CrowsNest wrote:Then first obvious question is, why aren't they linking to YouTube videos? Or has nobody ever uploaded a video debunking these conspiracy theories?
And how does this not destroy their S230 immunity? How can you claim to merely be a platform, when you are clearly making editorial decisions based on the content you host, decisions that aren't simply to remove content that violates your terms?
I'm also perplexed at the logic of these executives. Surely there cannot be a single person on this planet who believes the sort of person who is looking at YouTube videos debunking the moon landing, is persuadable by Wikipedia? You see the same naivety in the field of fake news - nobody reading Breitbart is going to give two shits what Wikipedia says.
Part of the reason is that they will be perceived as part of the mainstream, and thus 'in on it'. Secondly, due to the fucked up way it works, there's plenty of genuine reasons why nobody who distrusts the government, should trust Wikipedia. You have no clue who is editing it, they are funded by people who are very much part of the liberal elite, they have a long history of permanently deleting evidence of their screwups, and an even longer history of ignoring/denying their screwups, and there is a screamingly obvious left wing bias to it. Conspiracy theorists will absolutely have no problem identifying the cult like nature of Wikipedia.
Still, as Jake observed, hopefully this will make life harder for the Wikipediots, as it will send a hoard of angry editors their way, and if just 1 in 10,000 is converted to a long term POV pusher, it will cause serious problems.
They are doing this crazy stunt because YouTube is a giant black hole for Alphabet and Google needs the site to bend to their will and be mostly advertiser-safe. So they try to fight the bullshit problem of "fake news" with links to Jimbo's jungle thanks to Google's long history with Wikipedia, not realizing there are gaps (sometimes large ones) in fringe subjects because the "Guerilla Skeptics" decided seven years ago that minimizing the amount of information suited their views - case in point, the
cattle mutilation article has obviously been warred over (very general writing with few in-depth examples, it's on that
"List of topics characterized as pseudoscience" meta-article, the weird and overly-broad bibliography that looks like it was assembled by a committee), also there are no gory photos as with certain articles on human skin diseases. Thus the piece is now four years out of date. Good luck with them trying to explain such new phenomena as Chapo Trap House (the "Dirtbag Left" podcast) making jokes about Jordan Peterson with the phrase "lobster men" or talking in a Kermit the Frog voice to mock him;
the Wikipedia article on the group mostly dates to 2016, when the podcast was just starting to roll.....I bring this podcast up because chunks of shows have been turned into YouTube videos.
Truly,
God help this YouTube-Wikipedia 'bot Frankenstein when the machine has to explain Filthy Frank memes from 2014, the reams of crappy fake UFO videos, the Stefan Moleneux cult videos (
Yes,
baldo has a cult and there are ex-members making videos in the ex-Scientologist tradition), and the bootleg copies of
Swastika (1973) plus Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's seven-hour magnum opus
Hitler, A Film from Germany (1977).
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.
