Behind the Curve is a great documentary about the strange resurgence of flat earth theory in the last few years. It covers a few of the major YouTube personalities.<p>I think flat earth’s comeback is actually a good thing and YouTube is making a mistake. It’s true that nobody 30 years ago believed the earth was flat but they probably couldn’t articulate why they believed that. People who are brave enough today to re-examine their beliefs should be admired, not ridiculed.<p>Of course flat earthers are wrong, but the coolest part of the documentary is when members of the movement start spending thousands of dollars to conduct experiments to prove their theory. At the end one of them gets a contradictory result to what he expected, and you can see the doubt start to form in his eyes as he smiles and just says something like “Oh, that’s interesting, that’s very interesting.”<p>YouTube has given nonconformists a platform where they can be honest and be themselves, and it’s unfortunate they look to be trying to take that away. Of course some people on there will hold views that are frankly stupid, but I’d say it’s better than having everyone believing the same thing out of a sense of conformity.
A few concerns with this story:<p>1. How big is this 'flat earth movement' really? The video claims it 'caught fire around 2015-16' but gives no specifics. This is unfortunately typical for these sort of 'we need to do something' arguments—no sense of the magnitude of the problem is given.<p>2. This argument for censorship is often made without a limiting principle, as it is here. "Books are a disturbing platform for conspiracy theories" works just as well.<p>3. There always have been and will be conspiracy theories, whether 9/11, Moon Landing, JFK, Illuminati or a thousand others. We don't seem to be very concerned with these. Why should we care about flat eartherism, especially as it seems rather benign in comparison?<p>4. Isn't the obvious response to make a point-by-point refutation to their most convincing claims? The well-argued truth is going to be more convincing than a silly hypothesis.
I LOVE the flat earth theory. Obviously It's wrong, but it's so fun to think about how people convince themselves of it. They claim that it's all about empirical evidence. But spend a few minutes on their site and you'll realize that's bogus. Such as their reasoning for why the sun sets. What they're really saying is "Only trust what you can see, but also you can't trust what you can see"
This push to censor wrong ideas instead of compete with them is misguided at best. And then there's the nerve to pretend like there isn't some kind of intentional social engineering going on with internet platforms.<p>If the kinds of policies I see journalists pushing for on YouTube were in place before the Snowden leaks, they would've been suppressing any videos talking about the NSA's spying on American citizens.<p>But we can't risk letting people try different ideas. They might disagree with us. They're not smart enough to make their own decisions. Better step in.
If you censor conspiracy videos, you're validating them. It looks like you're trying to hide the truth. There is just no way of getting rid of them, unless you want to censor all of the internet.
There are a lot of comments talking about how Youtube should not censor flat Earth but something that people need to keep in mind is how much the Flat Earth youtube community censors. If you point out their errors, their mistakes, or basically anything that goes against what they know to be true they ban you and delete your comments. As a group censorship doesn't appear to bother them just as long as they are the ones in control of the censoring.
How do you explain lunar eclipses (the Earth's shadow is round)?<p>How do you explain retrograde motions of planets?<p>These 2 simple observations explain why we live on a round Earth that revolves around the Sun.<p>(That said, I am against censorship of any kind. People should be free to believe whatever they want.)
> "One researcher found that of attendees at a flat Earth conference, nearly all said they first came to the idea through the video-sharing platform."<p>Aside from shilling time shares, MLM schemes and recruiting for a cult of some sort, I can't think of anything that would necessitate a "Flat Earth conference".<p>I'm convinced the the only reason these hoaxes exist is to identify high quality leads for obvious snake-oil products. It's similar to how the ye olde Nigerian prince scams are made to sound as absurd as possible, so you know that people who respond to them have a high likelihood of converting.
Does it really matter if someone believes the earth is flat? What practical effect does that actually have on society?<p>I can't help but think most flat-earthers are just after attention and the desire to correct them is a feedback loop.
It seems to me, that most flat earthers already believed in some conspiracy theories so, they just add another one. What puzzles me the most about flat earther is, how much the shape of the earth is part of their identity. I mean for my daily life the shape of the earth doesn't matter. So for me personally it doesn't matter if the earth is round, flat, or shaped like a banana. it just happened that the earth is round.
Really this should be "how the proliferation of disinformation enabled by the internet converted people to flat Earth." Also not helped by the (warranted) declining trust in legacy media sources.
It's more than just flat earth too. There's many strains of conspiracy holes on youtube - you can spend all day watching people predict the rapture is coming (this year for real this time!), of course there's the standard political extremism strains of youtube if you're into that, and so on.<p>The problem is that people learn to trust personalities, and then those personalities can spread ideas regardless of their merit. If you start by denouncing the brainwashing of the mainstream consensus, just about any idea can be rationalized with enough effort. And to top it all off, Youtube and other online platforms offer a profit model for personalities who can garner attention (not to mention the softer connections to money and fame that come with being an "influencer")<p>Do so many of these personalities actually believe in a flat earth? Personally, I've had my doubts from the beginning. I follow a few communities on Twitch, for example, and you see personalities pop up all the time, often by being controversial. I've seen people pop up, often leveraging flat earth or anti-vax as a tool to make themselves more edgy. Sometimes they make it <i>too obvious</i> that they're just trying to be controversial and it gives away the act - one personality on twitch trying to make his debut, for example, claimed that his childhood best friend grew gills and swam away in the river after a vaccine. To his credit, it worked in the short term and the show brought him back for a few more segments.<p>Frankly, I hope we as a society will come to learn sooner rather than later that public personalities on the internet can't be trusted. For some reason, people have learned this lesson for public personalities on TV, on the radio, and so on - who really trusts the mainstream news these days? - and yet these same folks turn into their favorite strain of youtube conspiracy to learn on the daily what the world has been hiding from them and what truth the mainstream has buried like a treasure, only to be found on youtube.
It’s almost like there’s a conspiracy theory to censor information and manipulate public discourse. Hmmm...<p>The current centralized structure of the web is broken. Any person who believes in classical liberalism should find this disgusting.
<i>company says it's taking action to prevent conspiracy videos from reaching large numbers of people</i><p>I'm not afraid of conspiracies. Are you?