Official live update of spread of COVID19

[Rev. Rye]

In school if I had used The Blaze, Youtube or The American Thinker as references for my research, I'd have flunked out.

YouTube can actually be good for research, even if it is just as a start. But you need a bullshit detector that actually works. A YouTube video by Russell Brand might cut the muster if you're somehow writing a paper about Russell Brand and/or how his videos represent some larger phoenomenon of some kind, but he's clearly not a good source for information about a pandemic.

Fun fact: I actually wrote a small paper for Business Law class about the ethics of data harvesting. Not a big research paper, just a little two-or-three page reflection piece on the subject. The prompt was specifically about Clearview AI scrubbing Facebook profiles for billions of photos without the consent of the owners of said faces or photos. And I talked about a major problem muddying the waters in the discussion of the ethics, one that I had been made acutely aware of because, a year before, a YouTuber I admired, The Mysterious Mr. Enter, created a long series called Technocracy that was all about the insidious ways tech companies control our lives. I used a lot of examples he included in the video, like how Facebook kept data on all of one man's phone calls and text messages for over a year, or how Target of all stores managed to figure out that a girl was pregnant before anyone knew, even her. Of course, if this was a proper paper where I needed to cite my sources, I could probably do so. Hell, the simple act of finding and pasting the links in shows I just did.

But the only times I actually cited Technocracy were times when I couldn't use any other source because it was talking about his own experiences with these programs. I did so twice: first when he talked about how he managed to get Google to give him all the data they had collected on him. It took them 16 hours to compile 67 ZIP files of 148.93 GB of data they had collected on him. Second when he pointed out that someone had spoofed his email and sent terroristic threats to foreign governments and how trivially easy it was for the government to subpoena Google so they could give them all his information. The teacher saw the bit about the 67 ZIP files and said "Good Find." That said, I wouldn't dare cite The Mysterious Mr. Enter as a credible source on COVID. Especially given some of the dodgy shit he managed to swallow in that category. Especially not to a teacher.