It seems to me that a lot of people are missing the forest for the trees on misinformation and censorship. IMO, a single YouTube channel promoting misinformation, about Covid or anything else, is not a huge problem, even if it has millions of followers.

The problem is that the recommendation algorithms push their viewers into these echo chambers that are divorced from reality where all they see are these videos promoting misinformation. Google's approach to combating that problem was to remove the channels, but the right solution was, and still is today, to fix the algorithms to prevent people from falling into echo chambers.

Yeah, there are two main things here that are being conflated.

First, there's YouTube's decision of whether or not to allow potentially dangerous misinformation to remain on their site, and whether the government can or did require them to remove it.

Second, though, there's YouTube's much stronger editorial power: whether or not to recommend, advertise, or otherwise help people discover that content. Here I think YouTube most fairly deserves criticism or accolades, and it's also where YouTube pretends that the algorithm is magic and neutral and they cannot be blamed for actively pushing videos full of dangerous medical lies.

The problem is that misinformation has now become information, and vice versa, so who was anyone to decide what was misinformation back then, or now, or ever.

I like the term disinformation better, since it can expand to the unfortunately more relevant dissenting information.

Why. Why is Google obligated to publish your content? Should Time Magazine also give you a column because they give others space in their pages? Should Harvard Press be required to publish and distribute your book because they do so for others.

These companies owe you nothing that's not in a contract or a requirement of law. That you think they owe you hosting, distribution, and effort on their algorithm, is a sign of how far off course this entire discourse has moved.

I've argued this before, but the algorithms are not the core problem here.

For whatever reason I guess I'm in that very rare group that genuinely watches everything from far-right racists, to communists, to mainstream media content, to science educational content, to conspiracy content, etc.

My YT feed is all over the place. The algorithms will serve you a very wide range of content if you want that, the issue is that most people don't. They want to hear what they already think.

So while I 100% support changing algorithms to encourage more diversity of views, also I think as a society we need to question why people don't want to listen to more perspectives naturally? Personally I get so bored here people basically echo what I think. I want to listen to people who say stuff I don't expect or haven't thought about before. But I'm in a very significant minority.

The problem with this is that a lot of people have already fallen into these misinformation echo chambers. No longer recommending them may prevent more from becoming unmoored from reality, but it does nothing for those currently caught up in it. Only removing the channel helps with that.

The algorithm doesn't push anyone. It just gives you what it thinks you want. If Google decided what was true and then used the algorithm to remove what isn't true, that would be pushing things. Google isn't and shouldn't be the ministry of truth.