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'Why YouTube's New Plan to Debunk Conspiracy Videos Won't Work' (vortex.com)
Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein believes YouTube's plan to combat conspiracy videos with "information cues" is "likely doomed to be almost entirely ineffective."
The kind of viewers who are going to believe these kinds of false conspiracy videos are almost certainly going to say that the associated Wikipedia articles are wrong, that they're planted lies... Not helping matters at all is that Wikipedia's reputation for accuracy -- never all that good -- has been plunging in recent years, sometimes resulting in embarrassing Knowledge Panel errors for Google in search results...
The key to avoiding the contamination...is to minimize their visibility in the YouTube/Google ecosystem in the first place... Not only should they be prevented from ever getting into the trending lists, they should be deranked, demonetized, and excised from the YouTube recommended video system. They should be immediately removed from YouTube entirely if they contain specific attacks against individuals or other violations of the YouTube Terms of Service and/or Community Guidelines. These actions must be taken as rapidly as possible with appropriate due diligence, before these videos are able to do even more damage to innocent parties.
The key to avoiding the contamination...is to minimize their visibility in the YouTube/Google ecosystem in the first place... Not only should they be prevented from ever getting into the trending lists, they should be deranked, demonetized, and excised from the YouTube recommended video system. They should be immediately removed from YouTube entirely if they contain specific attacks against individuals or other violations of the YouTube Terms of Service and/or Community Guidelines. These actions must be taken as rapidly as possible with appropriate due diligence, before these videos are able to do even more damage to innocent parties.
'nuff said.
Lauren's supposition that Wikipedia information will simply be ignored and that Youtube should simply censor the videos is based on a dodgy notion that censoring speech we don't like is somehow better than combating it with truths. Yes, they may ignore Wikipedia but not all of them. It may take longer but it's the more righteous path than censoring. imho
The problem is that they think they know best for everyone else. Their default position is authoritarian and dictatorial.
The best way to entrench an idea is to tell someone they're wrong, and be a smug, condescending, elitist asshole while doing so.
So... Basically why the Democrats lost in 2016, and why the left in general is losing the culture war. They can't get over how fucking smart they think they are, and how stupid everyone else is for not thinking the same thing.
Because you need humans for debunking.
And humans are biased.
AI won't be of effective help as it lacks trasversale knowledge.
And in the end, you need humans to train AI and to sample the outcomes.
It won't work.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Sounds just like what someone would do if they were PART OF THE CONSPIRACY!
The problem with Lauren's proposal is: Who decides. No matter which side of the debate you are on, picking the other side, saying they are lying, and then censoring them, only makes them believe that they are being censored & oppressed. Do that enough and you'll get the Trump supporters who don't believe anything printed about him in the MSM. On the flip side, Bernie's supporters were claiming their votes were being scammed by the DNC, until it turned out to be true. But if the truth had been censored because it was "lies", the truth would never have come out.
It's how opposing voices are to be swept from public view & dissemination. Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al are all working along the same path to de-platform views conflicting with Leftist/Progressive dogma and silence them. It's not too far down this path where we get to the pogroms, camps, and ovens part.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
This debunking of conspiracy videos by YouTube was instigated by the trifecta of the Illuminati, the Catholic Church and the United Nations all coordinated by the Girl Scouts of America.
You THINK you're buying cookies but you're really getting the annual booster of the mind controlling drugs they put in the cookies.
I won't even begin to tell you guys what Ben &Jerry have been doing - that DAMN ice cream!!
1. New category called Bunk, or Yet another conspiracy theory.
2. Use AI, or modify existing algorithms to mimic an AI that can figure out what appears to be a conspiracy theory.
These are just as asinine as what has been put forward. The third option is best viewed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyyoaBa7DaE
The conspiracy theorists would say that "they" are wrong. "They" often being Jews, which is the line of thinking that led to the holocaust. You can't win, just let them live in their bubble and make sure they don't hurt anyone in the real world.
A single video with some far-out theory? Crackpot.
A far-out video with a host of other videos and links claiming it's false? Obviously a kernel of truth someone is trying to cover up, they can't tell me what to think...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is the same retard who thinks:
https://plus.google.com/+Laure...
And now he thinks censorship will work?
Only cowards censor.
Why?
Ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away.
ONLY by having a rational discussion, where people are FORCED to confront their biases will they ever learn to see the pros/cons of BOTH sides.
Seen the "top torrents" list on Demonoid lately? Packed with conspiracy videos.
"Conspiracies" are real things. For example, the October Revolution; 9/11 official story, assassination of Julius Cesar, failed Cuban coup attempt by the CIA, etc. The entire program is instinctively ignored when the very words used communicate to users that there is some kind of attempt to manipulate them.
Youtube are idiots who're really busy virtue signalling in a way that doesn't get them called out on censorship.
Lauren Weinstein is a complete and utter fuckwit who thinks the content of the proposal matters somehow and proposes to censor, thereby making youtube arbiters of who gets to have free speech and who doesn't.
Both are idiots and for their sins need to get off the internet.
It implies that someone over at there has inside knowledge of all and any conspiracies and can arbitrarily decide on their validity.
Sometimes the best course of action is no action at all..
The people most against free expression always have similar sounding last names
Whatever solution or mitigation one suggests, if it cuts into google ad revenue it is a non starter. As far as Google is concerened.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You can go on YouTube and see all shows of videos "proving" the Earth is flat. The shape of the Earth being round doesn't require complicated physics and a graduate degree yet people insist it is flat. There is nothing you can do to change the minds of these people.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
No- no- you shouldn't be censoring results. People should discern for themselves what is and isn't true. There is a far greater danger to implementing censorship to democracy than there is from dumb fuckers believing some conspiracy non-sense. We already have tyrants in power- we don't need to further erode our freedoms to a point where we're all living in a NAZI or Soviet like shit hole. The United States is already well on that path and other countries like the UK have certainly achieved a great deal of this already. What we fought against in ww2 and during the cold war has been resurrected for implementation in Europe and is being pushed in the United States today. Censorship and redistribution of wealth schemes. At least with these older systems you could pay people off and they'd go away. Not so much with the European-style theft.
Devil's advocate: Adblockers go to great technical lengths to let you ignore the problem of too many ads on too many websites.
The economics doesn't lie - Tax doesn't fund spending, and cant fund spending.
Yet this is against the mainstream politics view that it does and we need to cut spending, or increase tax to reduce the deficit.
Will the mainstream attempt to limit visibility of these 'fake' articles that say tax does not fund spending?
Big corporations and government, protect us from people who lie or who we disagree with on the internet. It's too hard to do our own research into facts or be educated enough to make valid counterpoints. Love, the Sheeple
In my sleepy little California town, the Girl Scouts are selling their cookies directly outside the door of the weed dispensary. HOW DEEP DOES THIS RABBIT HOLE GO?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Originally, I was very supportive of the whole LGBT movement and feminism etc., but, it seems like they've just veered into a place where they are anti-free-speech, anti-white-man, anti-man, anti-normal. If you don't have some kind of social dysfunction, then you are the problem. It couldn't possibly be that they are wacko!
And how do you propose forcing someone to confront their biases? Like this?
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Almost all debunked by now.
And that's propagated by the mainstream Fake News.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You can't legally call yourself a business if you disriminate.
If you want to bake wedding cakes as an amatuer for your straight friends, that's perfectly legal.
All those activities are what one *expects* to do with their computer.
Why would this make me want to switch to Ubuntu? What makes it unique?
Nothing like a good ol' call for censorship early in the morning. If we get rid of conspiracy theory videos, might as well get rid of any religious videos. Also, if someone really does find out something and tries to publish it on youtube at least... instantly crushed. :) Maybe one day we'll be like Germany and the US government itself will be threatening fines for unliked information.
Munchies, maaan....
If YouTube gets it wrong and besmerches someone with their fact checking couldnâ(TM)t that open them up to libel or slander claims?
We know. EVERYONE knows guys.
The Wikipedia articles ARE wrong.
They ARE planted lies.
That's WHY Google is doing this.
... oh, 'yeah ... Reddit ...
This is the challenge, where the alternative to YouTube is Breitbart... And where YouTube would censor half of what's on the onion for being mean spirited.
Yuck. Just. Yuck.
There are no pros/cons of "both sides". There is no "both sides". That's bullshit. I'm not going to politely explain to a Nazi why he's wrong. That's insane.
I don't respond to AC's.
Now can you figure out why Michael Isikoff's book about the collusion between Trump and Russia is selling way more than 12 Rules?
Yes, because people enjoy a good fantasy that meshes with ideological beliefs.
Myself, I like Trump but think people who spend their precious free time thinking about him are insane. Doubly so if they hate him...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You'd lose the views and the adverts sold on those things are bound to be profitable. If you're gullible enough to think the last two or three school shootings were false flag operations you're probably in the market for some expensive supplements, some gold, or a bucket of food for that shed you call a bunker.After all, there's a sucker born every minute.
The way you stop this is funding schools, especially the liberal arts. e.g. reading. Critical thinking is a skill and like any skill it can be taught. You're not going do do that with STEM. If you're bright enough for STEM you're usually bright enough to figure out critical thinking on your own. There's a reason the well to do always insist on a solid liberal arts education for their kids. It's how you teach dumb people to think.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What is truth and what is conspiracy theory? Or what is Truth or what is PROPAGANDA?
Just because the government or the media says it makes it true? Is there REAL video of the incident or is it staged like a Hollywood film? How do you know Trump is REALLY president? You saw something on the Television, video, on the news? How do you know it's not a Hollywood staged video? Where YOU personally there WHEN it happened?
You were ON SITE and physically SAW JFK shot by Oswald right? You PERSONALLY were on the 6th floor of the Texas Book Repository and WATCHED Oswald shoot JFK correct? You personally saw Oswald take 3 shots in 5.6 seconds with a Carcano bolt action rifle (which by the way too many experts have said and shown it CAN'T be done)?
Just remember - how many people who heard the radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" that it was REALLY happening? Millions.....
The truth is what YOU PERCEIVE it is, it doesn't make it fact. The truth is what YOU want to believe, it doesn't make it fact.
"Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it."
- Adolph Hitler
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
- Josph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister
"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State."
- Josph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister
"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."
- Josph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister
"It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion."
- Josph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister
"Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play."
- Josph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister
"Education is dangerous - Every educated person is a future enemy"
- Hermann Goering
The Truth is a Virus!!!
All they will do is serve as a friendly reminder to everyone watching the video to update the wiki with the information learned in the video.
I know several Flat Earthers... they certainly don't believe it is a joke. They are very serious. Almost all serious Flat Earthers are that way for religious reasons... they already believe totally bizarre stuff and the trip to Flat Earth isn't that far of a walk.
You should be able to, but not for his sake. If a Nazi can politely explain why multiculturalism is wrong and will lead to failure, and you can't provide any sort of counterargument then he will end up winning that debate. It doesn't matter if there isn't ever any formal debate, the idea of using censorship in the modern era is so self-defeating and stupid I almost think it's being done on purpose.
Once a person has been "caught" in a conspiracy theory is like being caught in a cult. They become evidence immune.
1. All evidence that disproves the conspiracy is planted and thus part of the conspiracy. It must be suppressed.
2. All evidence that can be construed as even remotely supporting the conspiracy is the only true evidence. It must be echoed.
3. All lack of evidence either way is proof of a cover up by the conspiracy. The lack of it proves the conspiracy.
4. Any authority figure that speaks out against the conspiracy is part of the conspiracy. They must be suppressed.
5. Any authority figure that agrees with the conspiracy is part of the enlightened ones and is the only trusted source of truth. They must be echoed.
Once someone has sunk that deep into a conspiracy theory (and I'm sure several readers have) there really isn't any point arguing with them or disagreeing with them or trying to engage with them in any meaningful way, they are lost.
Seriously. Now if the weed dealers were dealing outside the school... oh, wait.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
They cannot stand differing views.
In the minds of these brutes, there is One Truth.
STUPID WHITEY can be seen in many countries, including Germany.
I here it is also prevalent in Sweden.
And Londonistan.
The Mohammedists openly shit on everybody else and call for the enslavement and/or killing of everybody else.
As they are very cunning and ocassionally wealthy, they do get away with it.
Happy circumcision, STUPID WHITEY !
Only due to Old White Men, Hillary, Lockheed Martin and General Atomics were stopped from showing their full potential !
Imagine all the money and all the nice careers arising from MORE WAR. War with Iran, War with Yemen, War War War !
You leftists really must make sure more Matriachic warmongers will be lifted into high office !
Lets hope you Marxists will drag down America into the shithole she belongs after destroying the peace in so many countries !
Mao and Stalin killed 3x of whom Hitler killed. And they were the teachers of Hitler. He witnessed their acts in the 20s, when he was still a low level guy.
Same with Mohammedism: extremely deadly for those who do not comply.
Jews killed millions in Russia from 1917 onwards. Basically the entire Russian elite was killed or driven out of country.
They also screwed you over in 1929 and 2008.
We need to set up a Ministry Of Truth to "protect them from themselves" ???
Because that is essentially what the Marxist 1% supporters like Weinstein suggest.
In other words, accept what the New York Moneymen and their Propaganda Artists declare to be the Truth.
FUCK THAT !
Now lets ban all pro-fagott, pro-lesbian propaganda on y-tube and we will see what happens.
After all, it is "googles private platform", har har.
If we only had a slightly better censorship system, nobody would have to be sent to the GULAG !
You Murricans still suffer from being allied with the jews who killed millions in Russia before Hitler came to power ?
Look up Uljanov and his henchmen.
Or the french revolution.
A "soviet" of elite Hollywood movie makers will decide what is the truth and what is not.
Another soviet will decide which people are enemies of the state and will be shipped off to an extermination camp. You cannot call that a KZ, though. It is a much more noble institution, which we call a GULAG. Also, it predates the KZ.
...it's Fash the Nation!
Farewell, youtube
Well, I can tell you how NOT to do it.
By trying to ignore the issue.
That doesn't work.
seriously if you are getting your information on topics from youtube videos you are already too far fucked up to be worth saving. Besides which throwing a spotlight on conspiracy theory garbage has the opposite effect, it reinforces it as after all why give focus to something and spend time debunking unless you have something to hide. You can't win arguments with people that have already burned out most of their logic brain cells.
The freedom to publish.
The freedom to comment.
The ability to search and find a result with out another site getting placed over the results for political reasons.
The freedom to search for any topics like history.
The freedom to comment on politics.
To talk about topics like illegal immigration.
To talk about their OS.
Cryptography and maths.
About cars and trucks.
The more a US party political brand attempts to get between the user and their use of search the more users will look for a better search brand.
Stop putting party political SJW politics between the user and the way a user wants to use the internet.
Give the user the results they want not new layers of your brands politics.
Freedom sells. Censorship makes users seek out freedom.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The author may well be right that the Wikipedia links are ineffective.
But then the author asserts the *right* way to do it is by big-brother suppression as if YouTube knows what should and shouldn't be suppressed. RED FLAG!!!!
Let's not support THAT approach, as YouTube has it's own profit-motive Ed bias and no other qualifications as an arbitor of truth.
For God's sake, let's not ever encourage sensorship!!!
Already YouTube is suppressing independent media in search results and is allegedly unsubscribing users without consent. I'm sure lots if other channels have experienced this.
Wikipedia went through their hurdles long ago. As in 10-15 years ago. It is being managed at surprisingly good levels. It hasn't outwardly programmatically changed in all that time.
This is testament to the basic 'pull' tech of ordinary HTML.
The only real problem is the 'push' technologies that support rapid spread of ideas, any idea, good or bad. Eliminate 'push'ing and the fake news problem mostly goes away.
Let the Web go back to what it was intended to be - an information repository.
My favorite example is when he said that Disney's Little Mermaid is superior to Disney's Frozen because one comes from classical mythology and one was written by SJWs. They were both written by Hans Christian Anderson.
But does Disney's The Little Mermaid preserve the themes of H. C. Andersen's original story more closely than Frozen keeps the themes of "The Snow Queen"?
There are no pros/cons of "both sides". There is no "both sides". That's bullshit. I'm not going to politely explain to a Nazi why he's wrong. That's insane.
1) There are clearly at least two sides, one containing you and another containing Nazis.
2) It's not "...why he's wrong." but "...why you disagree with him."
3) It's not insane, it's tolerance, a key element of civility.
and, because I can tell you're a lefty,
4) "...to a Nazi why he's wrong." implies all Nazi's are men. This is sexist. You must use "...to a Nazi why they're wrong."
ALL totalitarian mass-murdering governments are creatures of the LEFT.
Soviet Union which mass-murdered tens of millions while spying on everybody - Communist (Marxist, and therefore LEFT wing)
Pol Pot who massacred millions - Communist (Marxist, and therefore LEFT wing)
Chairman Mao who massacred tens of millions while spying on everybody - Communist (Marxist, and therefore LEFT wing)
Benito Mussolini - Italian leading socialist (Marxist, and therefore LEFT wing) who invented fascism as a "better" form of socialism.
Adolph Hitler who massacred millions and ignited a world war - National Socialist German Workers Party (Marxist, and therefore LEFT wing)
Left wing politicians, educators, and historians has spent decades trying to re-write history to assign Hitler to the right wing, in a very dishonest attempt to pretend that both the left and the right have their bad guys and that the one on the right is the worst. This does not erase all the millions of captured NAZI documents, audio recordings, and films in archives all over the world in which the NAZIs push NATIONAL SOCIALISM and their track record of socialist policies, and all the documents pre-WWII in which left wing elites in the US and Europe praised "Herr Hitler" for his socialist "miracle" in the 1930s.
The ONLY legitimate way to claim Hitler was "right wing" is from the perspective of the very warped political spectrum of Europe where the political center is so far over on the left that it it to the left of Hitler's national socialism and thus to the further left of the average European you see communists and to the right you see Hitler and the populace is on a very narrow knife edge between these two evils WAY over on the left of the human political spectrum.
I hope they are going to also debunk videos about religion since magic is not real.
if it wasn't for free speach, I would have never learned about how the ix86 BIOS and interrupts work on x86 architecture DOS tsr programs. A conspiracy is nothing more than a plan in motion, whileba theory ofbsuch only predicts the damages as does a weatherman.
When you spoke in terms of 'conspiracy theory', you just converted a right into a privilege. What is worse, a multi-national corp announcing a conclusion of a calamity with it's own assessments is nothing more than propoganda competing with another assessment.
Free speach isn't supposed to garble a message in transit like how Youtube does. by the way, Youtune protocol allowed pop-up captions earlier and discontinued it 10 years ago, now re-enabling it for privileged governmental use.
gtfo.
This is the same retard who thinks:
https://plus.google.com/+Laure...
"For the record, I don't run any ad blockers. Basically, I consider them unethical"
The right to not be subject to unsolicited advertising arises under the 9th Amendment, as a right retained by the people, and the 10th Amendment, as a right reserved to the people. While Congress is limited by the 1st Amendment, the Bill of Rights is a higher legal authority and does have the authority to limit advertising, even that delivered through speech or the press.
Hence, he has things exactly backwards: it's not only ethical to use ad-blockers, it is protection of a right that is routinely being violated by businesses in this day and age. It's the businesses that are being unethical - and the lawyers, and the government, in allowing the Bill of Rights to be violated on a routine basis. Every time I get an unsolicited email offer, or I get junk mail from businesses and have to spend time and money to throw it out, my rights are being violated. It's no different from people leaving their garbage in front of my door because they're too lazy to throw it out themselves. Sociopaths.
If a specific citizen wants to receive advertising from a specific business or class of business, they can sign up for it. All marketing should be opt-in - and opting out should be easy.
Further, the type of advertising to be received must be governed by an opt-in provision. If one does not wish to receive loud audio advertising that can cause permanent hearing damage, one should not have to do so by opting out of advertising with an audible component. The advertisers have no way of knowing what sound level the audience is using - people who are already hard of hearing will probably have the volume up and thus will be vulnerable to sound levels that might not cause harm to others.
This should have been addressed long ago - and would have been addressed by any sort of ethical and competent government. The US legal profession has taken the massively unethical position that their time is valuable - and thus they can charge others for it - but the time of others is not valuable - and thus people can not charge others for sending unsolicited advertising to them in violation of their rights.
If websites wish to be paid on advertisements, to be compliant with the Bill of Rights they must give people the option to opt-in to advertising from specific vendors, or a specific class of vendors - and until they implement that, they're breaking the law.
+1 Excellent points! Mod up!
> The US legal profession has taken the massively unethical position that their time is valuable - and thus they can charge others for it - but the time of others is not valuable
Indeed. The greed of the legal system and their desire to maintain the status quo (It is illegal to "practice" law without having _their_ permission while ignoring the fact that founding fathers WERE lawyers is conveniently ignored.)
The problem is they don't respect anyone else. That reminds of an old joke:
Q. Why don't sharks attack lawyers?
A. Professional courtesy.
Notice what Tacitus said a few thousand years ago.
The more numerous the laws the more corrupt the state.
These scum over-complicate EVERYTHING. The tax code is 73,954 pages!!! WTF!?!?!
Instead of having ONE, EASY, sentence: "10% of all income is taxed" instead we get this bloated shit with so many loop-holes you have to pay an expert to "legally minimize" your fair share.
> All marketing should be opt-in - and opting out should be easy.
Agreed !
Should Slashdot delete openly racist, sexist, antisemitic posts? Obviously their policy is not to. They're also not reliably hidden. I'm reading at +1 and I see comments to this story whose only content is antisemitic propaganda. If Slashdot chooses to publish these, why shouldn't Google?
I know TFA is about "conspiracy theories". I think that's not the real issue. We all know what sort of conspiracy "theories" we're talking about. It's a euphemism. OTOH I wouldn't dismiss any opinion only because it postulates a conspiracy. Conspiracies have happened in the past and were uncovered and proven beyond doubt.
Not only should they be prevented from ever getting into the trending lists, they should be deranked, demonetized, and excised from the YouTube recommended video system.
This is going to be the precise reaction to this line;
LAUREN (((WEINSTEIN))) IS IN ON THE (((MOON LANDING))) AND (((CLIMATE CHANGE))) LIIIIEEEESSSS! Look at how we're being oppressed, they're cutting off our money for exposing the truth! - Conspiracy theorist
It sickens me that her idea is "TAKE AWAY THEIR MONEY HIDE THE VIDEOS REEEEEEEEEEEEE" instead of "Refute and respond, prevent YouTubers from deleting or disabling comments from their videos". Do you have any idea how many scammers put vids up and disable comments in order to prevent their lies and scams from being pointed out? Here's a hint; every fucking one of them. For starters; that vegan woman who pressured her aunt into abandoning cancer therapy, resulting in her death. All comments disabled on her lies.