I've been censored!

On February 20 2020, I gave a public talk at Nerd Nite Toronto called Stab Everyone You Love. It was about the "ZYX of Vaccine Denialism" (because anti-vaxxers get everything backward). At the time, we knew that there was an outbreak of some disease in China, but not that it would soon become a global pandemic.

My son recorded my speech, which debunked several myths about the supposed dangers of national immunization programs. I uploaded the video to YouTube one day after my talk, and posted the video (and the subsequent Q&A session) to this blog the following month. 

One pandemic and two years later, on April 26, 2022, I received a letter from YouTube. It stated that they think my presentation violated their "medical misinformation policy", and thus removed my video from YouTube. 

YouTube has an appeals process. I clicked on the link, and wrote that my presentation debunked medical misinformation - I explained several erroneous beliefs about vaccines in my presentation so my audience would be more effective at rebutting them. 

Seconds after submitting, YouTube sent a second email stating they had "reviewed your content carefully, and had confirmed that it violates our medical misinformation policy. [...] We won't be putting your content back up on YouTube." Clearly, this was an automated process - there was no time for a human to read my appeal before I received the email stating it had been denied.

This experience highlights several problems with any censorship (or "moderation") regime:

1. Who decides what's acceptable?
2. How do you ensure none of the bad stuff escapes your filter?
3. How do you ensure none of the acceptable stuff gets caught in your filter?

I'm pretty sure I'm an accidental victim of 3). I doubt that anyone at YouTube watched my presentation. It probably contained enough keywords that an algorithm determined it was "medical disinformation" based on a machine-generated transcript. I wasn't peddling medical misinformation, but no one at YouTube will watch the video to find out. And now, nobody else will, either.

I presented Stab Everyone You Love for the Centre for Inquiry Canada and Toronto Oasis virtually later that year. Those videos are still online - so far. It may just be a matter of time before they are taken down as well, for the same reason. 

Take care before endorsing censorship regimes. They tend to target the very communities they were ostensibly set up to protect.