We have confirmation that the Saudis did it, and that the Bush Administration actively suppressed any investigation into the Saudis and invaded Afghanistan instead. Sen. Bob Graham had a lot to say on it. No need to really say anything more than that. I don't think "Bush did it", but the media censorship industrial complex was complicit in suppressing the truth at minimum.
A better way to judge if he's a "conspiracy theorist" would be to look at what he says, what he cites as evidence, and judge for yourself if he has any credibility. A more valid disagreement would be his far-right political views. After the Trump shooting he shot down any conspiracy theories that had to do with it being an inside job, said conspiracy didn't make sense without any evidence, and then followed it up with a "simpler explanation: diversity". I consider myself center-right but he's too far to the right even for me (though I'm not a believer in using demographics to make hiring decisions, bias is not a fixable problem). I still think he's done a great job at exposing big tech.
Wikipedia probably didn't include the above counter-argument. Disputes on Wikipedia are decided by a vote, and you're crazy if you think there isn't a bias there. I wouldn't trust it as a source for anything political. Even if individual statements are factual, the overall conclusion can't be grounded in truth when facts are cherry-picked.
Another thing to consider: Regardless of my own views, I think it's more valuable than not to have the voices of the wackos at the extreme ends in all directions.
The extremists may have some opinions or beliefs or attitudes that don't add up to being a reasonable balance between some ideal and the reality of life, so you can say technically literally irrational or disconnected from reality, but those people are the ones who are motivated enough to find out things despite difficulty, and those people are the ones who make observations and points that are outside of your comfortable established norms rut, yet can't be denied when examined.
Practically all forward progress actually only ever happens thanks to some discontented initial minority who are considered unreasonable for some time initially simply because they are the minority.
But they are the devils advocate, and that is a critical role. If you have an idea or a philosophy that fails to stand up to some devil's advocate charge, then your philosophy was never valid in the first place and maybe you're the devil.
Even if the devil's advocate is an extremist who also says some other things that are demonstrably invalid where you can easily provide a counter argument. It often takes that extreme person to spot a problem and bring the valid argument to light even if the valid argument is bundled with also a bunch of invalid arguments and conclusions.
It's nice in theory, but post-January 6 I'd like to think people realize the tangible effects gish-galloping lies can have on a society.
I think we on the Internet have been way too comfortable with way too many devils' advocates for way too long. Because what the devil really advocates is the death of all coherent philosophies.
And my time is too precious to me to find nuggets of truth in a pile of vomit these days; if someone like Mark Dice is making some interesting points, I'd be happy to entertain them... As themselves, isolated from the source.
We live in a world with 5.45 billion people online. Until the AI gets good enough to "Reader's Digest" the Internet, tools like "consider the source" must be used as a first-pass filter; to do otherwise is to get washed away in a sea of noise.
(Before someone drags in our old friend ad hominem, dusts them off, and props them up in the corner to stare silently at us in judgment for not following all the best practices discovered by rhetoricians engaging in the art of "attempting to convince people by logic, which does not need to be tied to reality" for mostly the political purposes of advocacy in court... I will note that "I’ve watched enough Mark Dice videos to know how bad it is" is an appeal to authority first, and calling out his conspiracy theory is an attack on that authority, i.e. 'He doesn't generally know what he's talking about; we should treat everything he says with heavy skepticism first.' So no, I'm not convinced anything Mark Dice says has any bearing on the actual ground-truth reality of how online communications work in 2024... What are his credentials to that effect?)
> "I’ve watched enough Mark Dice videos to know how bad it is" is an appeal to authority first
That's not what appeal to authority is. You should read the Wikipedia article on that one again (Note: I learned about fallacies not from Wikipedia but from a very old professor who was a Chinese dissident, and I had a 4.0 in that course). The statement in parenthesis was an appeal to authority. I was referring to the times he posted screenshots and videos of search results being manipulated, or his own videos being demonetized with manual review, or if you searched his name at one point you got no video results. At the time, you could do the search yourself and reproduce the results. I don't know how you can get any better than that save a Snowden-esque leak from big tech, and I'm sure you guys will find a way to label one of those a hoax.
The premise of that argument wasn't even centered on the question of the scale of the manipulation itself, but rather a rebuttal to the argument that "only the uploader will know about the censorship". There's a saying, "who are you going to believe, the media, or your lying eyes?"
One person's eyes, vis-a-vis search results, are an absolute drop in the ocean and never indicative of how the actual system works or the common experience of an end-user. "Look how they're censoring us" can be anything from explicit policy to user-specific configuration based on past history to an unexpected consequence of other features minimizing access to some unrelated data to the information being shared on a site that is also acting as an active persistent threat to a datacenter or storage / processing cluster dropping offline for a few hours.
If one trusts screenshots and videos because Mark Dice shared them, it's an appeal to (bad) authority. If one tries to armchair-analyze them without a lot of both grounding in the space and insider knowledge, one is extremely likely to arrive at untrue conclusions not only about the motivations of the people operating the system but the actual behavior of the system itself.
In Dice's case, regarding demonetization, if I were to wild-ass guess from glancing at his content: YouTube doesn't display the "dislike" signal any more, but it still consumes the signal as both algorithm sampling and a soft-trigger for manual review (and potentially an auto-trigger for demonetize-now-review-later). And the "Report" button is still there, and there are no consequences for reporting videos that are later decided to not be TOS violations (that I'm aware of).
Dice's problems can be explained by the kind of simple brigading that happens to controversial figures all the time. In terms of monetization, YouTube is a very (small-c) conservative platform, and lots of people from all sides of the political aisle have been migrating away from it, not because of its political bias, but because it's a damn slot machine for anyone trying to make a living.
(TBF: Google et. al. could possibly minimize a lot of this controversy by being far more transparent about the special sauce. OTOH, I don't know in the current political climate if that would be useful because I don't know if their explanations would be believed. "Who are you going to believe, Google, or your lying eyes", right?)
"A Saudi national gives a tour of landmarks in Washington, DC that shows entrances, exits, and checkpoints" is not at all compelling, no. That describes my trip overseas last year if you swizzle the nationalities. The notebook of plane calculations is more compelling, and the evidence that he was paid by the Sauds as an informant is interesting, but not particularly damning (one possibility: he could easily be taking free money on the side while he coordinated with the Taliban outside of Saudi interests).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQCkTu3n-KY
A better way to judge if he's a "conspiracy theorist" would be to look at what he says, what he cites as evidence, and judge for yourself if he has any credibility. A more valid disagreement would be his far-right political views. After the Trump shooting he shot down any conspiracy theories that had to do with it being an inside job, said conspiracy didn't make sense without any evidence, and then followed it up with a "simpler explanation: diversity". I consider myself center-right but he's too far to the right even for me (though I'm not a believer in using demographics to make hiring decisions, bias is not a fixable problem). I still think he's done a great job at exposing big tech.
Wikipedia probably didn't include the above counter-argument. Disputes on Wikipedia are decided by a vote, and you're crazy if you think there isn't a bias there. I wouldn't trust it as a source for anything political. Even if individual statements are factual, the overall conclusion can't be grounded in truth when facts are cherry-picked.