Out of all things to come at BreadTube for, why debunking COVID misinfo?
The underlying issue is that this relationship was not disclosed (which is also against youtube TOS as you need to disclose these ties). If Philosophy Tube signed a secret contract, then who else was, and what for? It’s also pretty shady of supposed socialists not to disclose these ties even if they didn’t have to, ethically speaking.
The PR firm may have participated in imperialist projects but this particular collaboration with the youtuber seems to specifically be for a campaign against COVID misinformation. I don’t see why they thought a left leaning channel would be a good candidate for this, since their bubble of viewers is likely already not anti-vax. But regardless it doesn’t seem that bad.
By “misinformation”, you mean “criticism of government measures”, right? I dont know about India, but here in Europe the governments acted pretty terribly during the pandemic, and deserve to be criticized and held accountable. Suppressing such criticism through propaganda should not be possible in a democracy.
From the leaked document it looks like misinformation here means the pseudoscience which is the basis of anti-vax and anti-lockdown movements.
Yes thats what they call it. But the question is, who gets to decide what is pseudoscience/misinformation, and what is legitimate disagreement with the mainstream opinion? I believe that this should be decided by the courts, based on existing laws. Instead we have the same governments and corporate (social) media who lie to us every day, deciding what is right and wrong. I really dont think we should blindly trust them to do whats in the best interest of society.
I don’t think it is anything as nefarious as them trying to form a monopoly on deciding right from wrong. They know that vaccine and lockdown hesitancy is going to cause a lot of problems for them so they are trying to counter those problems within the confines of their broken ideological framework. At least that is how I see it
