> No, censoring that content including videos is NOT the role of a hosting platform.
Huh? If I ran a hosting platform and people were putting absolute BS on there, I'd remove it too. People who run hosting platforms want to have integrity.
The WHO denied human-to-human transmission even after Taiwan told them about it, and they dug their heels on calling the outbreak a pandemic for weeks.
I think it depends how youtube draws the line. If they’re removing stuff like “use colloidial silver” or “no need to wash your hands” then sure. But the WHO is not gospel.
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.
"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"
> The WHO denied human-to-human transmission even after Taiwan told them about it
I don't think anyone on HN needs to be told that "there are no clear evidence of human to human transmission" is not the same as "there are evidence that human to human transmission is not possible" which is how everyone is trying their hardest to interpret it as.
> even after Taiwan told them about it
Do you have a primary source about it? Every time someone references it, it's an editorial obfuscating the embarrassing primary source of Taiwan's "warning" email from December 31 which reads:
"News resources today indicate that at least seven atypical pneumonia cases were reported in Wuhan, CHINA. Their health authorities replied to the media that the cases were believed not SARS; however the samples are still under examination, and cases have been isolated for treatment.
I would greatly appreciate it if you have relevant information to share with us.
Thank you very much in advance for your attention to this matter."
where they're asking for the WHO's help clarifying something they heard over the news.
Taiwan told them about human-to-human transmission in December, and the WHO responded by repeating CCP propaganda verbatim in January saying there was no evidence of it.
Note that at the time WHO had zero access to China, because of the cover-up ongoing.
"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,"
Actually, technically that is the WHO summarising results from preliminary investigations by the Chinese authorities.
Saying that that is the WHO making that claim is incorrect, a kind of logical fallacy. It's like a newspaper reporting on the words/claims of a celeb or politician, and folk claiming that those words/claims were actually the newspaper's claims.
> Saying that that is the WHO making that claim is incorrect, a kind of logical fallacy.
WHO is in fact making that claim at the behest of China. The are not reporting like a newspaper as you claim, because a newspaper would have a duty to investigate the claims, the WHO just took China at their word and republished it.
WHO is the UNs international health organization and they are supposed to be independent. The onus is on the WHO to publish this alleged “preliminary investigation” referenced by the Chinese Authorities (hint: it does not exist). Once they admit there was no actual written report of the “preliminary investigation” or data provided by the Chinese Authorities, then they can identify the actual Chinese Authority who made the representations to the WHO, and we can continue to peal back the layers.
Do you think repeating propaganda designed to cover-up a huge outbreak is responsible for such an organization? At the time of that tweet they had zero access to China.
It may not have explicitly stated that there was no human to human transmission, but that was strongly suggestive that there wasn’t.
The default assumption should be, that a virus affecting hundreds of people already, could be contagious. Suggesting otherwise, with no reasonable evidence to support such, is deliberately obfuscating if not deliberately misleading. There was absolutely no reason to make such a statement other than to parrot without question what was being reported by the PRC.
Considering Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus received support from the PRC in his candidacy for leadership of the WHO, and the significant ties between his home country of Ethiopia and the PRC, I’m skeptical that it was just absolute ignorance without any political influence or bias that prompted such a statement.
That’s totally true, but I don’t think it should be controversial to say that the WHO lied by omission, and that their statement was intentionally intended to convince countries _not_ to lock down.
"No clear evidence" uncovered in a "preliminary investigation" was a completely true statement. They never ever said "okay, this definitely isn't transmissible, everybody can ignore it". They said in the early stages that it was too soon to be sure. All the other tweets from this period are saying the same thing: something might be coming, so countries should prepare.
The errors the WHO has made have generally been corrected and so far as reliable authorities go on the pandemic there isn't a more reliable one, even if all are fallible. It's a better standard than nothing for stopping misinformation from killing people.
I agree that they're generally have good advice. But, I looked at their mask guidance, and they're still recommending that healthy people do not need to wear masks.
This ignores the possibility that people may be asymptomatic and contagious. Some government authorities have called for mask wearing outside. They are contradicting the WHO.
Should Youtube remove these views? That's why I said it all depends just how strictly they're going on WHO guidelines. If they're only removing obvious nonsense, fine. But the WHO should not be the only authority, especially if different health authorities may disagree.
Did the WHO explicitly deny human transmission? Their earliest reports I saw said “we have no confirmed evidence of human transmission, but we are likely to find it”. It’s the second half of the sentence that people and the media seem to have ignored.
>“From the information that we have it is possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission, potentially among families, but it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, acting head of WHO’s emerging diseases unit. The WHO is however preparing for the possibility that there could be a wider outbreak, she told a Geneva news briefing. “It is still early days, we don’t have a clear clinical picture.”
I didn't see where they said that second half, do you have a source? Because all I saw was a tweet from them saying that they haven't found any evidence of human to human transmission.
This is a ridiculous assumption. For two obvious examples, Art Bell attracted plenty of advertisers, as did early-day Howard Stern.
Some advertisers do, and some do not. Don't lump them all into a single bucket. YouTube is creating an environment that guarantees a future without Art Bells or Howard Sterns.
The concern you raise could easily be remedied with a single checkbox on the advertiser portal labeled "Display this Campaign on Fringe Content". The fact that with the enormous technical capability of Google, they choose not to do this and instead decide that they know the advertisers' preferences better than the advertisers themselves demonstrates clearly that this is about power and control, not ad revenue or serving the customer.
If that was the reason, why ban instead of just demonetizing those videos, like YouTube already does with tons of other videos that are not "advertiser-friendly"?
Huh? If I ran a hosting platform and people were putting absolute BS on there, I'd remove it too. People who run hosting platforms want to have integrity.