Study blames YouTube for rise in number of Flat Earthers

[Infinity Times Two]

I wonder how much of this is due to the 'algorithm.' I get where they are coming from it, but it is definitely proliferating shitty views and giving bad people a platform. I believe OG youtube didn't have those problems. Yes, there were idiots on it, but it was very difficult for them to reach many people.

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I mean, if a lot of people get told that something is true for a long period and by different sources, they will accept that as the truth.

Except in Youtubes case, they keep you in your lane and keep serving you videos reinforcing that core belief by the algorithm.

Creates a lot of engagement and revenue. Also creates a lot of crazies.

 

[Stinkles]

A Guardian story about flat earthers. When I first heard about them I thought they were just bored trolls, but now we've got articles like this with researchers trying to figure out how to combat their rampant stupidity.









Sigh.

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Doesn't matter how many steps it went through, ultimately the trolls still trolled to a cavern, echoing level. Just cause there's also a subsurface of superdumb and crazy people doesn't eliminate the likely math that this was spread (recently and noisily) by trolls and dripped down one cavern layer. :-(

Trick is to do what we normally do and ignore them?

 

[Mivey]

I believe any content that's hateful, be it racist, openly or indirectly threatening violence and so forth, should be blocked. I am by no means a free speech extremist, as with anything you need to strive for sensible solutions that can work in reality.

But I don't think you can or should protect people from their own stupidity. These people believe they are disseminating some great, suppressed truth, and blocking their content will just confirm them further, as they aren't breaking any rules by believing in dumb, but harmless stuff. If a larger and larger amount of people can't tell incredibly stupid ideas from good ones, then that's the actual problem right there. A lack of education and critical thinking is the real problem for a rise of flat earthers, not the fact that we have ways for people to communicate more effectively.

 

[adamsappel]

Of all the stupid that goes on in the world, this one will always stick out as so confusing. We've photographed it. What more proof do they need?

Do they also believe the Moon and the other planets are flat? Because the Moon's up there right now and looks pretty fucking round to me.

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The Moon is round, but you can't necessarily tell it's a sphere, because we only ever see the one side of it. You'd think the Moon could be more easily thought of as flat, whereas anyone who's been on an airplane has seen a curved horizon.

 

[Acorn]

Doesn't matter how many steps it went through, ultimately the trolls still trolled to a cavern, echoing level. Just cause there's also a subsurface of superdumb and crazy people doesn't eliminate the likely math that this was spread (recently and noisily) by trolls and dripped down one cavern layer. :-(

Trick is to do what we normally do and ignore them?

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Ignoring didn't work for the alt right, but engaging is even worse because it widens their reach. You have to hope these things self destruct, doesn't seem like anything works to kill them.

 

[Excuse me]

It's odd that this is happening, but at the same time not so surprsing.

Social media is bad in this regard. but at the same time, I don't see why companies would have to take any action against conspiracy nuts. Flat earthers aren't actually hurting anyone. I guess there is case made against anti-vaxers and their ilk, but even with them, I don't see what kind of realistic measures you could take against them. Especially when there are cases that Vacines actually can have negative side effects.

 

[Dingens]

Silicon valley - making the worlda better place

 

[samoyed]

Ignoring didn't work for the alt right, but engaging is even worse because it widens their reach. You have to hope these things self destruct, doesn't seem like anything works to kill them.

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Well de-platforming works to an extent. You have actively suppress them.

 

[Dust]

Flat Earth is trolls trolling trolls which went wrong due to people losing ability to tell shitposting from actual discussion.

 

[erlim]

The village idiot can now reach out to the world.

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The village idiot can now be our president.

 

[RastaMentality]

I believe any content that's hateful, be it racist, openly or indirectly threatening violence and so forth, should be blocked. I am by no means a free speech extremist, as with anything you need to strive for sensible solutions that can work in reality.

But I don't think you can or should protect people from their own stupidity. These people believe they are disseminating some great, suppressed truth, and blocking their content will just confirm them further, as they aren't breaking any rules by believing in dumb, but harmless stuff. If a larger and larger amount of people can't tell incredibly stupid ideas from good ones, then that's the actual problem right there. A lack of education and critical thinking is the real problem for a rise of flat earthers, not the fact that we have ways for people to communicate more effectively.

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It's been shown time and time again that blocking people from reaching their audience works. It worked with Milo and it would work here.

All of the people in the OP found out about it through Youtube. They wouldn't be going anywhere else.

 

[DXB-KNIGHT]

 

[Deleted member 9305]

The lack of education creates idiots. Youtube just hands the idiots a megaphone.

 

[Sec0nd]

Crazy how all these social media turned sour after being perceived as such as wonderful revolution. There are obviously still great parts about it, but there are some really nasty side effects.

 

[Acorn]

Well de-platforming works to an extent. You have actively suppress them.

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True, forgot about baked Alaska etc

 

[Dultimate]

Kinda off topic but I want to ask:

Is this why I kept getting anti-Sarkeesian videos in my recommendation? I've always wondered why I'm getting bullshit hurty men videos after watching Sarkeesian's videos and few others like those. The answer may be depressing, but I want to know...

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I believe so. This video may explain better why this happens.

https://youtu.be/69obN625Fjs

Basically though, YouTube algorithms are fucked and if you watch enough of it, doesn't matter where you start, it tends to want to lead you down a very dark path.

 

[Vuze]

Not surprising. I once watched a single conspiracy video about China (I had to stop in the middle though, associating QR Codes and thereby the mobile payment system in China with Satan was so fucking idiotic that my brain hurt) and had to deal with absolutely crazy recommendations for the following week. It's incredibly easy to get sucked into a circle jerk if you are seriously uneducated or gullible.

 

[Deleted member 1445]

It's odd that this is happening, but at the same time not so surprsing.

Social media is bad in this regard. but at the same time, I don't see why companies would have to take any action against conspiracy nuts. Flat earthers aren't actually hurting anyone. I guess there is case made against anti-vaxers and their ilk, but even with them, I don't see what kind of realistic measures you could take against them. Especially when there are cases that Vacines actually can have negative side effects.

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You're missing the fact that YouTube for example is actively putting forth misinformation and nonsense. Just because they wrote a shitty algorithm to do it, doesn't mean that they're not doing it. This is their way of curating the content, and they bear full responsibility for that curation. What, or if any, consequences there should be for their curation, is the question.

 

[Zombegoast]

A lot can be blamed for Youtube giving Anti Vaxxer, Conservatives/Alt right, Flat Earthers etc a platform.

But Google rather much focus on censorship and taking down videos for "Copyright infringement"

 

[hey it's that dog]

A lot can be blamed for Youtube giving Anti Vaxxer, Conservatives/Alt right, Flat Earthers etc a platform.

But Google rather much focus on censorship and taking down videos for "Copyright infringement"

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Copyright stuff has a legal basis. There's no law against saying or reading stupid things.

Google isn't going to go down the road of policing content in the basis of stupidity, that's their bread and butter. They should, however, push factual information alongside the conspiracy garbage by taking some responsibility for the algorithms and tweaking them as needed.

I don't even know if that would help but at least it would look like they're trying.

 

[Naijaboy]

I think hbomberguy has an interesting theory as to why this movement is happening.

 

[GLHFGodbless]

I meeean, does it really matter? I feel like out of all the extreme skeptics/conspiracy nuts, flat earthers are pretty harmless. Stupid, but harmless. I don't see whats the problem in letting them believe the earth is flat, as long as they never come into a position of power or authority....

 

[travisbickle]

I meeean, does it really matter? I feel like out of all the extreme skeptics/conspiracy nuts, flat earthers are pretty harmless. Stupid, but harmless. I don't see whats the problem in letting them believe the earth is flat, as long as they never come into a position of power or authority....

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It's not about what shape the earth is, like you say why would it matter if people didn't believe that fact. It's about the narrative that a fact (a falsehood to them) in our society is being used to control us.

In our reality, science observed the earth was round through a variety of tests over the centuries. If it was flat or a cube we would have found out through those same tests.

In their reality, science observed the earth was flat and then manipulated tests/lied so that the general public would assume it's round.

It's about the belief that scientists/governments are tricking the public.

 

[SliceSabre]

I don't blame youtube for as much as I blame people being stupid and believing everything they here.

While I want Youtube to ban alt-right nutters from peddling Nazi bullshit videos I can't say I feel the same for bull conspiracy theory bullshit like, Bigfoot, Flatearthers and Chem-trails. Because these group aren't, in typical practice, dangerous or hateful they're jus stupid people. You can't always seek to protect people from their own stupidity.

I can just see it now: "Youtube and the government don't want us telling you the truth about bigfoot!!!!!!!!!!"

 

[LL_Decitrig]

From what I've seen of flat earth videos, they're really shallow in their understanding of orbital mechanics. For instance one guy who is very famous has a video in which he critiques a live video stream from the International Space Station. He derides many perceived faults in the stream, but only reveals his rampant ignorance of what Earth's surface should look like if you're orbiting broadly from West to East with a period of 90 minutes. Why yes, you will see the Earth's surface moving towards the West. This is not an error.

Another problem is simply misunderstanding how GPS works. It's easy to show that, although it may be possible to fake a GPS constellation over a certain location by using terrestrial transmitters, it would be impossible to do so globally in any way that wouldn't be blatantly obvious.

A third point that I'm looking forward to being comprehensively debunked soon is the notion that we can't track aircraft in the Southern hemisphere because we're closer to the rim and the distances are far too great. In reality it's due to the relatively sparse distribution of tracking stations, the lower population density and the lower proportion of journeys that can stay close to land in the Southern Hemisphere. The latest Iridium fleet has just about been launched by now and soon their satellites will be able to feed data directly from commercial aircraft to ground stations. Thus coverage of the Southern Hemisphere will improve.

I'm afraid the main blame for the spread of flat earth beliefs is intellectual laziness. The conspiracy theories deliver a neat feeling of being in the know without encouraging the acquisition of technical skills required to test the alleged knowledge.

 

[LL_Decitrig]

The Moon is round, but you can't necessarily tell it's a sphere, because we only ever see the one side of it. You'd think the Moon could be more easily thought of as flat, whereas anyone who's been on an airplane has seen a curved horizon.

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The curvature of the lunar surface was an early observation in recorded astronomical history. It's particularly visible during a lunar eclipse. It's conventionally inferred that the other side of the moon is of a similar shape, but that wasn't proven conclusively until robot spacecraft orbited the moon and sent back photographs of the far side.

 

[boris_feinbrand]

Social media has the veneer of authenticity. Experts have long since warned that our society isn't media trained enough. Which was a huge problem before social media basically surplanted news media, and it's catastrophic for democracy now that it has. We have a generation of parents who are hopelessly inadequate at disseminating media or how to differentiate propaganda or outright lies, in charge of educating the next generation in media literacy. We need help.

 

[I am a Bird]

Anyone want to explain the point of all the world's scientists conspiring to lie about the shape of the earth?

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From what I have gathered it boils down to two things. To keep people from believing in God, or to hide the super secret super world beyond earth.

 

[samoyed]

True, forgot about baked Alaska etc

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I understand why people are reluctant to do it though. It carries the scent of authoritarianism. They'd rather believe that good ideas and truth will win out in the end rather than risk engaging in "censorship". Time will prove them wrong however, and show that the truth doesn't always win out and not all speech is worthwhile (some can actively be harmful), and that there's a balance to be struck between freedom of self expression and expression curation.