this is the one you heard about. It’s like seeing two bugs in your house: are there 20 more, or 20,000 more?
The insidious part about sometimes-censorship is that it is invisible and deniable. Everyone knows the press in China or under the USSR is/was censored 24/7.
YouTube is only censored sometimes. It’s like a seatbelt that works every day except the day you crash (emergencies/crises are the times when open and free communications systems are most critical to the functioning of society).
I believe this poses an existential threat to a free society, because everyone flocks to these censorship platforms
in peacetime, and they pose a mortal danger in war/crisis. I wrote at length about this failure mode recently:
Before WHO was saying there's no human to human transmission and masks don't help. So anyone who created a video opposing that would get their video taken down.
Later, WHO started claiming the exact opposite. Now anyone who created a video previously will also get taken down.
How exactly do you propose deciding what's misinformation and what's not?
> WHO was saying there's no human to human transmission
This is one of those completely false things that people only believe is true by repetition. Go back and actually read the full set of WHO statements in mid-January. They have a bunch of statements saying that nations should get prepared, one saying that specific studies haven’t yet found hard evidence for person-to-person transmission (because at that point most of the cases they’d managed to find were tied to the market). The WHO never, ever said that it can’t be transmitted, and they absolutely never said that people should do nothing about COVID-19. They were urging nations to act for months before they actually did.
"At this stage, there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission in the novel #coronavirus (2019-nC0V) outbreak in #Wuhan, #ChinaFlag of China. However, the Chinese authorities continue intensive surveillance and follow-up measures, including environmental investigations."
https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1216397232427147264
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳."
https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
"The Committee does not recommend any travel or trade restriction based on the current information available.
Countries must inform WHO about travel measures taken, as required by the IHR. Countries are cautioned against actions that promote stigma or discrimination, in line with the principles of Article 3 of the IHR."
https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/30-01-2020-statement-on...
We should also point out that the WHO is once removed from a state body. Youtube could have easily adopted CDC guidelines as their measuring stick, in which case Youtube would be censored by the United States government.
Then the question becomes, hows does the government decide what is and what isn’t misinformation? The overwhelming answer should be ‘government shouldn’t be determining that’.
