YouTube starts mass takedowns of videos promoting ‘harmful or ineffective’ cancer cures | The platform will also take action against videos that discourage people from seeking professional medical ...
YouTube starts mass takedowns of videos promoting ‘harmful or ineffective’ cancer cures | The platform will also take action against videos that discourage people from seeking professional medical ...
It’s attempting to streamline its health moderation policies.
YouTube starts mass takedowns of videos promoting ‘harmful or ineffective’ cancer cures | The platform will also take action against videos that discourage people from seeking professional medical ...::YouTube will remove content about harmful or ineffective cancer treatments or which “discourages viewers from seeking professional medical treatment.”
Thank you. Finally.
My mum had cancer. The number of such bullshit videos i got sent, offering no real hope, was painful. It's heartbreaking to toy with people in that situation.
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that probably means that advertisers started to have issue with that, and it didn't bother them for well over decade
If Youtube is gonna be a platform of mass arbitrary censorship, i welcome the few times in its slow downfall that it chooses the right things to arbitrarily censor.
How rude! Now where will conservatives "do their own research"?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
YouTube hopes that this policy framework will be flexible enough to cover a broad range of medical topics, while finding a balance between minimizing harm and allowing debate.
In its blog post, YouTube says it would take action both against treatments that are actively harmful, as well as those that are unproven and are being suggested in place of established alternatives.
YouTube’s updated policies come a little over three years after it banded together with some of the world’s biggest tech platforms to make a shared commitment to fight covid-19 misinformation.
While the major tech platforms stood united in early 2020, their exact approaches to covid-19 misinformation have differed since that initial announcement.
Most notably, Twitter stopped enforcing its covid-19 misinformation policy in late 2022 following its acquisition by Elon Musk.
Meta has also softened its moderation approach recently, rolling back its covid-19 misinformation rules in countries (like the US) where the disease is no longer considered a national emergency.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Should have happened many years ago really
Who determines what is ineffective or harmful?
I mean chemo isn't puppies and rainbows.
Maybe let's go with science?
Chemo is one thing.
The Steve Jobs pancreatic cancer buster plan, not so much.
Science and scientific studies help determine what is ineffective or harmful, the problem is the FDA doesn't have authority over shit plenty of things - a person can go on YouTube and say drinking their special bottled water will cure cancer, and they don't fall into FDA guidelines so they are free to claim whatever they want, essentially. These woo-woo type cure-alls have gotten into trouble with the FDA because of their ridiculous and unfactual, unproven claims, but that's usually where the lawyer wordsmiths show up to change the wording just enough to not get into trouble with the FDA.
There is a whole history of pseudoscience as an industry and how it was able to bribe/lobby for its current position in public view (since you even have to ask this question)
I mean chemo is effective. It fucks you up. But it's pretty good at "curing" cancer.
Maybe someone should start a social media platform that only publishes the truth. Truth something. And it could be moderated by a really smart AI that is the final arbiter. It would know what’s true because it’s scraped the whole of human knowledge.
We did that, the answer was 42
Well colour me shocked. That YT would do the bidding of big pharma.. Never.
You're right, we should let these vile scammers prey on vulnerable people when they're at their most hopeless. They don't deserve their money! They won't have any use for it!
Fallacy much?
The fact that there's debate about the efficancy of certain medicine doesn't change the fact that we atleast have a relatively good idea about what doesn't work. People like Steve Jobs would probably have a thing or two to say about that aswell.
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"Big pharma" companies do have a potential interest in covering up the harms of medicines in their patent rosters. If it doesn't straight up kill their customers, it's less money they have to spend on R&D for less harmful treatments.
Not to imply random snake oil assholes selling ivermectin etc. don't have similar, worse interests. But no one in the space whatsoever is just immune from standing to gain from doing something bad without serious oversight from all angles. That includes vigorous and scientifically-minded public conversation about it - not just walled off to professionals. There's no magical formula here, you need public education and open information, to not only just have correct information but refute incorrect information. If you have this big walled garden around "The Truth" and delete everything else, well, we just lived through the consequence of that with COVID, it breeds distrust and pseudoscience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisinin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digoxin
there are probably more, starting with aspirin (salicin), modern opioids (opium) and modern anticholinergics (atropine). there's also plenty of stuff in traditional medicine that maybe does nothing beneficial or even kinda works but it's way too toxic for modern regulatory agencies, like all heavy metals and aconitine
The need for a free internet that is community-regulated cannot be more urgent. This move will indiscriminately ban any kind of speech, important traditional therapies, etc. Implemented, this will be a huge loss to our collective knowledge and ability to organise as communities.
What are these “important traditional therapies” that you are want to protect?
I’m guessing stuff like Gerson Therapy where you fast only consuming fresh vegan juice and nutritional supplements while you give yourself organic coffee enemas to cure your cancer.
at this point "important traditional therapies" don't exist. if they were working, these things are tested, standardized or sometimes used as a starting point of something else, at which point they become therapies without adjectives. this is how we got artemether and digoxin. everyone in pharma is looking for new stuff, this is why they're looking for alkaloids in obscure sea sponges and random vines, sometimes it's the entire thing, but more often not. this is also how we got taxol
what are you saying could have been true in 70s, but by now almost all attested traditional therapies were tested already and developed into something new that works and passes all regulatory tests
you can't just throw random bullshit at desperate people and expect everything to work. you can expect them to pay, that's how scams work. also i don't see, in most charitable terms, how restricting scammers is a barrier to organizing
This always struck me as a lazy approach. Traditional methodologies for medicine may not be as rigorous as Western scientific ones, but they weren't just universally so stupid that they couldn't figure out something didn't even work. At least not across the board. You want to vet them to the highest standard possible, but you can't just assume they don't work by default, a lot of that stuff hasn't been studied at all.
IMO there is nothing wrong with alternative/traditional techniques so long as they don't actively harm the person and they are not expensive and they don't discourage seeking actual medical treatment. Sadly a lot of these treatments break one or all of those caveats - and those should be cracked down on. Yeah they might not do much more than a placebo effect on the person - but the placebo effect is very powerful and can help them manage or lessen their symptoms.
If someone wants to take some herbal tea to manage pain or chicken soup to help with a cold there is nothing wrong with that. So long as it is not actively hurting them or stopping them from actual treatments or causing them to pay far more than need to for it. IMO we should be making more use of the placebo effect as it is a powerful effect, and there are ways to do it ethically with out trying to scam people or lead them away from modern medicine.
Even a some clinical medicines, treatments and even surgery has been shown to have no or little more than a placebo effect. Though once difference here is that when these are found they tend to stop being used. But does go to show how powerful the placebo effect is.
Hell, you could make a whole market off of sugar pills with completely honest marketing as the placebo effect still works even when you know it is only a placebo. So long as it is reasonably priced and honest about what it is (though this could very easily be abused for profit as well - so would need to be regulated quite well).
That said, I do think harmful or predatory treatments should be cracked down on. And sadly a lot of alternatives at the moment do fall into this category. Additionally I also think the pharmaceutical industry should be cracked down on as well as they do some very predatory practices as well, even if their treatments are more effective it does not mean they need to charge an arm and a leg for it.
Are you saying that traditional therapies are harmful or ineffectual?