John R. Houk, Blog Editor
© April 26, 2020
A FEE article points that Youtube
owned by Google who is owned by Alphabet is preparing to censor any
video that does not tow the Communist World Health Organization (WHO) line on COVID-19. FEE author Dan
Sanchez points impending Youtube censorship is something you can nothing about
because it is a privately owned company. Meaning the government can’t censor
Youtube, but Youtube can censor whomever they please. Even if that means
favoring Communist propaganda over truth.
YOU – a private citizen – can abandon Youtube during
censorship to more friendly video platforms such as Vimeo,
Dailymotion,
DTube,
BitChute,
Brighteon,
Liveleak,
etc.
I’m also cross posting an Activist
Post article that not only touches on Youtube censorship
but examines some of the WHO’s Liberty-robbing demands (e.g. no alcohol during
COVID), WHO bad-science idiocy to support Communist China, local police
persecuting teenager for posting their Instagram experience on Instagram AND
Harvard upset closed Public Schools are allowing homeschooled students to
bypass Leftist-society brainwashing.
JRH 4/26/20
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from home business –
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YouTube to Ban Content That Contradicts WHO on COVID-19,
Despite the UN Agency’s Catastrophic Track Record of Misinformation
The policy represents a betrayal of the pioneering
platform’s founding principles.
Susan Wojcicki - Image credit: TechCrunch on Flickr | CC BY 2.0
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
By Dan Sanchez
April 23, 2020
Soon, YouTubers
will be silenced if they don’t agree with the United Nations on public health.
As The Verdict reports:
YouTube will ban any content
containing medical advice that contradicts World Health Organisation (WHO) coronavirus
recommendations, according to CEO Susan Wojcicki.
Wojcicki announced the policy on CNN on Sunday. WHO is an
agency of the UN, charged with overseeing global public health. The Verdict
report continues:
Wojcicki said that the Google-owned
video streaming platform would be “removing information that is problematic”.
She told host Brian Stelter that
this would include “anything that is medically unsubstantiated”.
“So people saying ‘take vitamin C;
take turmeric, we’ll cure you’, those are the examples of things that would be
a violation of our policy,” she said.
“Anything that would go against
World Health Organisation recommendations would be a violation of our policy.”
While the decision has been
welcomed by many, some have accused the streaming giant of censorship.
To be clear, for American YouTubers, this kind of censorship
is not a violation of their constitutional right of free speech. The First
Amendment protects citizens against government censorship, and YouTube
is a private platform. Were the US government to force the private owners of
YouTube to continue broadcasting certain videos against their will, that
would be much more a violation of the First Amendment.
While YouTube’s decision is not unconstitutional, it is
unwise, exhibiting far too much deference to central authority in general and
to WHO especially.
WHO’s Track Record on the Issue
The World Health Organization is far from infallible. Its
handling of information throughout the coronavirus emergency has been a long
string of failures. As policy analyst Ross Marchand has recounted here on FEE last week, WHO failed to raise the
alarm as the coronavirus rapidly spread through China during the crucial early
period of the global crisis in January of this year. Then, as Marchand wrote:
The global bureaucracy uncritically reported that Chinese
authorities had seen "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of
the novel coronavirus” on January 14, just one day after acknowledging the first case outside of China
(in Thailand). WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for
his “political commitment” and “political leadership” despite these repeated,
reprehensible attempts to keep the world in the dark about the coronavirus.
President Donald Trump recently announced that the US would
cease its funding of WHO over its many
coronavirus-related failures.
And it is not just American conservatives who have been
critical. As FEE’s Jon Miltimore wrote a month ago:
Our World in Data, an online publication
based at the University of Oxford, announced
on Tuesday that it had stopped relying on World Health Organization (WHO) data
for its models, citing errors and other factors.
This raises an interesting question: would YouTube censor
Oxford if it posted a video on the coronavirus issue with recommendations based
on data that contradicts WHO’s?
As Miltimore wrote, “Recent reports suggest US intelligence
agencies relied heavily on WHO in its national
assessment of the COVID-19 threat.”
This is gravely concerning because bad information leads to
bad policies. This is true not only for government policy (like mayors,
governors, and heads of state deciding to largely shut down the economy in
their jurisdiction), but for the policies of private decision-makers like doctors,
business-owners, and individuals making decisions about the health and overall
lives of themselves and their families.
Indeed, WHO’s misinformation early in the crisis squandered
the most precious part of the world’s prep time, which likely crippled the
public’s responses and may have cost many lives.
YouTube risks compounding that tragedy by now insisting that
the public’s response to the coronavirus emergency conforms even more strictly
with WHO’s dubious pronouncements. Wojcicki wants to protect WHO’s
recommendations from contradiction. But WHO’s recommendations are necessarily
informed by WHO’s information, which has proven to be extremely suspect.
Sheltering untrustworthy pronouncements risks amplifying their dangerous
influence.
Why Censorship Is Counter-Productive
So, it is ironic that YouTube justifies this policy in the
name of protecting the public from dangerous misinformation.
It is true that many videos contradicting official
pronouncements are themselves full of medical quackery and other misleading
falsehoods. But, censorship is the worst way to combat them.
For one, censorship can actually boost the perceived
credibility of an untruth. Believers interpret it as validation: evidence that
they are onto a truth that is feared by the powers-that-be. And they use that
interpretation as a powerful selling point in their underground evangelism.
Censorship also insulates falsehoods from debunking,
allowing them to circulate largely uncriticized in the dark corners of public
discourse.
This makes censorship especially counterproductive because
it is open-air debunking that is one of the most effective ways to counter
misinformation and bad ideas. As Justice Louis Brandeis expressed in a US
Supreme Court opinion, the ideal remedy for bad speech,
“is more speech, not enforced silence.”
Again, YouTube has a right to set the terms of service of
its own website. But the general principle applies here as well: the truth has
a much better fighting chance with a proliferation of competing voices than
with inquisitorial efforts to circumscribe discourse within a narrow orthodoxy.
A Systematic Problem
Moreover, WHO’s track record of misinformation is not
exceptional among government organizations in neither its degree of error nor
in its disastrous impact. Governments and the experts they employ not only get
things wrong but have frequently proven to be fundamentally wrong-headed on big
questions.
To take another example in the realm of public health, it is
increasingly widely recognized that the high-carb,
low-fat diet recommendations, as depicted by the USDA’s “Food Pyramid,” and
successfully promoted for decades to the population by the US government and
the most respected authorities on dietary science and epidemiology, was
basically backward. Science journalist Gary Taub tells the whole story of bad
science, corrupt influence, and obtuse orthodoxy in his book Good Calories, Bad Calories.
Again, bad information leads to bad advice which leads to
bad choices. So how much illness and even death was caused by generations of
Americans uncritically swallowing “official” diet advice and by Americans
largely only having one choice on the “menu” of diet advice?
The more we centralize decision-making and the management of
actionable information, the wider the scope of the damage caused by any single
error. But if we let a thousand errors bloom along with a thousand truths, any
single error will be circumscribed in its damage and more likely to be
corrected through experience and counter-argument.
Knowledge Problems
Champions of policies like YouTube’s like to cast the issue
in simplistic terms: as a black-and-white battle between respectable experts
and wild-eyed crackpots. But the issue is more complex than that.
It is just as often a matter of overweening technocrats
making pronouncements on matters that are way beyond them in complexity, that
involve factors that fall way outside their domain of expertise, and that
drastically impact the lives of millions or even billions. For example: a few
dozen epidemiologists, with limited understanding of economics and a great many
other relevant disciplines, holding sway over whole economies.
It is also a matter of dissenting experts being
silenced along with the actual crackpots.
And, perhaps most fundamentally, it is a matter of weakening
the individual’s ability to discern between truth and falsehood, good advice
and bad, by denying them the responsibility and practice of doing so in the
first place—of turning self-reliant, free men and women into irresponsible
wards to be led by the nose like dumb, deferential livestock by their “expert”
caretakers.
That is not where we are, but that is the direction that the
rigid enforcement of centralized orthodoxies tends toward.
A Challenge
Let’s choose a different direction. YouTube, do better.
Trust your users more. Treat them like human beings with all the capacities for
learning, growth, discourse, and cooperation that are the distinctive glories
of being human.
After all, that is what made you great in the first place.
Your very name is derived from your original faith in the individual. YouTube
(a crowd-sourced, individual-driven, pluralistic platform) is what made the boob
tube (centralized, institutionalized, and homogenizing broadcast television)
largely obsolete. As such, you had a starring role in the internet’s
democratization of information and learning.
Don’t betray that legacy. Not now. Not when we need open
platforms for the free flow of information and discourse more than ever.
Dan Sanchez is the
Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the
editor of FEE.org.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Coronavirus Response: Ban Alcohol, Free Speech, and
Homeschooling (This Week’s Dystopian News)
April 24, 2020
For this week’s round-up of articles, we’re taking a look at
some of the things the government thinks should be banned in response to
coronavirus.
WHO urges governments to ban alcohol during lockdown
Last week we talked about how the World
Health Organization was coming for your sick family members.
This week, they want your booze.
WHO says that alcohol compromises the immune system. And
since we are fighting a virus, they think that prohibition is necessary.
In fact, alcohol restrictions can be justified by
governments for the same reason coronavirus lockdowns are needed.
WHO notes that even in good times, alcohol is the cause of
major health issues, addiction, and death. Alcohol accounts for 3 million
deaths per year worldwide– far more than the coronavirus.
So it almost seems like WHO’s argument for banning alcohol
has little to do with the coronavirus.
If it’s all about good health and saving lives, why not
mandate a WHO-approved diet and exercise regimen for the masses as well? Why
not ban sugar while they’re at it?
Where does the madness stop?
Not that you can disagree with the WHO anyhow…
Speaking of which, it’s difficult to even disagree with the
WHO anymore; YouTube’s CEO indicated yesterday that her video platform would
delete any content that goes against official WHO guidance.
Specifically she told CNN: “Anything that goes against WHO
recommendations would be a violation of our policy.”
Bear in mind that the WHO was totally incompetent,
especially in the early days of this pandemic. Here’s a quick review:
December 31: China first
notifies WHO of the outbreak
January 5: WHO “does not
recommend any specific measures for travellers” and “advises against the
application of any travel or trade restrictions on China”
January 23: Even as China
begins its lockdown of Wuhan and the virus spreads across Asia, WHO still
insists “it is still too early to declare a PHEIC” [Public Health Emergency of
International Concern].
January 30: WHO still “does
not recommend any travel or trade restriction” and praises the Chinese
government’s “commitment to transparency.”
February 27: After many
countries began introducing travel restrictions, WHO lamented that these
restrictions would lead to “unnecessary interference with international
traffic, including negative repercussions on the tourism sector.”
March 11: After more than
100,000 cases in dozens of countries worldwide, WHO finally declares this a
global pandemic.
Oh I almost forgot: the WHO is the same organization that
made a brutal murderer– former Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe– one of its
GOODWILL ambassadors! You can’t make this stuff up.
And now YouTube wants to ban content that disagrees with an
organization that is corrupt and incompetent.
Police threaten arrest for Instagram post about
coronavirus
Amyiah Cohoon is a high school
sophomore who went on a band trip to Disney World in March.
When she came back home she developed a fever and dry cough
and doctors “concluded that her symptoms matched those of COVID-19.”
Amyiah posted a picture from the Disney trip on Instagram
with a caption telling her friends she had Covid-19 and would not be able to
see anyone for a while she quarantined herself.
After a short stay in the hospital, Amyiah posted a picture
from her stay, again with a caption that she was recovering from Covid-19.
The next day, a Sheriff’s Deputy knocked on the family’s
door. He demanded that Amyiah delete the Instagram posts, or else he would cite
the family for disorderly conduct and “start taking people to jail.”
The family offered to show the Deputy the documents from the
hospital proving that doctors believed Amyiah had Covid-19. The Deputy was not
interested.
He said the Sheriff told him to make sure the posts were
deleted, because the county officially had no confirmed cases of Covid-19.
Intimidated, and threatened with jail, Amyiah compiled and
deleted the posts.
Turns out it was the school superintendent who contacted the
Sheriff about the Instagram post who claimed it was Amyiah’s “foolish means to
get attention.”
Harvard professor: parents can’t be trusted with their
kids
With American schools closed, homeschooling is the new
normal for many families. This trend was already increasing, and will probably
be accelerated by fears of the continuing spread of coronavirus.
But a Harvard professor Elizabeth Bartholet, the faculty
director of the Child Advocacy Program at the law school, is calling for a ban
on homeschooling.
She says that homeschooling, “not only violates
children’s right to a meaningful education and their right to be protected from
potential child abuse, but may keep them from contributing positively to a
democratic society.”
She adds that a large percentage of homeschool families are
driven by conservative Christian beliefs, which she seems to think constitutes
child abuse. . .
Professor Bartholet says that some parents are deliberately
trying to keep their kids from the mainstream culture taught in schools which
includes “democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of
other people’s viewpoints.”
Yep. She’s all about tolerance of other people’s viewpoints.
As long as those viewpoints conform with her own. Otherwise she’s not tolerant.
It is hard to imagine that this is a real person, and not a
caricature villain created by Ayn Rand.
Source: The Daily Bell
_______________________________
Leftist Censors to Support
Communist Line
John R. Houk, Blog Editor
© April 25, 2020
________________________________
YouTube to Ban Content
That Contradicts WHO on COVID-19, Despite the UN Agency’s Catastrophic Track
Record of Misinformation
_______________________________
Coronavirus Response: Ban
Alcohol, Free Speech, and Homeschooling (This Week’s Dystopian News)
Activist Post
- ALTERNATIVE INDEPENDENT NEWS - Creative Commons
2019
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