ORIGINAL: HansBolter
I believe some one asked for examples:
A commentary on the liberal bias of multi-country high tech communications platforms.
Dare we refer to them as 'media'?
Bokhari: Tech Censorship Is Now a Public Health Hazard
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/05/ ... th-hazard/
In a quick skim I noticed this:
The censorship of AYTU is just one example of Silicon Valley’s coronavirus overreach. YouTube has also censored a video of two doctors in Bakersfield, California, who recommended an early end to the nationwide shutdowns.
Interesting there is no context from Breitbart to support a positive or negative context to why this may have been shutdown by youtube.
This had been part of our thread earlier. I don't have time to go through every one of the many assertions in this article, but not offering context on this one is a serious omission and shows a lack of journalistic integrity since many experts and several official medical groups have condemned their approach and findings.
They dressed in scrubs. They sounded scientific. And last week’s message from two Bakersfield doctors was exactly what many stuck-at-home Americans wanted to hear: COVID-19 is no worse than influenza, its death rates are low and we should all go back to work and school.
Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, co-owners of Accelerated Urgent Care, which offers Bakersfield’s only private walk-in COVID-19 testing site, held a press conference on April 22 to report their conclusions about COVID-19 test results. During the conference, broadcast on YouTube, the doctors said that 12% of Californians tested so far have been infected. Extrapolating that to the general population, they estimated that as many as 5 million Californians have likely contracted the virus. They then used the total number of COVID-19 deaths statewide (roughly 1,200, as of last week) to calculate a death rate of just 0.03% — similar to the average death rate from seasonal flu.
Public health experts were quick to point out the major flaws in the doctors’ methodology – namely that only a tiny percentage of Californians have actually been tested, a group that is more likely to test positive and is not representative of the larger population.
But public health experts were quick to debunk the doctors’ findings as misguided and riddled with statistical errors — and an example of the kind of misleading information they are forced to waste precious time disputing.
The doctors should never have assumed that the patients they tested — who came for walk-in COVID-19 tests or who sought urgent care for symptoms they experienced in the middle of a pandemic — are representative of the general population, said Dr. Carl Bergstrom, a University of Washington biologist who specializes in infectious disease modeling. He likened their extrapolations to “estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court.” And most credible studies of COVID-19 death rates are far higher than the ones the doctors presented.
“They’ve used methods that are ludicrous to get results that are completely implausible,” Bergstrom said.
Still, the early media coverage of the doctors’ announcement went viral (digitally, that is) over the weekend. The press conference video garnered more than 5 million views before YouTube removed it on Monday for violating community guidelines.
Youtube's statement on the removal:
“We quickly remove flagged content that violate our Community Guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance," said the statement. "However, content that provides sufficient educational, documentary, scientific or artistic (EDSA) context is allowed -- for example, news coverage of this interview with additional context. From the very beginning of the pandemic, we’ve had clear policies against COVID-19 misinformation and are committed to continue providing timely and helpful information at this critical time.”
