This also raises concerns for me around the question of freedom of speech and censorship. I fear we are centralizing too much power into a few private companies that effectively wield more power than the government and the people for whom it represents.

I'd rather have freedom of speech even if it means tons of misinformation out there.

If and when there is some information that is unpopular but critical for people to know, I don't want censorship to be the norm.

I wish the WHO made more transparent arguments about the utility of masks. Their failure and apparent flip-flop gives the crazies low-hanging fruit and ethos.

If you stop people knowing he is also talking about this then the only people left to talk about it are the regular normal seeming folks. Channels like this https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsAwM1EqcYXKeIEufJqwWjw/vid... thousands of views per video, seems like any normal bloke you'd chat to down the pub.

So well done by silencing a known eccentric you just made the only voices in this conspiracy the normal everyday folks, if regular people searched this theory and Icke popped up they might have actually questioned it because they don't want to be associated with the lizard guy.

Someone showed me the Icke lecture, and so we discussed what are easy ways we could falsify his claims. E.g. countries with high incidence of covid19 and no 5g.

Especially when the conspiracy theory is so easily debunked the media should handle such cases more liberally. Think of it as inoculating the population against misinformation.

I do tentatively agree there are some kinds of misinformation that should be suppressed, but any such thing should be very exceptional, and very well explained. Otherwise, the media will end up being the modern Catholic church and go the way of the reformation. The church has spent centuries undoing the mistakes it made handling Luther's and other's criticisms.

> One falsely suggests 5G suppresses the immune system, the other falsely claims the virus is __somehow using the network's radio waves to communicate and pick victims, accelerating its spread.__

(__ emphasis mine)

W T Actual F people!

Facepalm.

If it were true it might be one of the greatest discoveries of all time ;)

Can't remember him when he was a footballer, but I wonder how many times he headed the ball ;-)

I swear to god I thought the internet would be so different in 2020.

Before (and even after) the ban there was a lot of good information on YouTube, a lot of it was from trained medical professionals and now it’s all going away and people will be left with gossip and guesses.

Or is actually saving lives to much bother and it's more fun attacking people who believe in reptilians?

I understand why it's harmful to spread anti-vax memes, but 99% of "misinformation" is harmless. It's often difficult to separate theory and conspiracy from harmful information, a dubious concept.

> This includes conspiracy theories which claim that the symptoms are caused by 5G.

Yeah, fair point. But it's a red herring.

> For borderline content that could misinform users in harmful ways, we reduce recommendations. We'll continue to evaluate the impact of these videos on communities around the world.

This one is KEY. Truth is, the majority of views comes from the Recommended, Trending and Next to Play. No one without a direct link will see your video, if it's nerfed by the algorithm. Checkmate.

Corona is a very heated topic with many unknowns. Deciding what can and can not be labeled as misinformation is thus very tricky even for an expert, because there is a very fine line between misinformation and speculation (which is different in the sense that it's done in good faith and thus perfectly fine). Who's going to make these decisions? A private corp with zero transparency?

We sorely need very clear distinction (maybe even legal - e.g. a framework for Terms of Service) between media and medium. With the former being free to set arbitrary rules, push agendas, ban otherwise harmless content, fuck with content promotion in whatever ways they want, etc. And the latter providing just the infrastructure and technical means to publish content with minimal governance. Status of being either of these must be granted upfront and then prohibited to change.

Otherwise every "social media" platform will eventually mutate into a weaponized propaganda machine, promoting the interests of its stakeholders and greater powers-that-be and suppressing any dissenting opinion. This temptation is evidently impossible to resist.

https://www.facebook.com/londonreal/videos/206277527340570/?...

If 5G wasn't in the news, it would be something else. Suppressing the signal only makes it stronger, because now you've "proven" that "the elite can't allow the secret information out".

David Icke is preaching to the choir, he isn't converting anyone. Nobody who is otherwise capable of sound reasoning is going to watch him and go: "I might disagree with this person on whether Zionist Reptile Shapeshifters are controlling the world, but his analysis of the effects of 5G on human health and COVID-19 seem credible!"

Conspiracy thinking is extremely common even among clinically sane people. The "cure" is not suppression, not derision, but letting people figure it out how their mind sometimes works against them. The biggest obstacle is the human ego.

My only complaint is that Icke wasn't demonetized over this. He should be banned from the platform entirely. He's actively harmful to society.

If you ever wanted a trip through la la land go visit his website's forums....

Its a not so coherent and less nasty version of 4Chan where everyone is off the hinge. some more than others.

It’s really depressing these theories, anti vaccine, and anti science ideas are gaining so much momentum in recent years. And then the world governments pull something like they just did, saying masks don’t work when in fact they help... how can you ever convince anti science people to trust, well, science and governments when this happens??

I suspect this will become a bigger and bigger problem, with more and more people dying of illnesses we have vaccines for. Very sad.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/business/media/turkey-syr...