I'm starting to think that comment sections on news sites are a really bad idea. At first I thought NPR and the like were cowards for removing theirs.
It's bad enough that NYT can be pretty biased on its own, but the comment sections are always full of low-tier thinking that just push whatever narrative is currently in the Overton window.
What I find distressing is how people remark that a telecom and advertising giant acting as a de facto government over the public square isn't a violation of free speech principles because they're a "private business", as if that's an original thought that's profound. Funny how people say "it's a private business" when it suits their own political interests.
We wouldn't blindly allow company-owned cities or states to pass laws, especially vague or undefined ones, that potentially violate our rights, so why do we allow "states" in cyberspace to be run in such a way?
Ban people promoting violence? Sure, why not. I'm as against hate and violence as the next person. But not only is censoring "hate speech" becoming a slippery slope at the company level, it's bad for the public in general because it sets a greater precedent for what the big corporations that run our everyday lives can tell us what we can or cannot do, and with no forgiveness. I don't find it hard to imagine a world where individuals can be instantly and permanently banned from doing everyday things, just like they are on YouTube, because they said or did something off the platform.
I was shocked when news sites started publishing comments as a matter of course.
They worked so hard to research and create a 2000 word article that accurately reflects the world (in accordance to their editorial guidelines) using their good name - and then let fReEtHiNkErChAd and 2020BloodInTheStreets chime in at the end.
It would be OK if they strictly moderated the comments, but few sites seem to do that.
> They worked so hard to research and create a 2000 word article that accurately reflects the world (in accordance to their editorial guidelines) using their good name
I'm not sure which news sites you read but most of the ones I've seen count only as journalism in a very vague and abstract sense. The information is thin, the writing poor, and major important questions go unanswered and ignored. If there is indeed any point to following the news on a daily basis (and there is good evidence to suggest there is not), the quality of most new sources is atrocious enough that none of it is worth my time.
(The exception here is the occasional piece of very well done investigative journalism.)
But, in regard to comments, they do it for the same reason that Hacker News or any other site has a comments section: community engagement. This is not necessary a bad thing but it comes with the responsibility to _moderate_ the resulting community and almost every site drops the ball on this.
If you look at the comment sections of actual propaganda sites... well, you won't see Breitbart comments "correct the record". Quite the opposite, they are an important part of the local echo chamber. The only good they can do is giving others an unfiltered view into the minds of those communities.
Comments do add additional context, it's just a situation by situation basis of whether they are useful. HN comments tend to be useful, YT comments are occasionally useful but mostly garbage.
Is there any service that compiles relevant news(filtering out propaganda etc.). I would prefer an team of people doing the compile by manually going through various news sources and sending out the summary email to subscribers. That would be a huge time saver for me. I wouldn't milk paying money for that kind of service.
The Atlantic have taken that principle & modernised it: every article ends not with a comments section, but an invitation to email them your thoughts; then they publish the cream of the crop on https://www.theatlantic.com/letters/.
Doesn't work if the newspaper publishes total nonsense and smarter or better informed comments point that out, which is 50% of the value of comments.
I'm pretty sure a big part of the reason the Guardian stopped opening comments on most stories was the cost of 'moderation', except the reason their moderation costs were so high is that their moderators would routinely plough through comments by hand to remove people pointing out mistakes or absurd statements by the journalists, and as the Guardian changed over the years the articles became ever more extremist, so that started to be most comments. That is, they defined making their own staff look bad as abuse (regardless of whether it was written in vitriolic style).
Even now if you go read one of the few open threads they have, you can find commenters pointing out logical or factual problems with the column.
My experience is the exact opposite. I often skim the article and find that commenters are better informed than the author and provide more relevant information.
Unlike news companies, commentators do not gain monetary value from sensationalism.
Authors of articles are generally more informed than their pieces suggest, but their editors step in and make the story "pop" for readers in order to generate clicks. This often involves removing nuance. I believe that most major news organizations make an honest effort to be factual, but there's a lot of room within the facts to be misleading.
A commentator that is an expert in the field is not constrained by an editor, and can in a few paragraphs give a more realistic and accurate assessment of the phenomenon.
When I read articles about things in which I'm not knowledgeable, I don't trust the conclusions until I see high quality comments(or tweets) that confirm the thesis of the article.
One website where the comments are usually more interesting than the article is the register, which is mostly IT/high-tech-related news. But when I say more interesting, it's usually because they provide more context, another angle, more information or some humor.
Sometimes, to some degree, and sometimes not. The level and consistency of accuracy varies per organization, per individual reporter, per story, and per person doing the judgement of "accuracy".
Comments would be better if there was a enforced delay in the conversation, and you would have to sign off on what you wrote. 24h laters, the rage of the past would be seen indignified by many.
"They worked so hard to research and create a 2000 word article that accurately reflects the world"
I find this laughable. Many recent articles I've seen are designed to get clicks and have nothing to do with good journalism or research beyond what someone can get from behind a keyboard.
Okay: they worked so hard to contrive a 2000 word sequence to get clicks using machine learning and whatnot - and then let fReEtHiNkErChAd and 2020BloodInTheStreets chime in at the end.
Because fReEtHiNkErChAd and 2020BloodInTheStreets will each piss some readers off and please others, polarizing the topic and inviting others to participate, thus increasing pageviews and ad exposure. It worked well for a while, but with the growth of Twitter mobs it eventually backfired.
A lot that I've read in the past few years read like AI has written them. It wouldn't surprise me if major news publishers removed writing positions and replaced them with AI.
On the other hand, a privately owned shopping mall is legally a "public square" in a number of states in the US, with the justification that it is explicitly a place for people to gather and interact, just like the main street of a town in the 19th century.
Which of these cases is Youtube more like? It's already hard to tell, and it's continuing to change. I expect the legal status of online forums to evolve over the next several decades, just like the legal status of brick-and-mortar spaces has evolved over time.
>On the other hand, a privately owned shopping mall is legally a "public square" in a number of states
Even then, it does not mean that those malls should allow anyone to sell wares. What it means it allows people to visit without discrimination on basis of legally protected classes like gender and race. YouTube banning a channel does not ban individual from watching videos, it prevents them from uploading videos which is akin to setting up stores.
> What it means it allows people to visit without discrimination on basis of legally protected classes like gender and race
No, the "public square" designation specifically allows people to do things like come to the mall and set up political protests and whatnot. It's not about _access_ to the mall; it's about speech protections.
Is uploading videos more akin to setting up a store at the mall, or more akin to standing on a soapbox at the mall and giving a political speech? It probably really depends on the video, on whether the video is being monetized, etc.
In particular, I feel there is an important distinction between demonetization and removal here, from an ethical/moral perspective. I can't speak to the legal perspective; I am not a lawyer.
Not just between demonetization (totally fine with me) and removal (don't really like it). Promotion is also a tricky one, since those algorithms are fully under Google's control and thus responsibility for its results. But do you still participate in this "public square" if only your followers will find your message? But Google will have to decide what videos are shown anyhow...
For a mall comparison, that would be like them only allowing the demonstration to exist in the basement behind the door that says "beware of the leopard".
If a mall did that they likely be accused of discrimination. The demonstrators don't demand to be promoted, but simply be treated as anyone else.
One flaw in the analogy is that physical space is limited and difficult for a person to move around in. The digital space is effectively infinite, and switching is as easy as typing in a new url (compared to the physical challenge of moving to another state/region).
There are all sorts of flaws in the analogies here; that's why they're analogies, not identities.
That said, I'm not quite sure I understand your point. A speaker in physical space can pretty easily take their speech elsewhere; most obviously to the nearest public street corner. So moving away from a private venue typically does not require anything nearly as drastic as "moving to another state/region".
I'd really like to understand your point and how it applies to both the mall and youtube situations, though, and would appreciate you explaining it if you have the time.
The crux is that digital space is infinite -- anyone can create a space for their own speech. In the physical world, people own very little space, and free speech almost always needs to impose on someone else's property. I think because of that, any comparisons between online speech and IRL speech are inherently flawed and not very useful.
I think there's a difference between "you can speak" and "you can speak in such a way that interested people can hear". The former is not very useful in terms of the right people usually think of as "freedom of speech"; the limiting case of it in the physical world is "you can speak, but only in your own home". So what, if anything, makes for an online version of the public square, where one can go to present speech for consideration by others?
Also, I think online speech is more similar to physical-world speech than you make it out to be. You can't speak online without "imposing" on your hosting provider, their ISP, etc. If you self-host, you "impose" on your own ISP (and probably violate their ToS, if you have a residential connection). You "impose" on your domain registrar. These are all private entities, so you have the same sorts of issues as you allude to for the physical world. And these private entities have been known to restrict the speech of people relying on their services, so this is not a hypothetical risk.
Telling a silenced victim that they can easily move to somewhere else in digital space is of little comfort when their complaint is that they are being denied access to a public audience who are habitually congregating in an existing location.
The extent to which someone is entitled to an audience is of course more difficult to judge.
I disagree with your last sentence; I don't think anyone is entitled to an audience, so it's not a very difficult situation to judge. Free speech means you can shout in the wind all day long.
The original poster was referring to the Pruneyard rule, which is not about characteristics of shoppers (public accommodation), but about using the shopping mall's premises specifically to engage in speech directed to other shoppers.
I assure you that if you were to set up a booth in a shopping mall and start screaming slurs and lecturing about how gays and blacks and Jews are undermining the foundations of the superior white civilization, you would very quickly be removed from the mall.
What if you set up a booth in a shopping mall in the spring of 2016 in California or Massachusetts and gave away pro-Trump stickers? I assure you there are plenty of people out there in both states, many of them likely working on YouTube, who view that as equivalent to your hypothetical. I know a number of them personally.
Trust me, I'm not a fan of the sort of rhetoric you describe. But I also don't like slippery slopes with no guardrails. I expect we'll end up with guardrails here in the end, after a few decades and a bunch of court cases, but it's going to take a while.
A literal reading of their new restrictions as quoted in the article would in fact make a bunch of Trump's campaign speeches fall under the restrictions. And while I'd much rather he had not made those speeches or that people had not listened, or both, it's not clear to me that refusing to broadcast them would have been the right call either.
Now very likely Youtube plans to do extremely selective enforcement. I'm not sure that over-broad rules with ensuing very selective enforcement, applied only against the powerless and unpopular, is the right direction to head in, but that's what I see going on here.
I don't have a problem with people pushing bigoted fear mongering narratives for attention being powerless and unpopular.
I think the truth is that big platforms that are conceivably open to anyone eventually become abused, unevenly enforced, and end up being a gamble when it comes to business. YouTube, Google play, Apple's app store and many more are all examples of this.
I think you have the causality backwards. What I said is that in practice only the powerless and unpopular will get silenced, not that silencing will make people powerless and unpopular. That is, in practice this will likely get applied against all sorts of minority viewpoints that fall under the rules, but not applied to sufficiently powerful/popular/near-majority-viewpoint rules violators.
Also, I couldn't care less whether things are a gamble when it comes to business. I do care about public discourse and control thereof.
Youtube runs on the back of publicly-funded infrastructure and, as a natural monopoly in the space, it has a position of privilege that needs to be regulated.
We need an Internet Bill of Rights to ensure free speech on any platform of this scale. Yes, that means speech you don't like; may I suggest not watching it?
Interesting question. US culture has a rather long history of censoring sexual content, but other nations has other areas which they prefer to censor. Historically in Sweden, we had about as restrictive ban on violence as the US had on sex. As an example, we had sexual education for teens on national broadcast and allowed movies which got banned in the states. On the other hand we banned Darkwing Duck as it "taught children how to use physical violence against each other".
Following more modern censoring in Sweden, should Youtube allow videos that include tobacco, alcohol and gambling? if not why not?
Interesting question. Of course, being of sound mind, I don't consider pornography to be the same thing as political speech, and don't really seem to have any issue drawing a line between the two. It should certainly be just as easy to NOT see either thing, if you don't want to; but presently it's much harder to get a platform for the speech than it is for the porn. Funny, that.
Anyone can put video on the internet. How is YouTube a monopoly? It isn't a human right to have a certain number of people stumble on to your video through algorithm recommendations.
Do any of those places host a substantial portion of the public political debate? If any of those places banned people, would that significantly reduce the ability of those people to meaningfully participated in the public political debate?
Probably not, but then I don't think it's a like to like comparison, youtube is more of a broadcast system than anything, it's closer to TV or Newspapers were pre youtube and nobody has the automatic right to TV airtime or to be printed in a newspaper.
It's not close to TV, in any way shape or form other than the fact that it's a video on a screen. Regular people don't put things on TV. That has always been a privilege for the very rich, or for local governments in the case of public access TV. Either way, not something regular people have access to.
It's closer to pamphlets than newspapers, in that regular people can make and distribute pamphlets, whereas regular people have never been able to put whatever they want in newspapers. We would be rightly upset if either the government or common carriers refused service to political groups distributing pamphlets.
Then using your analagy I could see a compromise here, youtube could host whatever content as you desire but it wouldn't necessarily surface it in seach or anywhere else on the site. It would only be accessible by direct link. That would satisfy the common carrier aspect as you could simply email the links out to your existing audience.
Because to use your analagy, to send out your pamphlets you must know your audience already.
>That would satisfy the common carrier aspect as you could simply email the links out to your existing audience.
Yes, but the analogy with traditional delivery services breaks down because people don't ask the delivery service to find new content for them. Preferring certain people's videos in search and recommendations based upon their political content is a deliberate reduction in the ability of the penalized people to meaningfully participate in the political conversation, which is what we should be trying to prevent. It's dangerous. Less dangerous than banning them altogether, perhaps, but still dangerous.
Google and Facebook et al built very successful products that a lot of people enjoy using. But I don't think very many people think that should entitle them to shape the political conversation. The people being shut out to varying degrees will certainly not see it that way.
Then I think there's a core distinction between hosting content and as you put it "finding new content for them". Hosting may fall under some common carrier scenario, but recommendations/search fall under curation and curation is very much back in the realm of TV/newspapers where the proprieter exercises control. I think that does entitle them to shape the political conversation, although I could see some argument for a great deal of transparency in exactly what they're doing in that regard.
>Then I think there's a core distinction between hosting content and as you put it "finding new content for them".
Yes of course those two things are different, but YouTube does both of them and both of them are necessary for meaningful participation in the public political debate.
>but recommendations/search fall under curation and curation is very much back in the realm of TV/newspapers where the proprieter exercises control.
When users search somewhere like YouTube or Google, or look at their recommendations, they are typically not expecting to get content ranked by how well it falls in line with the proprietor's political outlook. They're trying to get content that matches what they searched for, or in the case of recommendations looking for content the service thinks they might be interested in, not content that the proprietor thinks they should be seeing to further their own political goals. Search, and to an extent recommendations, fall under discovery. People don't go to YouTube or Google or Facebook or Twitter to see content curated by those companies. If they want curated content, they go to a specific channel or page or account, or to a website like the NYT.
>I think that does entitle them to shape the political conversation, although I could see some argument for a great deal of transparency in exactly what they're doing in that regard.
I'm curious if you would you say that if they were hiding content you agree with and promoting content you disagree with, or what you would say if there was an election coming up and they were hiding content in favor of your preferred candidate and pushing content in favor of the opponent.
I think google will largely remove content at the edges that it deems to be offensive or dangerous both to its audience and to its reputation, much the same way reddit went through a recent cleanup of similar "communities". So long as they are transparent with what they're removing, I really don't have a problem. I distinctly believe that a right to free speech is not a right to have an audience provided to you. If you want to build such a community on your own site then by all means, that's your prerogative and that's the freedom the web gives you.
>I think google will largely remove content at the edges that it deems to be offensive or dangerous
And do you think they remove that content without any regard for their own political leanings? That their opinion of what is "offensive" or "dangerous" is not influenced by their own political ideology?
>I distinctly believe that a right to free speech is not a right to have an audience provided to you.
What is the point in free speech, in your opinion? Why is it something we should care to guarantee?
>If you want to build such a community on your own site then by all means, that's your prerogative and that's the freedom the web gives you.
A) The actual fact of the matter is that the majority of the public political debate which normal people engage in on the internet occurs on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, and perhaps a couple of other giant corporate-owned web properties that all have essentially identical policies. Telling people to go elsewhere is essentially telling them to go piss up a rope. It's not a real alternative.
The main legal benefit is §230 of the Communications Decency Act, which has never required platforms to refrain from exercising editorial control in order to receive immunity (in fact, one motivation for this law was to encourage platforms to engage in exercising editorial control without incurring liability for doing this).
(I can see political pressure now and in the future to say that some platforms should have some kind of neutrality and/or transparency obligation in order to get this immunity -- but under current U.S. law, they don't.)
Well, social media is heavily based on network effects, so it's not like consumers can just leave one platform for another and reach the same people.
If your cell company prevented you from calling your crazy uncle on Christmas eve because he believed aliens built the pyramids, that would be considered a violation of your right to free speech AND free association, and it would be very creepy.
There's already a SCOTUS ruling on the books where the government cannot deny convicted sex offenders their access to Facebook because it is the public square. It's literally in the ruling.
The public square argument at this point isn't deniable, it's more about what the company that maintains that public square gets to define as trash.
I think a key insight in discussions like this is realising that “public square” is as more of a function rather than a state of ownership.
IMO if your company becomes big enough to obtain the function as a public square, you should be prepared to be required to act as one.
Legislation isn’t there yet, but just like privacy and data-ownership is getting more legislative attention these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if things like this are subject to regulation within 5-10 years.
As this infinitely repeated discussion shows, it’s clearly a problem which needs to be solved.
Youtube, Facebook, have to decide whether they're communication infrastructure, like telephone companies, or publishers. In the first case, they have to publish everything that doesn't violate a state law; in the second case, they get to choose, but they accept liability for everything that is published on their platform.
This is wrong. The law very explicitly states that companies are not liable for content uploaded by users and are also legally able to moderate their platform as they see fit. Google section 230.
The advantage of removing (or at least, humans actively moderating) comments is that it pushes discussion back to face-to-face (or at least, more direct and personal) channels and restricts the anonymity of commentary. This has a few benefits, namely:
* Self-moderating: Such conversations require a certain level of decorum, since these are presumably people you interact with every day. The likelihood of calling your desk mate a Nazi, racist, race traitor, etc. to their face are astronomically smaller than when it's cloaked in anonymity, since there may be consequences to your commentary.
* Self-authenticating: It reduces the efficacy of message amplification, since the real world serves as an out-of-band identity authentication mechanism.
* Self-regulating: It's easier, cheaper, and less risky for the hosting site, since they no longer have any enforcement role to play in the discussion itself (beyond the original slant when presenting the information, e.g. by news organizations).
Of course, this doesn't address the problems of sites which are inherently designed to do one-to-many broadcasting and discussion, such as Youtube or Reddit. How would these sites look without comments at all, or with a very strict attestation/vouching system?
Although HN follows a similar model vis-à-vis discussion and broadcasting, the active HN moderation is pretty good, at least good enough to maintain a relatively high-quality discourse and removing very low-quality discussion. However, this is difficult to scale and relatively expensive.
I was a huge proponent of this in the early days of the web and was leading the crusade for reader engagement, championing the idea of anonymous commentary and a pure marketplace of ideas.
Well, it turns out I had an over-optimistic view of people.
Maybe so, but I still think this can work. I think the problem is that we've moved away from communities focused around a particular topic to just throwing everyone into a pool and crossing our fingers.
If a community has a topic and the majority of users are interested in discussing that topic, then when someone veers off-topic to rant about their favorite conspiracy theory, you don't have to be a judge of the validity of his viewpoint. You just gently point out that's not what people are there to talk about and that they're welcome to discuss said conspiracy theory over on yonder conspiracy theory aficionado forum (and ban them if they continue trying to detract from the conversation).
This then removes moderators as judges of what is Right and True (the problem facing moderators on Facebook/YouTube/other anything-goes platforms) and positions them in the much more manageable role of, well, moderating a conversation.
The problem isn't an ideological or semantic one but the fact that most news operations don't have the resources or motivation to moderate online commentary effectively, and the cost of poisoning conversation is trivially low.
Most new organizations are also general-purpose, meaning the organization will cover everything from politics to sports to tech to finance to gossip. My assertion is that trying to be all things to all people leads us into impossible-to-moderate scenarios even before you look at the motivation/resources available with which to perform said moderation.
I'm proposing approaching the US code and other bodies of law (and associated jurisprudence) as a Wiki and seeing what happens. I propose that this could be an improvement over the whole representative democracy approach.
What no one really wants to admit here on YC is that the userbase here is something like the top .01% of (intelligence / literacy / analytical skills). Hell, even reddit, as low-brow as that has gotten, is still top 1% easily. But there are still plenty of staggeringly oblivious views in both places.
It's hard to admit that dichotomy, because when we realize that the top 1% or .01% can still be so ignorant, we also gradually realize that we are all probably in for a lot of trouble moving forward, particularly if and when resource wars become a bit more widespread than they are now.
> userbase here is something like the top .01% of (intelligence / literacy / analytical skills).
If this were true, I would have lost whatever little faith in humanity I had left. But I very much doubt it, being good at some "hackery" thing is completely orthogonal to being intelligent/smart in any normal meaning of the word.
Well, whichever measure of IQ you want to use as a proxy for intelligence, it's plausible that the self-selected group of people who comment on HN is higher compared to the world population (oh, this includes me, too -- how embarassing). How much higher is an empirical question which is unlikely to be settled, although I would guess that your .01% is a bit of an overestimate.
The important point, though, is that "dichotomy" not the same as "contradiction". The contradiction between your estimate of the high intelligence of HN commenters and the, let's say, less-than-intelligent ideas sometimes expressed here can be explained by noticing that being somewhat smart doesn't make someone immune to having stupid ideas.
What, after all, is the minimal IQ beyond which one will never make a mistake?
> What, after all, is the minimal IQ beyond which one will never make a mistake?
I'd argue 0, in that a being completely incapable of even attempting thought would be unable to have an incorrect thought. But that's a bit of a reductio ad absurdum
The major consequence of this for me is that it has caused me to reevaluate my views on representative democracy.
Edit: As a clarification, while I still tend toward a preference for representative democracy, I now acknowledge that it is possible for a fruitful and productive society to flourish in systems that some may label as an "oppressive dictatorship".
Major consequence of what? If we accept for a moment the extremely questionable proposition that HN and Reddit posters are some sort of intellectual elite, yet "there are still plenty of staggeringly oblivious views in both places", all that means is that you wouldn't be able to find an enlightened dictator, would you?
And indeed what we see is that oppressive dictatorships never have high quality people running them. They're always overrun with corruption, absurd ideas, forged statistics, pseudo-intellectual waffle (see: the books and political thinking created by the leaders of the USSR) and to the extent they may seem more intelligent or erudite than the working classes it's only because they craft their image so carefully.
You say you now acknowledge it's possible for a "fruitful and productive society to flourish" in an oppressive dictatorship, but what on earth are you thinking of here? Surely not China, which has thrown millions of its own citizens into concentration camps, trashed its environment, routinely seems to report false GDP numbers, relies on capital controls to keep the rich Chinese from leaving, is famous throughout the world for IP theft, has practically disconnected itself from the global internet and has radically misallocated resources in many well documented ways? That fruitful and productive society?
I abandoned that idea a while ago. I think we could move toward a wikiocracy, which would have problems of its own but for which we have a working prototype that is reasonably transparent, responsive, and accessible and delivered a significant public good in a relatively short time frame.
How would the rules look for establishing the long-term governance of a wikiocracy? Specifically, my impression is that it works because it has good people. If the good people left and lesser people replaced them, could it still be made to work?
One of the things I'll give the US is as crappy as the leaders get, the system still remains cohesive rather than suffering a bloody coup every four years.
Well lots of other countries get on OK with parliamentary democracies, I don't think the US system is uniquely reliable in this regard. You'd have to look at the ups and downs of Wiki edit wars, figure out what standards would apply for citations of empirical data as valid policymaking inputs and so forth. I don't think Wikipedia has especially 'good people', just experienced ones and a general agreement to operate within the wiki framework.
>I don't think the US system is uniquely reliable in this regard
Completely agree. I'm just speaking from an American perspective. There are plenty of other countries that are similarly stable (perhaps even moreso thanks to having more than two diametrically opposed parties).
The "general agreement to operate within the framework" bit was what I was getting at with "good people". I'm not sure how stable it would be against a concerted effort to disrupt/distort it. But I haven't looked into its governance in much depth, either, thus my original question.
Politicians have been talking up what they call evidence-based policymaking for years. That'd be the equivalent of citing empirical data for policymaking inputs. Unfortunately it's not that easy, as the endless edit wars and fights over what constitutes a reliable citation shows.
> One of the things I'll give the US is as crappy as the leaders get, the system still remains cohesive rather than suffering a bloody coup every four years.
Pretty much every system in the world has that feature. Heck, that's a standard of quality so low North Korea’s government passes with honors.
> We wouldn't blindly allow company-owned cities or states to pass laws, especially vague or undefined ones, that potentially violate our rights, so why do we allow "states" in cyberspace to be run in such a way?
Actual states have a monopoly on violence, and can deprive me of life, liberty, and property. So I want them to have as few excuses to do that as possible. These "states" in cyberspace can do none of that, so it's significantly less of a problem if they don't embrace freedom of speech as an ideal.
(I guess it depends somewhat on whether you see free speech as an inherent virtue or as a safety valve against government oppression. I've been leaning towards the latter personally.)
> I'm starting to think that comment sections on news sites are a really bad idea
I have no idea how it is in other countries but in Germany the comment sections in every single newspaper is _horrible_, especially when it is articles about refugees, climate change and similar topics.
That is sadly the way anywhere mainstream without heavy moderation. The scary thing about Youtube comments isn't that they are extra stupid because they aren't - they are the norm and essentially what happens when a representative sample of the population is available.
Just because the majority of the population has the ability to comment doesn't mean the majority participates. Voluntary participation like that tends to attract people with strong opinions on the position under debate - especially people who disagree with the position upheld by the article and especially people who feel like theirs is the minority opinion.
I suspect you're defining horrible comments as, "comments expressing views I don't like and wish didn't exist". Germany has particularly extreme and unusual policies regarding migrants/asylum seekers/refugees, climate change and a few other such things. Is it any surprise that extreme views in one direction trigger extreme views in the other?
Although any hateful speech is terrible of course, I think censoring like this is a bad idea. Like other conversations about freedom of speech on HN it will eventually lead to talking about banning non hateful but extreme ideas like flat earth and anti vax. While ridiculous as they are, I think it would be equally ridiculous to ban them. What's the line you draw when you decide what gets to be promoted. Maybe certain religious ideas or ideas criticising religions?
I do disagree with your private business comment though. It is a private business and they can do what they want to an extent. You don't tell a news paper who they have to let write articles. But I think the problem is that youtube is so large and the service so imporant that it might as well be a government deciding rights. It's not just youtube there are a lot of tech giants that powerful. I think when it's obvious they are that powerful and important it's time to break them up. I mean hell the bread company my step dad works at even had to go through a process to see if they would be too big with a recent purchase. But yet tech companies have been getting away with this sort of unchecked growth. They are global powers with dwindling competition. Break them up. Reintroduce competition.
Yet you say that "they can do what they want to an extent." I'm not sure that we disagree at all. I support private businesses right to do what they want, until they become large enough that they've reached "escape velocity", if you will, where they have become so large that it's unlikely that any meaningful competition can come close to matching them in budget or influence. Companies of Google's size should see even fewer freedoms when they get massive kickbacks from the government; Google receives millions in public money but has nebulous "rules" they arbitrarily enforce over the public.
I don't know if breaking up these massive "tech" companies is a good approach, but something has to be done at some point, and there needs to be rules over how YouTube can regulate its platform. At the very least, YouTube needs to be forced to make all of its rules explicit and to not insta-ban entire channels while deleting all their data.
I think it's going to be weird and messy whichever way it goes. If it is under government oversight, politics is just going to ruin the whole purpose maybe make it worse. Me and you can have a debate about whether or not neo nazis should have the right to speak their hateful messages without calling eachother nazis. But voters aren't so calm when their elected official slings mud suggestion someone is one because they don't want to ban their speech.
I'll admit though. I'm not so sure what the effect of breaking them up will be. How many services would be lost, how many sites would go down because of lost services, how much money would be lost due to search ranking being ineffective or businesses needing to buy ads from multiple companies. It would hurt a lot of people at least temporarily. But I think long term the Internet and business would thrive after a short term pain. It would definitely have to happen in stages though. Each part of the business broken up into a few.
But yeah I agree, the escape velocity companies you mentioned need to be put in check somehow.
Agreed. The only comment I would add is that, unlike newspapers, these companies receive a broad immunity through the laws so that they can operate without fear of legal retribution. Even though they operate as private companies, I would argue that they still have a mandate to the public good as part of their operations.
I'm also okay banning anti-vax ideas, in defense of the community in general, and in defense in specific of those vulnerable few who can't be immunized and rely on herd immunity.
Foregoing vaccination imposes an as-yet-unaccounted externality on the community; you put everyone at risk by not vaccinating yourself or your kids, and there's no way for the vulnerable (those relying on herd immunity) to know who around them will put them at risk.
It goes way beyond an individual choice, to vaccinate or not. That decision has impacts far beyond the individual's life.
You are OK with banning the idea? It's one thing to make it criminal to endanger your children's health. It's another to put a blanket ban on the speech because you don't like the idea or you think it's "dangerous". The point of free speech is that you don't get individuals deciding who gets to be in charge of what is morally right to say. Society as a whole decides through civil discourse and rigorous debate. But you can't have that if you go around suppressing the other side.
Start banning free speech and you start banning democracy. There is really no two ways about it. This is not a debate about the physical choices people make. Those are either made illegal or not. This is a debate about whether or not people have the right to talk about their ideas. But you are here trying to use a ridiculously nearly undefendable action to spin the argument of some actions are bad or dangerous. Yes they are, but the speech and discussion can only enlighten the public so long as reasonable minds have a chance to speak up against unreasonable ideas. Humanity's resilience comes from the fact that we get to try so many ideas at once out. But if you let a single entity decide what ideas will be allowed you introduce a dangerous weak point into society. The inability to speak your mind only ever brings suffering violence and death. Yes free speech has its problems but it's the best we got.
There is also the problem that someday a company might produce a vaccine that was dangerous to the public, and people that find this out might want to tell others. A strict ban on "anti-vax ideas" would stifle that speech.
Obligatory vaccination is oppression, however you twist it.
How far are you willing to go when it comes to oppressing individuals in the name of the common good? Force women to have children to repopulate aging countries (or, alternatively, force sterilize them in overpopulated countries)?
I don't buy this argument any more than I buy the argument that taxation is theft (it isn't) or that traffic lights are oppression (they aren't).
Vaccination, for those who can be vaccinated (not everyone can), is a trade-off for participating in a society free from disease. Taxation is the price you pay for buying a society and traffic controls are a price you pay for access to a ubiquitous and generally safe road network.
All of coexisting with others is a balance of trade-offs; labeling all of those trade-offs as oppression renders the word meaningless, as much as referring to any kind of coercion as violence.
As for how far am I willing to go? Mandatory vaccines are a good trade-off, and I am willing to stand by the position (one which is growing increasingly popular, as preventable diseases are returning in force).
Forcing women to have children? I have never heard, outside fiction, of a society that forces women to give birth; certainly it's been encouraged, lionized even, but you're proposing something from the realm of fiction as a what-if. Not helpful.
which vaccines? meningitis? anthrax? syphilis? tuberculosis? HPV? hepatitis? flu?
We will never have absolute safety in life. I prefer to have freedom to make the choice because the government will always end up abusing any power we give it.
You're conflating three concepts: forcing people to be vaccinated, banning speech opposing compulsory vaccination, and banning speech arguing that vaccines are a bad idea. In a free society, only the first has any possible justification (based on harm to others if you aren't vaccinated). The second is core political speech. The third is core scientific speech.
They can choose to not be a platform for anything that they want. You don't have a right to that platform. Forcing YouTube to leave everything up infringes on their rights to run their site as they want.
To play devil's advocate to the "private platform" argument: we force tv networks and radio stations to give equal air time to all presidential candidates.[1] NBC is a private a company but if they permit one candidate to host SNL they must give the other candidate(s) an equivalent opportunity so as not to unfairly sway public opinion. I don't necessarily think that "infringes" on NBC's right to run their platform as they want. They're still given the option of whether or not they want to wade into politics on their airways but once they do they're obligated to open their platform to both sides.
Now you could argue that Donald Trump expertly exploited exceptions to the "equal-time rule" in order to get much more coverage than his competition, but that's more to do with the structure of the law than the spirit of what it's trying to accomplish.
Broadcasters have purchased a license from the government to use those airwaves, and have to abide by rules. In contrast, anyone can put up a website. That is why broadcasters are more constrained in their behavior.
The issue with TV is that it's not "their airways". The "airways" are public property so to speak, and the TV license grants TV networks use of that public property on certain conditions, one being political messages.
Youtube, or any other site uses no public property in that way so they are not, and should not be beholden to the same rules.
YouTube has become a mass communication platform, more akin to the telephone company than say a magazine. A magazine has editorial control over what it publishes, and can decide what to put into its content. A telephone company has no say over what is said over its phone lines.
YouTube is just asking to be regulated in such a way as the phone companies. And it should be regulated to follow the First Amendment as a mass communication platform, even though it is a private company.
I'm wondering why YouTube doesn't have something like Reddit's "quarantine" where certain videos and/or channels are blocked from the recommendation algorithms without being outright banned, but still available for those who specifically search for them.
No comments, likes, dislikes, and no recommendations on the sidebar. It can still be viewed if you accept the risk, and can be found using the search bar or by scrolling through the channel.
Generally, true statements are not profound or original, but sometimes still need to be repeated when people assert the opposite. “The world is round” is neither an original or profound statement and yet people still need to say it periodically.
1. Comments sections on prominent, generalized websites (non-niche sites) are oftentimes not even worth reading. Buried beneath idiotic nonsense, spam/scams, edgelords, trolls, bots, and narcissists are the actual few insightful comments that are refreshing bits of value. It's like panning for gold in a river.
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2. There's not going to be a fair judge of what counts as "censorable content" when two opposite sites of the debate are each arguing in favor of their side. It's like why referees exist in sports. Of course Team A will say "No way! That wasn't a foul, I didn't touch them!", while Team B says "It was definitely a foul, I got hit!". To anyone who's heard "boos or cheers" from the crowd at a sports game, it's not a shocker the response centers around which calls benefits their team.
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3. With regards to the "freedom of speech" rights and personal liberties - how much of a shit does a monopoly-level, multi-national corporation give about strictly adhering to government-defined "rights"? What is the business cost of vehemently adhering to potentially-gray-area covenants vs. saying "Yeahh.. fuck that shit it's too much effort". Finagling laws to suit business needs is what huge companies pay teams of people to do already.
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4. YouTube is like a factory farm. The more users are bunched into YouTube, the more money Google makes from advertising. It's all a numbers game. Google has no incentive to change the setup of the farm, so to speak, when what they have has been paying off to keep the service free and hold market share. Unless someone has a particularly large audience, the main solution to complaints from random, non-paying users is: "Deal with it".
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5. Ban specific items that are violent, devious, or dangerous? Sure. Banning "DIY drinking bleach cures autism" is not the same as banning something more nuanced like "trailer trash ride dirt bikes on the interstate" on the grounds a specific subgroup has a problem. As customer service will show you, people will always find something to complain about. If Google came out with, "We will ban whatever we feel like based on what disagrees with our superior, self-selected ideology", that would be a very different story. That's not much better than a dictatorship banning anything that disagrees with the State.
What strange irony that you post about it on HN, effectively a detached comment section for a news site. Was that intended?
Regardless, I think you're making the tacit assertion that comments for the news belong somewhere. How? How should its censorship work? Would that take care of the problem?
There definitely is an effect to white-labeling and brand confidence. When comments are hosted by an organization - regardless of the specific legal implications and understandings - people assume the brand has some ownership of the contents of those comments... No matter how big of a font is used to say "The opinions expressed below belong solely to their owners and do not reflect the views of <BRAND>."
>The thing about an online comment section is that the guy who really likes pedophilia is going to start posting on every thread about sexual minorities “I’m glad those sexual minorities have their rights! Now it’s time to start arguing for pedophile rights!” followed by a ten thousand word manifesto. This person won’t use any racial slurs, won’t be a bot, and can probably reach the same standards of politeness and reasonable-soundingness as anyone else. Any fair moderation policy won’t provide the moderator with any excuse to delete him. But it will be very embarrassing for to New York Times to have anybody who visits their website see pro-pedophilia manifestos a bunch of the time.
“So they should deal with it! That’s the bargain they made when deciding to host the national conversation!”
No, you don’t understand. It’s not just the predictable and natural reputational consequences of having some embarrassing material in a branded space. It’s enemy action.
Every Twitter influencer who wants to profit off of outrage culture is going to be posting 24-7 about how the New York Times endorses pedophilia. Breitbart or some other group that doesn’t like the Times for some reason will publish article after article on New York Times‘ secret pro-pedophile agenda. Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you, people who hate everybody and will take whatever targets of opportunity present themselves, and a thousand self-appointed moral crusaders and protectors of the public virtue. It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section. Finally, it will make up 100% of what people associate with you and your brand. The Chinese Robber Fallacy is a harsh master; all you need is a tiny number of cringeworthy comments, and your political enemies, power-hungry opportunists, and 4channers just in it for the lulz can convince everyone that your entire brand is about being pro-pedophile, catering to the pedophilia demographic, and providing a platform for pedophile supporters. And if you ban the pedophiles, they’ll do the same thing for the next-most-offensive opinion in your comments, and then the next-most-offensive, until you’ve censored everything except “Our benevolent leadership really is doing a great job today, aren’t they?” and the comment section becomes a mockery of its original goal.
[...]
>Fourth, I want anybody else trying to host “the national conversation” to have a clear idea of the risks. If you plan to be anything less than maximally censorious, consider keeping your identity anonymous, and think about potential weak links in your chain (ie hosts, advertisers, payment processors, etc). I’m not saying you necessarily need to go full darknet arms merchant. Just keep in mind that lots of people will try to stop you, and they’ve had a really high success rate so far.
I agree with your comment but find it rambling, so I’ll concur with this: If free speech is a right worth protecting from the government, it’s worth protecting against equally powerful corporations.
> If free speech is a right worth protecting from the government, it’s worth protecting against equally powerful corporations.
The right of free speech is that you can say what you want without violent repercussions, such as fines, prison time, or capital punishment. Corporations and individuals already aren't allowed to do any of that, so no additional protection is needed. Governments are singled out specifically because they do not follow the same rules as everyone else—asserting that violence is a "legitimate" means of achieving arbitrary goals.
> The right of free speech is that you can say what you want without violent repercussions, such as fines, prison time, or capital punishment.
This is merely one view of free speech; many people actively disagree with this view.
You can't take a contested human-defined concept like freedom of speech and say "this only means X, case closed." I mean, you can, but nobody has to agree with you.
The view that free speech should protect you even from the most trivial consequences like being banned from a private platform is completely unreasonable and ridiculous. Doesn't matter that there are people that hold that opinion, that's a weak argument for it.
> the most trivial consequences like being banned from a private platform
You say these consequences are trivial, but they may not be trivial for every individual. A number of individuals have been banned from multiple platforms, including their revenue streams and parts of the financial system, seriously damaging them financially. Even when I disagree with the individuals being banned, something about this strikes me as wrong. It should not be possible to mount a coordinated attack on an individual's financial stability like this. The boogeyman of the moment is the right, but this will surely be turned against individuals on the left the next time we go to war, or perhaps the next time left-populism seems to be gaining serious ground.
A lot of people combine free speech with anti-discrimination. Speech get attached to identity and from there a ban becomes discrimination.
Three people walk into a Hotel. A priest, a advocate for the left, and a advocate for the right. Each three talks about the groups they define as "us", and how bad those "others" are. Can the hotel owner deny hosting and ban one of them based on the identity and vies of the person?
> If free speech is a right worth protecting from the government, it’s worth protecting against equally powerful corporations.
But corporations' ability to decide what to host is guaranteed by freedom of speech. Remember, freedom of speech is not just freedom to say what you want it's also freedom from compelled speech. It's the freedom from the government telling you to make or host speech. Mandating that corporations host speech they don't want is not protecting freedom of speech, it is violating freedom of speech.
What I find funny about all this is that I'm certain if YouTube existed a few decades earlier we would likely be under pressure to ban "disgusting" pro-LGBT content or content supporting things as "vile" as interracial relationships.
We would say, these private companies have a duty not to radicalise our children. That our children are being led away from god and into sinful lifestyles like homosexuality.
Some of us would welcome our views being censored by a few execs in silicon valley because we would see them defending the moral values of the status-quo...
Surely I'm not the only one who feels it might be a little short sighted to give a handful of billionaires like Zuckerberg control over what we can and can't express in the 21st century?
If we're so concerned and don't want to see content we morally disagree with, why can't we have family friendly modes?
I for one am glad we were all radicalised to support the "homosexual agenda". I'm glad we were radicalised by people like MLK to resist racism. And sure, there were some extremists along the way who took it upon themselves to commit acts of terrorism for the "greater good", but we understood these people were rare and this was the unfortunate, but necessary cost of liberty.
So before we continue too far down this road, are we certain we have all the answers now? If someone can be banned from social media sites for stating biological (but perhaps unfortunate) facts such as, "trans women aren't women" are we completely sure we'll get mass censorship right this time?
It might be worth remembering vast majority of us hold one or two "extreme views" that others find morally offensive.
Edit: Not that I should have to, but for those who are suspicious of my motives, I'm a left-wing, pro-LGBT, anti-racist type of guy.
I don't think the analogy fits. Those individuals are protected classes and refusing them access like this would be discriminatory behavior. Likely not illegal in USA but it would be illegal elsewhere.
Racists are not a protected class of people. They aren't afforded those same rights. And on some grounds their disruption of society actually puts an onus on you as a platform to restrict their access.
Nobody is in a protected class. In civil rights law, protected class does not refer to any specific group of people, but to the classifications that the law applies to. For instance, religion is a protected class, but the law applies equally to all. The confusion arises I believe because people think of it like "middle class", or "working class", but it is not. In the case of religion, because it is a protected class, discrimination based on religion is illegal, but the law protects all equally, so Baptists are treated the same as Mormons, for example. Racists are protected just the same as anyone else. Whether or not someone is racist is irrelevant in this context.
Yes it does, but to attempt and claim that White Supremacy could ever be considered a "protected class" is absurd.
This isn't my bias speaking here, this is a contextual reality, the world has constraints and there isn't any iteration of what we have that would allow this reality to evolve.
The only wiggle room you have here is on free speech grounds but we have already figured out, that this does not apply here.
Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights is already include ideological and philosophical views as protected.
To quote the EU court:
"the Court held that "A fair balance of personal rights made it necessary to accept that others’ thought should be subject to a minimum of influence, otherwise the result would be a "strange society of silent animals that [would] think but ... not express themselves, that [would] talk but ... not communicate, and that [would] exist but ... not coexist."
It basically comes down to the idea that people have a freedom to express a religion or belief, and its the later word which has in the courts view a much larger scope as it also covers ideology and philosophy. A belief can be anything from the view that men are more violent than women, or that immigrants are more violent than natively born.
The US has generally a much narrower definition for protected classes, but there are three states that consider political affiliation as protected class. California, D.C., and New York, where the later protect against discrimination because of political activity. (https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/political-aff...)
All that said, protected class is unlikely going to work on a youtube video. If youtube wanted to ban all non-white non-christian people they likely could do so, as people in videos are not employees of youtube and thus are not covered by the anti-discrimination protection.
You ever been to a legit protest? Have you been near the police line at a protest when there are thousands of protesters and hundreds of police officers and tensions are high and really not nice stuff is being said all around? And the police officers just stand there at the ready. (Sometimes they don’t and they antagonize protestors or just plain assault then, but my experience has been that is the exception.) I have immense, enormous, huge respect for those officers. Sometimes the individual officers personal beliefs align with the protesters. Sometimes not. But they stand there. Just stand there. If things get violent then they shut things down. But a lot of times it feels like things don’t get violent because they are there and people know they will shut it down if things get violent. That’s what I want YouTube to be. YouTube should be the public infrastructure that is available for people to gather and exchange ideas upon, such that most people don’t even give a second thought to the importance of having public streets available to protest on, and the police are there when the law is broken or unprotected speech is spoken. That is it. The job doesn’t pay well. It’s not a glorified role. And it’s prob pretty miserable when things get heated. But it’s a beauty to behold when you step back from it all and take it in and see what is happening.
A quick google, the top three results said average was 50k-60k. One result said the top 10% make low 6 figures. I doubt the majority of officers in those lines are top 10%, almost by simple math.
Departments pay differently, but it is not uncommon that protests pay overtime and that picking up extra shifts in 'normal' work also pays overtime. Such things that pay overtime may be providing security at a parade, may be going into a school for education, may be going to a confrence, etc. Typically, any time you see an officer in uniform, they are getting compensated for that. This is VERY dependent on department, but it is typically not difficult to make much more than 60k.
Well. Then it would be over time? So they are paid more for the time worked during a protest, but that doesn’t make them “well paid” overall. I guess, I’m not seeing any more data in your comment. But. Even if I grant that they make 80k or 90k (up to 50% increase in base pay of 60k, and I’m gonna suppose the cost of living for those officers is commensurately higher), argument sake, I don’t see that really making a substantive difference in the argument
I don't know if this is what you meant, but that's what youtube is doing now. They've decided that these neo-Nazi videos are causing violence, so they've stepped in to remove those bad actors for the sake of everyone else.
> They've decided that these neo-Nazi videos are causing violence
By this logic, shouldn't neo-Nazi rallies or protests be "causing violence" as well because they influence people to commit violent acts later the same way neo-Nazi videos influence people? Yet that is the very thing the officers in GP's comment are protecting.
The fundamental distinction is government vs private.
Police carry weapons that can kill, and have jails that can lock you up for a long time.
Youtube has none of those negative things. They have positive things: great technology and a huge audience. The worst they can do is deny you access to those.
In general, you're not owed an audience. The police won't bring you an audience for your protest, and Youtube won't bring you an audience for your videos unless they want to.
It’s that leftists are increasingly categorising reasonable discourse and arguments they don’t agree with as “extremist right wing propaganda” (or just Nazis), and based on that get accounts defunded or banned.
The left is widening their already rampant use of censorship.
Allowing one side to dictate what the other is allowed to say is generally not good for a democracy.
That's fine if we can agree on what is an "extreme view".
YouTube has already decided that academic software vulnerability exploitation proof-of-concept videos are "dangerous content", which results in video removal and a strike on your account.
53% of millenials have a favorable view of socialism today. But in th 20th century when we were fighting wars to "contain" it, we had senators keeping lists of people they suspected had favorable opinions of it. It used to be an extreme view.
This seems like another example of containment, but it's scary because what's normal today might be an extreme view tomorrow... and what's extreme today could be normal tomorrow. As much as I detest the idea of ideas like white supremecy spreading, I'm not sure I like the idea of fighting it by hiding it from view.
Yesterday was the anniversary of Tiananmen square. China avoided democracy by hiding all evidence of this terrible event. I think most people can agree the government hiding the truth is wrong, but if social media is the new public square (which the supreme court in a way ruled to be true when it ruled Trump can't block his tweets), I think these ideals of not hiding information still applies. The 1st amendment, and what it stands for is truely in jeopody with these actions.
Will YouTube also remove their algos that send people down rabbit holes of “extreme views” and encapsulate individuals in information bubbles that seem to validate and fail to challenge their views?
The platform should shoulder as much or more blame than the content in this case. Free speech man. This is not ok.
"In addition to tightening its hate speech rules, YouTube announced it would also tweak its recommendation algorithm, the automated software that shows users videos based on their interests and past viewing habits. This algorithm is responsible for more than 70 percent of overall time spent on YouTube, and has been a major engine for the platform’s growth. But it has also drawn accusations of leading users down rabbit holes filled with extreme and divisive content, in an attempt to keep them watching and drive up the site’s usage numbers."
Touché. Guilty. I didn’t read. Thank you for pointing out. Pessimistic me says that not much will change because as the other person’s comment says, algos are there to maximize the viewing time of people, and that have their views challenged etc, they aren’t gonna watch as much.
So you are saying YouTube should actively recommend people stuff they disagree with? Like, if you are religious it should recommend atheist and skeptic videos? And if you are vegetarian it should recommend meat smoking videos?
YouTube should actively try to prevent people from being drawn into racist rabbit holes. If your rabbit hole ends with "and that's why we should exterminate Jews", probably not a good idea to encourage viewers down that path.
Well then they should have a transparent blacklist of censored topics that the majority of users collectively agree on. Otherwise it's too easy to start lobbying for the censoring of politically advantageous "extremism" (i.e. groups petitioning YouTube to censor anti-abortion rabbit holes as "misogynistic extremism")
One thing I wish YouTube would clamp down on is extreme planet trashing. People do pranks such as buying a thousand burgers to toss the lot in a swimming pool. They get the ten million likes that pays for the burgers and the local burger restaurant makes a bit of money but some cows had to die for the 'stunt'. Meanwhile at YouTube headquarters they are diligently doing their recycling. At some stage you have to wonder if YouTube are being a good corporate citizen. They encourage this wasteful behaviour.
Regarding the censoring of extreme views, what I don't understand is why YouTube gave the likes of Alex Jones such a long run. I suspect that for a while it was working out well for YouTube having people watch his rants as well as the 9/11 conspiracy theory stuff.
This defied common sense, his garbage was being recommended to people that weren't looking for it. I think these Google people get a bit too clever for their own good without taking time out to just ask if things are common sense.
I think we should all have the option to seek out views differing to our own, for instance I do care to find out what the likes of Timothy McVeigh actually thought. It doesn't mean I believe in them or what they have done. I don't want some BBC journalist to interpret that for me, I want to hear it for myself.
Recently the Iran state broadcaster Press TV got banned from YouTube with no explanation given. They did not have many views, however, now they are gone, how is anyone supposed to 'see' what Iran thinks of the world? There was no hate speech on their channel, it was just banished. Press TV is positively benign compared to recent UK/US leaders and I don't believe I am controversial in saying that. Something is deeply wrong with the censorship landscape.
>and encapsulate individuals in information bubbles that seem to validate and fail to challenge their views?
Err, how do you know that the algorithm does this? And also, how do you know that people are not exposed to other views outside of YouTube. And lastly, why do you think its the job of an entertainment platform to "challenge" views?
Somewhat tangential, but unless you have a goal of using a product as much as possible, any algo that optimizes engagement is not your friend. It's like a waiter who always wants you to order more food.
Right, we can all speculate. I'm asking for some objective proof, if any such is available. We can only propose a solution if we first demonstrate that the problem is real.
I don't want to assume bad faith, but I have the impression that you are arguing just for the sake of arguing.
What about my statement is speculation?
• Youtube themselves state that they optimize for watch time.
• I don't want to go and search for papers on this, but I don't think the idea that people prefer to have their views validated instead of challenged is in any way controversial or speculation.
• It's also not speculation to state that people want to spend their time doing things that gives them positive emotions.
You clearly won't get "objective proof" on this, because the only way to actually proof this would be to do a formal study on it. And why would anyone to a study on such an obvious non-controversial topic?
Maybe it seems confrontational to you but, I don't think "how do you know this" is the same as "can you make a reasonable guess". I don't want to have a personal back and forth with you on this, because it doesn't serve any purpose.
I agree with the other commentator. You seem to be posting pointless confrontational messages that you know there’s no complete proof for, but if you were discussing in good faith, you wouldn’t have posted your messages questioning Google’s YouTube algo.
Parent made broad claims without evidence. Maybe those convinced you. They did not convince me. If you cannot respect that then what is the point of a discussion?
Also, I said I want "some objective proof". You twisted that into "complete proof". Its funny that you are doing the exact thing you're accusing me of.
I didn’t do the same thing at all. You’re seemingly continuing the same trend. There have been multiple people now all claiming the same thing about Youtube’s algo. Of course nothing convinced me because I already knew. It’s an obvious thing to many people who use YouTube to a certain degree. So did other people here.
I didn’t do the same thing as you because I didn’t post around multiple times asking for the same thing from multiple people and acting sort of obtuse like they are saying something isolated.
I assume based on my own use of it and pretty much all the memes and anecdotes from everyone. I make no assumptions about what people are exposed to outside of YouTube. It’s not the platforms job to challenge one’s views, rather one’s views are naturally challenged when in an open marketplace of ideas. YouTube isn’t an open marketplace of ideas. It is effectively a curated presentation of ideas, customized to each individual by the platform. For the economic profit of the platform, at the expense of community goods such as civil discourse. Your snark didn’t add anything to your argument, btw.
>I assume based on my own use of it and pretty much all the memes and anecdotes from everyone.
Well, now that its clear that it is simply an assumption/speculation, then I have no problem with anything you say. Your original comment seemed to imply that this is a demonstrable fact.
>It’s not the platforms job to challenge one’s views, rather one’s views are naturally challenged when in an open marketplace of ideas.
And you counter extreme ideas, with better ideas of your own - in this same open marketplace of ideas.
>YouTube isn’t an open marketplace of ideas.
Right, because YouTube seems to think that some ideas are verboten, and simply should not exist which is why they are removing those videos. Are you in favor of removing these videos?
I cannot speak to “these videos” as I do not know their exact content for each video. I’m against removing content because it is “extreme” or objectionable or even abhorrent. I am pro free speech and willing to pay the cost of allowing speech I disagree with so long as it is “protected” speech.
It might not be the job of an entertainment platform to challenge views, per se, but you can argue that it is its job to make sure that their profit-maximising algorithms do not devolve into steering users down a rabbit hole of ever more extreme and dishonest content within an information bubble.
Or, at any rate, if that's the outcome, then it might be time to regulate said platform.
The thing is that those definitions aren't unambiguously definable to humans let alone machines which can't tell. Who defines extreme? Who defines dishonest? Not to mention context and satire. If I suggest killing all the lawyers am I quoting Shakespeare, joking, or trying to incite violence?
Anyone capable of doing so is clearly capable of heading a Unicorn start up which isn't overvalued.
Large tech companies frequently receive demands for the literally impossible like backdoors which don't compromise security.
If I choose to only buy magazines with racist/extreme/violent content, its on me. But if I watch it on YouTube its on them? I don't understand how using the magic word "algorithm" immediately implies that there is zero volition from the part of the user. Is it scary to think that people actually want to watch these videos, even if the algorithm didn't exist?
Yeah but that doesn't tell you anything about the party alignment of employees.
1 rich republican Google employee donating $500K vs 100 middle class democrat Google employees donating $4K will yield those results you posted, yet the demographics would indicate 1% republican.
> Today, we're taking another step in our hate speech policy by specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status.
I wonder if things like the Freedom From Religion Foundation would qualify for a ban. Or a church that preaches that their god is the correct one.
You can't choose your age, gender (mostly), race, caste, sexual orientation, or veteran status, but religion is malleable and public discourse about those topics where one person argues that their view is superior to others is pretty important to society.
It's not clear if YouTube is going to remove anything that asserts some religious beliefs are indeed superior to others.
This is all a very interesting thought experiment, but you're supposing some attempt at logical consistency which will surely not be made.
What this announcement actually means is that YouTube is going to become more politically active in their content curation. This is what a subset of their employees, as well as influential bluechecked Twitterati, have been lobbying for. As a progressive/neo-liberal institution, it will apply exactly the sort of differential policy enforcement that one might expect.
I won't delve into the details of how that applies to your examples because it would quickly become too controversial for HN.
Just imagine how the median Bay Area tech-person would parse out the details and you'll have the answers.
You're exactly right, and maybe I should just be happy that YouTube is going to enforce political views that I mostly agree with, but the whole thing is a bit unsettling and definitely going to have unintended consequences.
It should unsettle you. Power in a democracy is obtained through the manufacture of consent. SF has been reluctant to take the reigns of power away from NYC, but it's finally happening. Strap in everybody.
As your quote shows, it's not simply a matter of saying your group is superior, but then using that view to "justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion".
What about the calls to boycott Hobby Lobby or Chick-fil-A for what they've argued are their religious positions? That's certainly exclusionary.
Or preachers telling the world that gays are evil sinners that need to be saved by conversion therapy? That's discriminatory.
Or feminist groups that advocate for women-only programs and institutions? Dividing the world into groups with different treatment is certainly segregation.
Give your worst political enemy the power to decide what is "hate speech" and what is "disinformation" and then you'll realize that free speech isn't something we should ever compromise on. - Naval Ravikant
I strongly disagree banning anyone or any video that does not call for violence. I think it's a slippery slope and smacks of book banning. The information is out there, right or wrong. Who is it to judge what the public should see?
I'm not sure if I follow your line of reasoning. Suppose it wasn't a call to violence but rather a call to never speak or engage with that person again. That person can be fired and never be able to rent again... (I have examples of this if you're curious)
I think that line is just too unsubtle. If that rule, and that rule alone, were applied to practically any platform, it would be overrun with extremely low-quality content (though the entertainment value might increase, for whatever that's worth).
I would also prefer Youtube not banning those videos. But they certainly should not help them get views. Google is fully responsible for the output of its recommendation algorithms and the impact to society.
I'll never understand this reductionist argument. Yes, YouTube/Facebook/Salesforce/etc can do whatever they want. That doesn't mean that it's good for society or that it's not worth talking about.
We're not talking about the removal of extreme political views. We're talking about the censorship of one particular ideology. Where is the corresponding elimination of polarizing videos espousing views from the radical left?
A wholesale expunction from one end of the spectrum is hard not to interpret as politically charged censorship. Let's see how many Antifa and BLM videos get taken down.
You appear to not be understanding my point. The videos being removed are not some "radical right" that serves as the opposite of your definition of "radical left". They are "channels that advocate for neo-Nazism, white supremacy and other bigoted ideologies". BLM, Antifa, etc. are not the "left" equivalent of these "right" viewpoints.
As someone who finds them both distasteful and hateful; yes, they are very similar. All sides need to reign in their extremists, or become defined by them.
Black Lives Matter literally exists to highlight disproportionate police violence against people of color;
not only are they not calling for expelling whites (the "reverse" of what a lot of white nationalists call for), what they are asking for is that people of color be treated by the state enforcement mechanism at parity with white people.
You may find that distasteful, but it is difficult to see what aspect of that is hateful.
From their own website: "We are working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically targeted for demise."
I'm only writing all this because it's very important not to let rhetoric like "white nationalists and Black Lives Matter are equivalent"; they're not and it's disingenuous or dishonest to conflate them.
"similar" is a very vague term. We are talking ideologies that call for the extermination of other races here, in what way is Black Lives Matter equivalent?
One is about creating violence and hate against certain races, other is about reducing violence and hate against a race. They couldn't be more dissimilar.
Preventing the spread of hate isn't an act of partisan censorship
I find it interesting that conservatives want to protect genocidal racists, but there isn't an equivalent on the progressive side of things. If there was, progressives would want that noise shut down faster than anyone else.
Regarding the general phenomenon of removing 'hateful content' from social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter as well) there seem to be primarily two reactions:
1) Good. Hateful content spreads hate and causes it to multiply. We should not allow it to proliferate on the internet.
2) This is censorship. It it is the fault of the individuals watching/reading the hateful media who are to blame for number of views the videos/articles get.
So I wonder: is it really an either/or decision? Is there no third option here? It seems like a classic ethical antinomy. Authority influences people but, at the same time, the authority always needs to be recognized as authoritative by the people who are influenced by it.
because it became the de facto place most of non tech-savy people go to to see videos online. They have a huge monopoly on our time and attention and that's extremely disturbing.
Imagine that the electricity company providing electricity policed what kind of devices you can use inside your home (you are allowed to connect a Samsung washer but not a Bosh washer). There would be a lot of outcry.
the issue is not me or you but with the masses of people that don't know // don't care where they give their attention. And that's the huge majority unfortunately.
That's their choice. If they don't like YouTube they should boycott YouTube, not leverage the government to force YouTube to host arbitrary videos for free.
How do you make small kids boycott YouTube before they gets addicted to it? If so then we can also have people simply boycott drugs and not make it illegal.
True, however this wraps back to the publisher vs platform debate. If they don't want the government forcing them to host content and uphold free speech then they have to take responsibility for the content in the eyes of the law. Currently they're having it both ways, free to ban ideas they don't like and control the content they deliver without being responsible for libel/slander.
> If they don't want the government forcing them to host content and uphold free speech then they have to take responsibility for the content in the eyes of the law. Currently they're having it both ways, free to ban ideas they don't like and control the content they deliver without being responsible for libel/slander.
It sounds like you're saying that they either have to host absolutely any video anyone uploads, or else stand behind every video as if they made it themselves.
I don't see how a video platform could exist on those terms.
That isn't what I said nor what I meant. They are overstepping on the censorship front by continually constricting their "acceptable" guidelines based off of their very fluid internal rules. "In 2018 alone, we made more than 30 policy updates. One of the most complex and constantly evolving areas we deal with is hate speech" They even state it as a point of pride - they continually shift the lines on what is "hate speech" and because of their market dominance, those they target are effectively shut down entirely just because the execs at YouTube/Google are intent on pushing their political viewpoints into company policy. I'm saying that this behavior shouldn't be acceptable for a company that has such a strong grip on societal discourse. Either curate, publish, and be accountable by law, or be a platform that removes only the videos that break the law and allow users to filter out content they deem inappropriate.
I share your concern about how Youtube influences society, and it's likely that content I consider good will be taken down by Youtube in the future. I don't like that.
But it still sounds to me like you're demanding that, after removing illegal videos, a site should either be 100% curated or 0% curated.
> The platform’s users upload more than 500 hours of fresh video per minute, YouTube revealed at recent press events.
100% curation is unrealistic in that case. They could crowd source the work, but it's hard to see how they can be legally accountable for what users mark as OK.
But 0% curation would mean that they're forced to host videos they consider repugnant. Imagine starting a video sharing platform, having your business grow, and one day being told "well now you're big enough that you no longer get any say in what your site hosts."
I see what you're saying but it's already a problem for them. 100% of videos coming onto the platform will be . Instead, the discussion we're having is where they should draw the line on what gets removed. Is it videos that break the law? Or videos that they deem inappropriate? We can vote to change the law, we can't vote to change their policies. Users can go to a new platform but there is nothing close to an equivalent competitor. (Name me one popular, full time content creator who did it without YouTube)
I don't like the sound of government interference at all, trust me. However when people are being silenced and demonetized because they hold political views that YouTube doesn't like I feel that it's necessary in order to uphold the users constitutional rights. Many experts have speculated that YouTube operates at a loss - is it fair that they gain market dominance this way and then flex their power to remove ideas they don't like?
> However when people are being silenced and demonetized because they hold political views that YouTube doesn't like I feel that it's necessary in order to uphold the users constitutional rights.
User's have no constitutional right to political speech on a private platform. Their rights are not being violated.
> I'm saying that this behavior shouldn't be acceptable for a company that has such a strong grip on societal discourse
YouTube doesn't have "a strong grip on societal discourse", it's a glorified video sharing site that's widely regarded as a cesspool in terms of discourse.
Perhaps I'm taking your analogy too far, but if you're an "extreme" user of electricity, either by consuming much more power than they expect you to or destabilizing the grid, the electric company absolutely will cut you off.
If a private developer were to take over most residential areas in a section of town, they would be responsible for providing public access, affordable housing, and other responsibilities normally associated with the government. This is enshrined in law - a private company that is the de-facto entity for a particular function gains the responsibilities of acting as a government entity.
Since YouTube has a monopoly on video content on the internet, it may be reasonable to require YouTube to take on responsibilities normally handled by the government, such as ensuring the freedom of speech on their platform.
> If a private developer were to take over most residential areas in a section of town
There is a finite amount of land in a town, so a monopoly can exclude people. This is not true of video hosting - there can be as many video hosts as people care to build, and they are all equally usable from anywhere on the internet.
> Since YouTube has a monopoly on video content on the internet
They don't.
Now, if ISPs started censoring particular political viewpoints, that would be different IMO. It's much harder to get a different ISP (at least where I live) than it is to browse to a different web site.
> This is not true of video hosting - there can be as many video hosts as people care to build, and they are all equally usable from anywhere on the internet.
There is a limited number of viewers, and content creators. YouTube has the monopoly on those two limited resources.
I'd also contend that "equally usable" is also not true, especially with HD videos. Most of the world can't stream 4k videos across a L3 provider (which YouTube does not have do).
YouTube is the most popular website on the internet for regular (i.e. non-rich) people to participate in the public political debate by posting/watching videos. This means banning regular people from it substantially reduces their ability to meaningfully participate in the public political debate. When people can't peacefully advocate for their interests, they do so violently. We don't want real world violence, so it's probably not a great idea to give YouTube carte blanche to decide who can meaningfully participate in the public political debate.
YouTube is just not that important. It's not some type of important political fixture, it's pretty universally regarded as a cesspool with regard to political discussion and most of the content is non-political anyway.
What exactly do you mean by "not that important"? Is it your position that if, say, YouTube took down all content that was in favor of Democrats, and pushed content that was in favor of Republicans to the front page, and put it all over recommendations, that there would be no impact to elections?
The impact would be negligible, not only because the YouTube demographic skews very young (i.e. people who don't vote), but also because most of the content on YouTube is not political content.
None of the top channels are political. Do you have any evidence to support the idea that YouTube is so important to politics that the government should step in to regulate it?
The second to most subscribed channel is not political as its main function, but there is most definitely political content on there.
>Do you have any evidence to support the idea that YouTube is so important to politics that the government should step in to regulate it?
Do you have any evidence to support the idea that people speaking on soapboxes are so important to politics that the government should step in to prevent municipalities from regulating their messages? There are billions of views of political videos on YouTube. It's a place where many millions go to consume political content. People get angry when political content they agree with gets censored.
> Are you suggesting that their impressionable young minds are uninfluenced by what they see on YouTube?
They will be influenced by hundreds of factors, YouTube perhaps among them, but YouTube is not of any particular our outsized importance.
> OK, but there is still a whole lot of political content on there.
And? Political content exists on the bathroom stall as well, that doesn't mean it's important.
> The second to most subscribed channel is not political as its main function, but there is most definitely political content on there.
PewDiePie is not a political channel and is completely irrelevant with regard to politics.
> Do you have any evidence to support the idea that people speaking on soapboxes are so important to politics that the government should step in to prevent municipalities from regulating their messages?
>They will be influenced by hundreds of factors, YouTube perhaps among them, but YouTube is not of any particular our outsized importance.
Outsized in comparison with what?
>And? Political content exists on the bathroom stall as well, that doesn't mean it's important.
Political videos on youtube have billions of views.
>PewDiePie is not a political channel and is completely irrelevant with regard to politics.
Like I said, not the main function of the channel, but there is certainly politically oriented content. Do you think his politically oriented content has no impact on the politics of his ~100 million audience?
With any of the other hundreds of platforms that cater to political discussion.
> Political videos on youtube have billions of views
So what? I'm not suggesting that YouTube isn't popular, I'm saying that just because its popular doesn't mean YouTube should be prohibited from curating it's own platform.
> Do you think his politically oriented content has no impact on the politics of his ~100 million audience?
The impact is negligible. Nobody cares what PewDiePie thinks when they enter the voting booth. And even if they did, it's YouTube's prerogative to kick off whoever they want, and if they decided to kick off PewDiePie... who cares? YouTube drama isn't important.
>With any of the other hundreds of platforms that cater to political discussion.
Which platforms in particular are you referring to?
>So what? I'm not suggesting that YouTube isn't popular, I'm saying that just because its popular doesn't mean YouTube should be prohibited from curating it's own platform.
I'm not saying that either. I'm saying it should be prohibited from curating its own platform because it's popular and because it's where a substantial part of the public political debate takes place.
>The impact is negligible.
Maybe, but he's only one person.
>Nobody cares what PewDiePie thinks when they enter the voting booth.
You could say that about just about anyone that isn't a cult leader, because that person isn't the only one the voter is listening to.
>it's YouTube's prerogative to kick off whoever they want
90% of all views of some particular type of political media, e.g. videos produced by people not associated with corporate owned media outlets. So if YouTube serves 40% of those views, and Facebook serves 30%, and Twitter serves 20%, then regulate those three.
> I would argue that it is not at all substantial and the evidence is on my side.
You keep suggesting that the amount of non-political content on YouTube somehow reduces the effect of the political content on YouTube. What is your reasoning behind that bizarre suggestion?
> Good joke. First of all, this site actively tries to ban political discussion
Yet here we are. Are you banned yet? YouTube also bans certain types of political discussion as you are well aware... so what?
> . Second, it's tiny in comparison to YouTube.
So you think the uninformed conversations occurring in a video entertainment cesspool are more impactful than the discourse between the engineers, founders and investors that actually built, maintain, understand and operate these platforms on a day to day basis? That's totally absurd. You're so hung up on popularity that you seem to have lost sight of relevance.
> ...
So in summary, if the site isn't a top 10 alexa ranking you regard it as politically unimportant. Popularity != political relevance. League of Legends is the most popular online game in the world, there are millions of people having political discussions on that platform every day, should Riot be prohibited from banning people?
> You keep suggesting that the amount of non-political content on YouTube somehow reduces the effect of the political content on YouTube.
No, I'm demonstrating that YouTube is primarily and overwhelmingly an entertainment platform and your attempts to suggest that it's so important to the fabric of political discourse that YouTube should not be allowed to ban people is not supported by the evidence of the activity on the platform.
>So you think the uninformed conversations occurring in a video entertainment cesspool are more impactful than the discourse between the engineers, founders and investors that actually built, maintain, understand and operate these platforms on a day to day? That's totally absurd. You're so hung up on popularity that you seem to have lost sight of relevance.
Each of those people engaging in uninformed conversations gets a vote that matters just as much as the vote of the people that built these platforms. I don't think many people are overwhelmingly concerned with making sure their message reaches the tiny number of people on this site.
>So in summary, if the site isn't a top 10 alexa ranking you regard it as politically unimportant.
I regard websites as being unimportant as far as this topic goes if they're not one of the most popular sites for people to participate in the public political debate. Banning an ideology from being espoused on HN isn't going to make people that subscribe to that ideology feel like they're being prevented from peacefully advocating for their interests. Banning that ideology from YouTube, or Facebook, or Twitter might. Banning it from all three almost certainly will.
>No, I'm demonstrating that YouTube is primarily and overwhelmingly an entertainment platform
What I'm trying to tell you is that I don't disagree with that statement, but that it doesn't matter.
>and your attempts to suggest that it's so important to the fabric of political discourse that YouTube should not be allowed to ban people is not supported by the evidence of the activity on the platform.
I've explained what I mean by substantial/important, and why I think YouTube qualifies. You keep saying it doesn't qualify because there are other videos on there and/or because the quality of discussion is low, but that doesn't address my argument.
> Each of those people engaging in uninformed conversations gets a vote that matters just as much as the vote of the people that built these platforms.
I agree. Getting banned from YouTube doesn't prevent you from voting. YouTube is wholly irrelevant to the civic imperative, it's just a video sharing site, yes, the most popular video sharing site on the web where people also happen to discuss politics, but its popularity doesn't change its fundamental nature.
> I don't think many people are overwhelmingly concerned with making sure their message reaches the tiny number of people on this site.
Right. Exactly my point. That's a mistake. Despite being orders of magnitude less popular than YouTube, this site has catered to an audience that is wealthy and well-connected relative to the YouTube audience and the political discussions on this site have a ripple effect in the tech community and thus the tech industry and people's livelihoods. My only point here is to illustrate that "popular" doesn't necessarily mean "important".
> it doesn't matter.
It does matter. The primary function of the site is a business built around video entertainment, just because some fraction of the site's users decided to have political discussions on YouTube doesn't mean that the fundamental nature of YouTube has changed into something that should now be owned by the commons. The creators and owners of YouTube still have rights to, and creative control over the product they created, even if that control resulted in a blatantly partisan culling of political content. If YouTube's behavior displeases the people they should seek redress with the platform's owners or abandon it. The reasoning you describe is a strange kind of mob tyranny where a corporation becomes obligated to give up creative control over its products because a bunch of people decided to start squatting political banners on the front lawn.
YouTube is not a political forum, it's a place where people shoot the shit about every topic under the sun, and there are plenty of places to do that on the internet.
>Getting banned from YouTube doesn't prevent you from voting.
Right, it prevents you from taking part in the public political debate that tens of millions of voters are participating in.
It's like telling someone "You can't talk about your political message on this popular street corner where there are actually people to hear you. You are welcome to go stand on the street corners way outside of town, though, where practically no one is listening. Those other people are fine to spread their message on this street corner, though, because I agree with them."
There are very good reasons why we don't allow that sort of thing on street corners. The very same reasons apply to the major social media platforms.
>this site has catered to an audience that is wealthy and well-connected relative to the YouTube audience and the political discussions on this site have a ripple effect in the tech community and thus the tech industry and people's livelihoods.
Ah, so middle/low class people should grovel to the elites that gather here, even though those people don't share their interests, and hope that they somehow convince elites to act against their own interests, and do some ripple effect thing on behalf of people that have interests opposed to theirs.
>My only point here is to illustrate that "popular" doesn't necessarily mean "important".
And you've forgotten not everyone has the same interests. If some low skilled workers feel that some policy is driving down their wages, they're not going to go grovel to a bunch of engineers who probably want their wages to go down so they get cheaper vegetables.
People want to be heard by people that have, or may have, similar interests to them.
>The primary function of the site is a business built around video entertainment,
So? The primary function of sidewalks is so people can walk on them.
>just because some fraction of the site's users decided to have political discussions on YouTube doesn't mean that the fundamental nature of YouTube has changed into something that should now be owned by the commons.
Right, it's the fact that said fraction represents a huge number of people.
>The creators and owners of YouTube still have rights to, and creative control over the product they created, even if that control resulted in a blatantly partisan culling of political content.
Subject to the limits that the government puts on that control.
>If YouTube's behavior displeases the people they should seek redress with the platform's owners or abandon it.
"Feel free to go talk on that street corner a mile outside of town. Only people who say things we like can talk on this one."
You really think that's going to be satisfactory?
>The reasoning you describe is a strange kind of mob tyranny where a corporation becomes obligated to give up creative control over its products because a bunch of people decided to start squatting political banners on the front lawn.
> Right, it prevents you from taking part in the public political debate that tens of millions of voters are participating in.
I don't think that's true, but even if you could prove it, it doesn't matter. You should not be entitled to use YouTube just because its popular and people discuss politics there.
> You can't talk about your political message on this popular street corner where there are actually people to hear you
Bad analogy. YouTube is not a public street corner, it's a private business and platform that you don't pay to use. It's more like saying you can't talk about your political message inside a popular tavern because the owners have decided they are not friendly to the political message. That is not a violation of your rights, that is how private property works. I get that you don't like it, but its their property and its a non-essential service, even if its very popular.
> Ah, so middle/low class people should grovel to the elites that gather here
Wow. That's a very disingenuous reading of what I wrote. I didn't say anything resembling that, AT ALL, I even explicitly stated that my only point there was to demonstrate that the popularity of a site doesn't necessary correlate with its political importance, but you still managed to twist it into a completely ridiculous strawman. Since you're arguing in bad faith I see no reason to continue wasting my time trying to have a conversation.
You don't think tens of millions of voters and future voters are have watched political videos on YouTube?
>but even if you could prove it, it doesn't matter.
You keep saying it doesn't matter without actually addressing my argument.
>You should not be entitled to use YouTube just because its popular and people discuss politics there.
Says who? You?
>YouTube is not a public street corner, it's a private business and platform that you don't pay to use.
The point of analogies is not that the two things are identical, but that they are similar in some particular important way.
>It's more like saying you can't talk about your political message inside a popular tavern because the owners have decided they are not friendly to the political message.
A popular tavern with tens of millions of people in it, maybe.
>That is not a violation of your rights
Depends on who you ask. Rights aren't written anywhere in the stars. People make them up.
>that is how private property works.
Private property rights are not absolute.
>Wow. That's a very disingenuous reading of what I wrote.
Actually you revealed a lot about your opinion from what you wrote. You said it's a mistake for people to value being able to post political content on YouTube more highly than they value being able to post political content on HN, because HN is filled with elites who do some ripple effect thing, whereas YouTube is filled with poor uninformed simpletons. In other words, they should value being able to beg the elites to do the ripple effect thing for them more than they should value being able to spread their message directly to like-minded people. Poor uninformed simpletons can't make changes on their own, they need elites to do it for them.
The problem is that the elites want cheap vegetables, so they don't want the poor simpletons to get paid more.
Getting banned from YouTube is not a violation of individual rights. Forcing a company to host videos for free sounds like a violation of individual rights though.
No it's totally not a violation of anyone's rights, but that doesn't stop me from being able to oppose the idea. Like how I support drugs being legalized but I don't think everyone should start doing drugs.
They aren't hosting the videos for free - they're displaying them alongside advertisements to make revenue off those videos.
Also, the rights given an individual are distinct from the rights given to a company, and IMO are distinct from the rights a company deserves (i.e. a company has no inherent right to exist).
Wait what? The first amendment protections are just a limit on GOVERNMENT power. The right is that THE GOVERNMENT won't prevent your speech. Youtube isn't the government, therefore they can limit the fuck out of your speech when you're on their property.
I think most agree that Government needs to be prevented from preventing our speech not that our neighbors must allow us to grandstand upon their property even if their property is listed as a public place to grandstand. They have been given rights over the venue and we're supposed to be intelligent enough to recognize government activity vs private activity.
Why can't the voice actor of mickey mouse say fuck more often? iTs hIs pHiloSoPhicAl rIGhT!!! Sure, he can say fuck and then get fucking fired.
Free speech is a natural right. The first amendment protects that right explicitly from the government, but if they didn't then that doesn't mean you wouldn't have that right. There's a reason why that same idea is encoded in human rights as well.
Platforms like YouTube have basically become the public square. A lot of political engagement happens on platforms like YouTube. Perhaps we should expect them to offer free speech as well? They already have more rights than you and I, perhaps they should get some responsibility too?
>Free speech is a natural right. .... that doesn't mean you wouldn't have that right.
Yes but still they have theirs also. That's what people don't seem to connect between the two. You have no right to my property and all the right to say what the hell you like. Just because I offer my property as a place to speak doesn't mean I have to offer my property without restrictions, how about bearing arms? Why then could a church or school prevent my being armed?
If an individual can change the terms of our property use agreement by saying anything he wants on my property when I object then cannot I change terms by kicking him and his "publication/broadcast" off of my property? Seems a pretty straight forward contract dispute to me. You may enjoy your rights on your property.
You can argue that the Second Amendment was not written with machine guns and rocket launchers in mind. I'm going to argue that the First Amendment was not written with the foresight that nearly all of the total bandwidth of communication between all people would be done using technologies that transcend physical property.
I like your thinking on this but Cannons existed...I think our failing maybe to fully understand their definitions of their times. That said, I don't think their definition of speech and property would be much different even if we're actualizing them in virtual realms. That would have been covered by "freedom of the press." You're literally just still publishing an opinion to someone's virtual press. There's no reason they must publish your writing either.
We have laws against monopolies and trusts to prevent this very thing, but the government is reluctant to enforce them. Not enforcing the 14th amendment's "Equal Protection" clause is the real spoiler here.
It’s not only about it being our most important right. We also expect our communications platforms have morality, and criticize them when they do immoral things.
Many think belief in free speech is an important moral - doubly important for communications companies like Youtube/Google.
The thing that gets me is, the folks who think Google should delete such content have no trouble with the idea that services have moral obligations which go beyond what's legally required of them when arguing they should remove stuff. It's only when someone argues the moral obligation goes the other way that it suddenly becomes about what's legally required and only that.
> because it became the de facto place most of non tech-savy people go to to see videos online. They have a huge monopoly on our time and attention
Society has a vested interest in either regulating or breaking up monopolies. Our rights don't magically stop at property borders. It needs to be checked on a case-by-case basis, whether the right to free speech or youtube's right to do what they please with their property is more important.
> Our rights don't magically stop at property borders.
Actually that's almost exactly what "property" means. Famously, "Your right to swing your fist stops at the end of my nose." Or in less flowery language: Your rights end where others' property begins.
If you think YouTube has a "monopoly", the right way to address it would be to start up a competing site. There are no significant barriers to entry in starting a video streaming site. They're a dime a dozen these days. Google will even sell you the server capacity and bandwidth, or you can host it on one of their competitors' cloud platforms or rent space in a datacenter somewhere. Your main concern will be dealing with the inevitable DMCA complaints related to user-submitted content.
Of course, you should be prepared to deal with the fact that your site will mainly be populated with all the videos YouTube doesn't want to host, often for very good reasons.
I don't know where you heard that, but that is not what property means. The concept of property represents a set of rights (and maybe obligations) that an owner of said property does possess. Your nose is not your property by the way, because the rights you have towards your own body are very different (and a lot stronger) than the ones you have towards your property.
So your rights do not end where other's property begins. What they actually might do is be in conflict with the rights of the owner. But only in a country where capitalism is driven to cynical extremes would the rights of the owner win per default. I know of no such country.
> There are no significant barriers to entry in starting a video streaming site.
Of course there are and you even state one of them three sentences later. Online platforms with user content are very similar to natural monopolies. While anyone can start a video streaming site, it is obviously extremely hard if not impossible to actually compete with Youtube. I mean even google tried and failed. But I'm sure you aware of that. What I don't know is why you bring up the straw-man of "starting a video streaming site", knowing full well that starting such a site will not change anything about youtube's monopoly.
> If you think YouTube has a "monopoly", the right way to address it would be to start up a competing site.
So, no – the right way to address it is to handle it as we handle all the other monopolies and regulate it or break it up.
> The concept of property represents a set of rights (and maybe obligations) that an owner of said property does possess.
Just the one right, actually: The right to decide how the property is used. That's both necessary and sufficient. There are no obligations beyond reciprocation, respecting that same right when it comes to others' property.
> Your nose is not your property by the way, because the rights you have towards your own body are very different (and a lot stronger) than the ones you have towards your property.
No, they're exactly the same. Your body is your property. The only difference is that you can't give up ownership of your body as a whole (it's inalienable), and that's simply because there is no practical way for you to relinquish control over your body to anyone else short of your death. Even if you agreed to it you would still remain in control, which would render any such agreement void. Certain individual parts, of course, are a different matter. In every other respect your body is just like any other kind of property.
> What they actually might do is be in conflict with the rights of the owner.
Any use of others' property against their wishes conflicts with the right(s) of the owner. This is a distinction without a difference.
>> There are no significant barriers to entry in starting a video streaming site.
> Of course there are and you even state one of them three sentences later.
DMCA complaints are a problem created by the government. If you want to do away with copyright, I have no objections. However, this is not a significant barrier to entry because it only starts to become a burden at scale. Small sites with user-submitted content regularly deal with such matters manually, while large ones have had time to implement the needed infrastructure for automating the process.
> ... starting such a site will not change anything about youtube's monopoly.
Because YouTube doesn't have a monopoly. What it has is popularity. Anyone can start up a site that does what YouTube does, but that won't automatically make it popular. The responsibility for that is 100% on the prospective competitor.
Popularity is fickle. Sites everyone turned to yesterday may be deserted wastelands tomorrow. (E.g.: MySpace) If your site is actually better at giving people what they want, it will win. Your problem is that YouTube actually is giving most people what they want. If you broke it up you'd end up with a bunch of YouTube-clones with basically the same policies, because they're trying to attract the same audience YouTube has now. You want to change what people want, which is naturally unpopular and likely doomed to fail.
In short, despite your complaints about "natural monopolies" and the difficulties of competing, you don't really want to compete with YouTube, just leverage its existing popularity to push your own agenda. The problem with this is that its popularity is a product of its audience-pleasing policies, not any sort of monopoly, natural or otherwise. If you did manage to force YouTube to follow your preferred policies it would become less and less popular until it was eventually be replaced by a competitor that looks more like the YouTube of today. So breaking it up wouldn't help you at all. Regulating it and actively preventing competition, or regulating all such sites the same way regardless of "monopoly" status, would better serve your purpose, but that's just exchanging one (non-)monopoly for a much larger monopoly, namely the government.
> Any use of others' property against their wishes conflicts with the right(s) of the owner. This is a distinction without a difference.
There is a very big difference between your rights ending or being in conflict.
> Popularity is fickle.
The only examples I know for this are myspace and digg. I don't think popularity is that fickle once you have the content.
> Because YouTube doesn't have a monopoly. [...] If your site is actually better at giving people what they want, it will win. Your problem is that YouTube actually is giving most people what they want.
So how exactly is youtube now not a monopoly and it is possible to successfully compete with it?
> You want to change what people want, which is naturally unpopular and likely doomed to fail.
I want none of these things, I was explaining how rights to free speech relate to someone else's property.
> In short, despite your complaints about "natural monopolies" and the difficulties of competing, you don't really want to compete with YouTube, just leverage its existing popularity to push your own agenda.
Where is this even coming from?
> The problem with this is that its popularity is a product of its audience-pleasing policies, not any sort of monopoly, natural or otherwise. If you did manage to force YouTube to follow your preferred policies it would become less and less popular until it was eventually be replaced by a competitor that looks more like the YouTube of today.
I highly question your theory that Youtube's popularity is a product of it allowing extremist content.
> but that's just exchanging one (non-)monopoly for a much larger monopoly, namely the government.
Now you're just trying to be clever with words, but I'll bite. As I wrote before
> Society has a vested interest in either regulating or breaking up monopolies.
The government is democratically elected by society and highly regulated.
Is the "someone" positioning their property as "a place for people to say stuff, generally speaking" and promoting it that way?
There is established case law and legislation in the US, though pretty variable by state in terms of details, that people can in fact have free speech rights on private property when the private property de-facto functions as a public square. The devil is, as usual, in the details, and the details are, as usual, not time-invariant here.
Why do you think a nation of free speaking individuals is patently not entitled to say what they want on a platform specifically created to allow people to say whatever they want?
To be absolutely clear on my position, I am not saying YouTube is acting outside their rights to censor content. But I am very much saying people have a right to be peeved about the bait and switch.
Further to my point. People being concerned about who and what specifically will be caught up in this is well, well within reason to bring into question given their current approach to takedowns which consistently missflag videos inappropriately.
"It's their business they can do what they want" isn't a valid argument against any of these questions, you're just stating a fact that doesn't answer or even acknowledge the potentially problematic situation at hand.
It’s disengenuous to say that YouTube didn’t have rules before this. This is just another rule on what’s allowed. Is it wise? I don’t know, probably. In America white supremacy is a rising problem and they are getting radicalized by YouTube and the economics of hate for profit making a lot of money by recommending the more clickbaity extreme videos. They are perhaps correcting the course. Perhaps they are overreacting. We will see where the chips lie after this.
Edit. I looked at the way back on YouTube’s tou from when the site was a dating site and it’s always disallowed hateful content regarding race or other things. This seems like a clarification on that provision.
from the original tou as far back as it went on archive.org:
> You may not post, upload or transmit to the Site, or to the YouTube servers, any communications, text, graphics or other information or Materials that: (1) is unlawful, obscene, fraudulent, indecent or that defames, abuses, harasses, or threatens others, or is hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable; (2) contains any software viruses, Trojan horses, worms, bombs, or any other computer code, files or programs designed to interrupt, destroy or limit the functionality of any computer software or hardware or telecommunications equipment or that may damage, detrimentally interfere with, surreptitiously intercept, or expropriate any system, data, or personal information; (3) advocates or encourages any illegal activity; (4) infringes on the copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, right of publicity or other intellectual property, proprietary, contracted, personal or other right of any third party; (5) violates the privacy of inpiduals, including other users of the Site; or (6) violates any applicable local, state, national or international law. You agree not to use bots, spiders or intelligent agent software (or other methods) for any purpose other than accessing publicly posted portions of the Site and then only for the purposes consistent with the limited license hereunder and these Terms of Use. You agree not to, or attempt to, circumvent any access or use restrictions, data encryption or content protection related to the Site; not to data mine the Site and not to in any way cause harm to or burden the Site. You agree that you will not post on or transmit through the Site any advertising or commercial solicitation of any kind whatsoever, including, without limitation, via e-mail or chat, without YouTube's express prior written approval and, if then, solely in accordance with the terms and conditions imposed by YouTube with respect thereto. You further agree not to use the Site, or any element or portion thereof (including, without limitation, e-mail addresses of users), for any commercial purpose whatsoever.
specifically the first part: (1) is unlawful, obscene, fraudulent, indecent or that defames, abuses, harasses, or threatens others, or is hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;
heading from their blog post:
> Removing more hateful and supremacist content from YouTube
where they go on to clarify what is meant by hateful.
> What is a clarification combined with a change in behavior?
It's moving from an ad hoc approach to a more definite, clarified criteria. Before some of these videos were being removed and some not but now there's more of a clear framework by which to judge offending content.
you can squabble over definitions of words all you like but they've always been against hateful content. they are just clarifying what is hateful.
Could you please stop posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've done it repeatedly, it's not what this site is for, and we eventually ban accounts that do that.
Age control isn't a legal requirement for websites that host porn in the USA as far as I know. Google, for example, will return porn in image search results (if you disable the safe search filter), and you don't have to verify your age first to do that.
I know this will be an unpopular opinion, but Youtube can delete whatever they want. It's their site. AFAIK, most people don't have legally binding contracts stating that Youtube must keep all their videos online. Even the big streamers that make money off Youtube have to follow whatever guidelines Youtube come up with. I bet there is wording that says something to the effect of "Subject to revision..." or like that in the AUP.
That said, there is nothing stopping people from creating their own sites, or putting taboo / extreme videos on chan sites, forums, etc... and plonk it down behind Cloudflare or Akamai. i.e. 4chan, 8chan, I mean, you won't find more extreme videos that what get posted there every 90 seconds. In this case, I am not linking to the examples.
Even as lifelong card-carrying ACLU supporter I don’t see why they don’t just take down anything they damn well please.
They’re a private company and are entitled to have a curatorial viewpoint—and for my particular beliefs culling white suprematists and borderline pedophilic content is a Good Thing.
You’re entitled to say whatever you want in this country, but I’m not obligated to broadcast it for you.
I think the problem is that they censor views they don't like that aren't breaking any laws, which makes them a PUBLISHER but then they claim they need protections only offered to OPEN PLATFORMS.
Publishers (like Forbes when people blog on there) on the other hand are responsible for their user posts. I think Facebook / Youtube is more like the Forbe here, so they should be treated legally as a publisher.
I'm not entirely sure that certain large sites have thought through the legal implications of this kind of behavior, and no I'm not talking about "censorship!" or other free speech laws that are applicable to government rather than private entities.
Back during the late 90s all of us working on public websites knew that allowing user-contributed content was a great way to build both community and to increase the sheer amount of content, which increased advertising revenues. But there's a catch to user-contributed content... in order to avoid legal responsibility as a site owner for the user content posted on the site you can't moderate that content directly. The reason for this is the "common carrier" rule.
Common carrier essentially states that as a communications platform you are not liable for the legal implications of the communications that occur on your platform as long as you do not choose to engage in editing or moderating that content. AT&T, for example, was not legally liable for a conversation that occurred on their telephone network even if the conversation involved the commission of a crime (we're plotting a terror attack, a bank robbery, etc.) The reason they were not liable was because they did not monitor the communications on their network and did not cut off a phone call if it sounded like you were planning something illegal, evil, whatever.
The minute you, as the carrier, begin actively moderating the content (as opposed to setting up common universal rules such as site karma or user driven moderation), you are responsible for ALL of that content. You managed to remove 99.99% of all illegal communication? Too bad, you're still on the hook for that 0.01% that you missed.
This does not mean that content may never be removed by the company, it's just that they must do it under the order of a court or applicable government entity... in the same way that AT&T could not tap your phones absent a court order.
Many sites opted not to have user-contributed content due to the potential concerns regarding advertisers or their own brand reputation. Others did allow such content and later removed things such as comments and the like due to the conflict between violating common carrier and the problems that arose with advertisers and/or their brand (see Yahoo Finance comments circa 2002 or so).
We talk all the time about the two internets, one of China and one of the rest of the world. But more and more we are seeing a new division arising within America itself of two internets. I can't say how this will play out long-term, but with alternative-media sites rising we may well see two broad forces developing.
That should be happening, but isn't - not to the degree it naturally would. Debanking. Payment processors have been very busy weeding out potential competitors to the big names in SV. I almost want to laugh at the fact that the early cryptocurrency proponents experienced the exact same treatment while building the very thing that would protect those presently being targeted by Visa/Mastercard. I'm still banned from two major banks...
This youtube censorship stuff is going to pale in comparison to the coming wave of debanking. There is a very freaked out class of people who have their hands on the wheel at the moment (especially true at Mastercard), so you can't rely on traditional profit motives to predict behavior - anything is possible. My financial adviser suggested, with a straight face, that I consider a portfolio built around some new social equity index... my account has been self directed ever since.
Yes this is absolutely true. But once the cryptocurrencies gain a true grip, along with alternative payment processors, we will really begin to see a true divergence. In some sense, such particulars are the bedrock of the second internet.
Maybe. I have no doubt that cryptocurrency use will be common, primarily because it will be necessary in a world dominated by software agents that can't rely on meatspace money, but I'm starting to wonder about likelihood of the original political goal. Wallstreet gave up fighting it after a couple of years, and is presently positioned as the guy selling the shovels in the gold rush, but there is an increasing amount of direct interaction. It seems like they think they'll be able to maintain the present segmented status - which is obviously not going to work. So I expect they'll go full hands on mode once it is obvious that there is no going back. What will that look like? Well every couple of years, since the very beginning, some idiot has tried to start a colored-coin/tainted-coin service - to, you know, think of the children... making the currency worthless after being tainted by activities deemed unacceptable (ransomware, exchange hacks, etc). No matter how many times it is explained that this eliminates the property of fungibility, which is what makes a currency a currency, these people keep popping up. Well wallstreet might be able to make it happen, if they make the move before there is more widespread global adoption.
What I worry here is that the extremity of a view will vary depending on how close it is to your own beliefs. Extremists don’t self identify as extremists, so the question is where does YouTube’s temperament lie?
The beginning of the end of YT. "Extreme" is the ultimate slippery slope situation, and Google is unable to articulate respectable, bright-line rules around extremism. I can think of dozens of startups that allow video sharing, and some like streamable seem to have speeds and compute that outperform YT.
I think the difference is that YouTube /pays these people/. It's almost an employer/employee relationship.
YouTube generates revenue, youtube shares that revenue, contributors with tons of views are making money directly from YT.
This is simply not the same as Twitter, etc. Twitter may make money off of eyeballs. I may somehow make money by becoming twitter famous. But my money is not coming as a share of twitter revenue.
The incentives are all screwed up. YT benefits financially the more 'shocking' my vid can be, and I benefit financially if YT does.
If that was the only issue, YouTube can demonetize the content or creator. They already do so for controversial content that advertisers won't abide. The fact remains that people want this content completely gone from YouTube, and preferably the entire internet.
I said it about facebook and I'll say it again about youtube: zero credit for deciding extremist views like white hate have no place on your platform a decade later.
How many ad dollars did Google make off these videos?
So, they're removing thousands of bad videos... thousands! Don't worry though, there are many, many other videos just like those on the platform. Your default recommendations are still going to suck.
Headline says thousands of videos, story body says thousands of videos and channels. I imagine you have to remove only about 20% of the videos/channels to account for 80% of the views.
The nuisance model on Mastodon is different. Silos push everyone together in the same space, so you pretty much have to fight to protect your own little corner.
People you might like to remove from your experience will tend to congregate on certain instances favorable to that kind of thinking. You have the power to block that instance at an individual level. There isn't the same impetus to deplatform them because you can just break the link.
I have many (but not all) "free speech" instances blocked because they're packed with users who try to force that perspective on me by (for example) removing content warnings when replying. I don't have to appeal to any authority to enforce my boundaries. Only the owners can decide who has the power to make those decisions on centralized social media sites. That seems to be outsourced moderators with little or no understanding of niche or marginalized communities.
Private companies like Google can't be expected to uphold human rights. They will almost always act in their own financial interest. It's up to the citizenry and their elected lawmakers to force them to do what is right.
All it would take is a law that compels public internet services to behave as if they're public services once they start reaching >33% of citizens.
The problem seems to be that a large percentage of citizens don't grasp that important freedoms often have a high price tag. Anyone can see this with the response to second and fourth amendment issues, and the same is becoming true of the first amendment.
Free societies have an inherent amount of chaos. That chaos is the price you pay. People desiring to live in a fully ordered society are unwittingly asking to live in a prison.
I'm sure that Google has been waiting for a youtube media panic to pull the trigger on this for a while. They'd prefer to be an on-demand cable channel, and would love to remove any material controversial to anyone, but didn't want censorship to be the story (especially with antitrust stuff going around.)
Google isn't in the video business because it wants people to be able to share videos with each other. Google is in the video business to sell ads. Censoring the illiberal is the way to get to get liberals to support censorship. Announcing manual control over the suggestions is a way to justify steering viewers away from any content, starving it of revenue, and getting it off the platform.
My sense is that unless content creators get views for calling out the behavior of other content creators, they risk losing likes and advertising revenue. Then they become the political agenda guy, and no longer the comic book movie critic, chef, video game expert, or theremin playing guy they were trying to portray. I'd like extremism resolved through naming and shaming, a living exile ideally, but I don't think drafting popular YouTubers to do so is completely realistic. Black Mirror, here we come?
For almost all of human history, sharing and persisting information had a pretty high cost. To get something into someone else's head, first you had to verbally tell them. Then you could at least write it once and have it read multiple times. That written work persisted over time longer too, though it required scribes to manually copy them periodically to broadcast it farther.
During all of that time, driving the cost to persist and broadcast information down has been a good thing. The cheaper the better, because it gives more brains access to useful information. I think because of that, we assumed the ideal cost is zero.
In the past several years, I believe we are slowly, painfully, realizing that we were wrong. The web has driven that cost down to practically zero. Any rando can write anything and it will be served on the web to all and sundry in perpetuity.
The problem with that is that it makes it equally easy to broadcast mis-information. What humans need to prosper is access to good information — true facts and useful ideas. Information that helps us take actions that help people.
When there's a non-zero maintainance cost for info, someone has to periodically choose to pay that cost. The scribe has to decide what book to copy. The printer has to decide which pamphlets to re-print. The public access channel has to decide which shows to schedule.
If someone can't be motivated to care about some piece of information enough to do that, it naturally decays and disappears. Like evolution, there's a natural selection process where some memes die. Now, granted, even with a non-zero cost, bad or misinformed actors may choose to further bad information. But I think that happens way more often when the cost to doing so is nil.
So, when you have a non-zero cost, it encourages a certain amount of selection where useful information tends to last longer. At the same time, you don't want the cost too high. When that happens, only the powerful are able to decide what information persists and they choose only information that furthers their own power. Driving the cost down has been, I think, one of the major engines of democracy.
But I do think we've overshot the mark now. In the next several years, it's going to be up to us as a culture to figure out how to effectively deal with the hurricane of misinformation constantly roaring around us. It is, I think, the biggest threat facing human society today.
(You might argue that climate change is a bigger threat. But note that a primary reason we're failing to take sufficient action on climate change is because of misinformation.)
I applaud any effort towards deradicalisation, but we need to work towards transparency. My gut reaction to the college board instituting an adversity score, was that it would’ve disproportionately impacted a guy like me growing up, but I’ve since come to realize that I’d prefer one entity with a transparent methodology tackling the problems instead of each institution, like Harvard, having an opaque system of their own.
I always find things like this interesting. A short while ago I posted a thread here [1] on a publicly owned service engaging in clear viewpoint discrimination with nary a peep. YouTube, a privately owned service, moves to moderate their platform and all hell breaks loose.
Mind you this isn't an attempt to defend YouTube at all given what they did yesterday but rather that I've always seen the battles over free speech and the bias on HN as being incredibly lopsided.
> The company also said that channels that “repeatedly brush up against our hate speech policies,” but don’t violate them outright, would be removed from YouTube’s advertising program
Even their own rules written by them is never enough for censors. They have to invent stuff like "brush up" to extend censorship even further, even when recognizing there's no violation of their own policies, that they themselves wrote. Talk about slippery slope...
I agree to an extent. I prefer a world where extreme hate calling for death of others doesn’t happen and isn’t tolerated. So the McVeighs (and death calling mullahs) of the world and company are justifiably deplatformable and if possible prosecuted for terroristic threats (and whatever else applies).
What I don’t agree with is conflating that with being un-PC. Or having s difference of opinion on contentious social topics, even if they can be personally offensive.
For example, for some, abortion is seen as pro-death. For others denying asylum is tantamount to a death sentence and thus is also death and hate. Or saying “f the police”. Police will say that is calling for hate, etc.
Today it feels like the PMRC was just a few decades too early. Would music be better without misogyny, violence, yes, in many respects but also we would deny a voice to those who feel oppressed and need an outlet to voice against the mainstream understanding.
In the absence of a government that makes clear laws concerning hate speech it’s up to the platforms to find a good balance.
From the YouTube blog post:
> We’ve been taking a close look at our approach towards hateful content in consultation with dozens of experts in subjects like violent extremism, supremacism, civil rights, and free speech.
So at the very least they claim to understand that it should not be a random decision.
An increase in censorship is very frequently good.
Consider a discussion forum that never banned any users or removed any spam. It quickly becomes very difficult to have a meaningful discussion when a third of the posts are "CHEEP ROLE X bUY NOW" and another third are racial hatred.
I thought censorship was never good? Now it's sometimes good except when it's based on "political ideologies," except for whatever example I bring up next, which of course is another exception.
Increases in curation (private censorship of one’s own offering) are very frequently good.
Whether the paying customers are consumers or advertisers, quality of curation is typically on of the main things they are paying for in content platforms. It’s true that there has been some effort to substitute algorithmic recommendation engines providing a consumer-specific view in place of curation, but it's also pretty clear that even the best of those is not viewed as an adequate solution by significant segments of the market.
Sure because targeted harassment, advocacy for the extermination of large groups, conspiracy theories like anti-vax BS that are actually killing people are just just fine
People against (limited) censorship usually react very quickly once it's their group that's being attacked (as some very famous subreddit does)
This is obviously untrue if you consider the people who call Ben Shapiro, who is Jewish, a Nazi. It's obvious to most people that people take wild liberties on the interpretation of words, especially when insulting people who they consider their enemies.
Or if you have concerns about high levels of immigration and it’s relationship to overall cohesion of society.
Views that were nominally conservative not long ago (and were actually also held by a lot of democrats) get recast as “Nazi!!1!1” in today’s environment. Weird historical inflection point we’re at.
NO. We're talking about people who want to exterminate other people. We know that because the last time they got power, we had mass executions (Holocaust), lynchings, and a century of extreme segregation.
This isn't a 'what-if'. We know what happened the last time.
Great, let's take down all fundamentalist Christian and Muslim videos now because we know that there were crusades and jihads in the past. I'm not being sarcastic, I really hope they apply this rule consistently. But my problem here is that I know that some of these groups will get a pass, and I think that's what a lot of people dislike about this rule but are not willing to admit.
You're taking something specific and applying it in the broad.
Directly as you quoted, "videos and channels that advocate for neo-Nazism, white supremacy and other bigoted ideologies", those are three separate things and there are a whole range of ideologies there.
The person I replied to specifically called that last one into question, because of the fact that it is so broad.
We we both able to point out other kinds of views that people consider to be bigotry and you literally just directly equated those examples with Nazis. This is exactly why people can't be given this kind of broad censorship power. You proved it in one comment. Congratulations.
I think the analogies in this case are often extremely accurate ways that people have been getting the point across. I'll add one of my own in just a second. The problem here is not censorship at all, the problem is monopoly. Take the recent Disney acquisition of Fox for example in which in the acquisition they were forced to sell off regional fox sports stations in their purchase. The problem was they were about to have a monopoly on sports TV content. Now look at YouTube which has a near monopoly on ALL user uploaded video content. The problem is an entire industry - user uploaded video - is consolidated. Peoples incomes, their very livelihoods depend on YouTube. YouTube decides whether individuals succeed or fail with user uploaded video with their recommendations, suggestions, and trending algorithms. Success of individuals depends as much on YouTubes opinion of them as much as on their own abilities to produce content. YouTube itself people wouldn't call a small company, but it doesn't have that many employees... unless you start to count people who upload videos as employees, then they have millions of them, most which work for free until they can make it big. YouTube is the largest employer in the world and their monopoloy on content means their employees have no where else to go when they get banned. This doesn't even scratch the fact that typically we have seen bans done across multiple platforms - Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, Paypal, Patreon. They all ban users simultaneously to silence people and cut their income off. Imagine if the water company decided your speech meant you were too evil to be worth supplying. Well Money is not quiet as necessary as water but it comes close for many people who are working or trying to make it big at YouTube. Hey you can buy water from some other company, they might say, right? Even other large companies are depending on their YouTube videos to succeed and they employ hundreds more people who rely on YouTube. It is clear that their monopoly on user generated video content is what is the true problem. How can their power be weakened is the better question than what should they be censoring. Splitting YouTube from Google and the rest of Alphabet is a start. They likely saw this coming a long time ago and preemptively worked towards this goal with their recent restructuring. How else do you break up a monopoly that was made by user choice? Well in the Disney example they simply split the channels. Force YouTube to split into two or more companies. Whether that means breaking subscribers right now the middle and making two companies or dividing it up into multiple categorical companies then do it. I don't know the best way but I do know their dominance and user lack of choice by virtue of the monopoly is the true enemy, not censorship.
> The tension was evident on Tuesday, when YouTube said that a prominent right-wing creator who used racial language and homophobic slurs to harass a journalist in videos on YouTube did not violate its policies. The decision set off a firestorm online, including accusations that YouTube was giving a free pass to some of its popular creators.
In my opinion, sites like YouTube that rely on user generated content should drop any pretense of being neutral - they aren't and never have been. What they have been doing is dodging responsibility for being the publisher of racist and harmful material.
I'm sure that YouTube would say that they don't play favorites but even if that were true, as we have seen there are organizations all the way up to nation states that are hell-bent on corrupting platforms like YouTube for their own ends. And they don't require much corrupting.
Moderation is key. Sites like Hacker News work only because of strict moderation by humans. Similar sites without such moderation quickly become a haven for trolls and spam. Automatic systems can always be gamed - what is needed is a strong editorial hand.
I don't want YouTube to end - there are thousands of hours of great content. But if it is to survive it needs to make a choice of what kind of site they want to be. Letting itself be anything its users want is turning it into a cesspit.
But if you editorialise too much, do you lose e.g. safe harbor status? Most edited media is liable.
It's possible their hands are tied here. The copyright strike thing is out of hand, too, but in that case the blame is also on the (often scummy) copyright owners/enforcers. (That isn't to say they don't benefit from keeping advertisers happy, or that their platform/brand won't suffer the consequences of this approach)
Google / Facebook are private companies, and they should absolutely be able to pick and choose what is posted on their platform if they want.
However, they SHOULD NOT be able to have it both ways where they censor posts they don't like (like a publisher would do) but enjoy protections afforded to actual open / neutral platforms.
Once you start censoring things that aren't breaking any laws, you're now a PUBLISHER and not an OPEN PLATFORM, so you are responsible for what's posted on your site.
> The court upheld AOL's immunity from liability for defamation. AOL's agreement with the contractor allowing AOL to modify or remove such content did not make AOL the "information content provider" because the content was created by an independent contractor. The Court noted that Congress made a policy choice by "providing immunity even where the interactive service provider has an active, even aggressive role in making available content prepared by others."
The law is specifically written for that case, as noted in my excerpt. AOL had a contract allowing them to censor their contractor’s work, did not censor it (although they did moderate and censor various content on their service), and was still held immune from liability.
The CDA basically grants publishers the ability to have their cake and eat it too, so you’d need to change the law.
Did you ever use AOL? It was similar to a website today. There was a search feature, you could view content on it, and so on. They exercised editorial judgment and removed content. Nevertheless, they were found immune from liability for a piece of third party content on their service that they did not remove.
Just follow the link and look up the various legal cases if you want to know more.
The whole point of the law was to allow the websites an option between "total prevetted lockdown" and "spam and gross out filled anarchy because anything not forbidden by law is permitted". It may have been for prudish intentions but there is a reason that was the only section of the CDA to survive.
The problem that you're missing, is that these companies choose the aspects of being a publisher when it's convenient to them and a platform what that is more convenient.
Publishers are responsible for the content that they put out. The New York Times can't publish some of the things that people put on Facebook without legal repercussions. When the government wants to stop some behavior happening on Facebook, Facebook says "we're not a publisher, we're a platform".
But as a platform there are certain consumer protection laws that apply to these companies. In some regard, they are responsible to their users/customers. Except when people try to exercise their rights there, Facebook says "we're not a platform, we're a publisher. We're responsible for the content we publish and we can't publish that."
They really shouldn't be able to have it both ways.
Youtube has always been a PUBLISHER. They have never been an OPEN PLATFORM in any real sense.
They have so far managed to shirk responsibility for PUBLISHING hateful content while being amazingly on-the-ball when dealing with copyrighted material.
I am sure YouTube wouldn't put it in these terms, but from the outside it looks like every day they make the editorial decision to enforce copyrights while pushing hate speech. I am sure this makes sense financially.
Except in a legal sense, which has been the only sense that matters.
If enough people get upset, things could change, but notable it is primarily the lack of censorship that is upsetting people, so it appears the status quo of YouTube being an open platform with some censorship (Section 230 style) will continue.
> Update on our continued review–we have suspended this channel’s monetization. We came to this decision because a pattern of egregious actions has harmed the broader community and is against our YouTube Partner Program policies.
Then they've made some additional confusion by talking about how they'll remonetize him when he removes shirts from the shop (they've presented it as the only requirement to reinstate monetization). At the end, they've doubled down on the first thing they've said:
> Again, this channel is demonetized due to continued egregious actions that have harmed the broader community. To be reinstated, he will need to address all of the issues with his channel.
Not good. What's "extreme"? Medicare for All? Brietbart News? Islam? Haredi? School shootings? Kim Jong-un? Putin? Trump?
YouTube already tries to transcribe videos to text. Is it within the state of the art to recognize common false statements and superimpose a crawl with counterarguments? One thing you have going for you is that the nuts aren't that original. If you had a classifier that could pick up the 100 best known nutty statements, you could do this.
It's up to the advertisers really, think cable TV. A little bit of edginess, but if it gets crazy a boycott can force an advertiser pull out. We're only a few years away from YouTube turing into cable TV, maybe even the FCC will get involved in making that determination.
Edit: I don't agree that advertisers should be in charge, I just think they will ultimately decide the line between edgy and extreme.
From the article: 'The new policy will ban “videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion,” the company said in a blog post.'
Is this going to include videos that mention "white privilege" (which one could argue alleges superiority of white people) in which white people are asked to "check their privilege" in some way (which one could argue is an attempt to justify exclusion)?
> "check their privilege" [...] (which one could argue is an attempt to justify exclusion)?
If you can make the case, maybe. I mean, it sounds like a kind of insane case to make to me. Who's being excluded, and from what, merely by having their assumptions challenged in a discussion context?
The groups actually being targetted are ones that tend to advocate for the status of the US as an inherently white nation. Sort of an easier sell to my mind.
It's not surprising there'd be groups advocating for that. They don't want to become a minority in their country, as both history and current events show that's a bad position to be in.
"Their country" seems to imply that it doesn't belong to people who immigrate legally. They're the majority of immigrants despite what people spreading hateful rhetoric try to tell you.
How else should the country they were born in, and are citizens of, be referred to? Without making it US specific, as my point is not limited to the US.
The comment did, but I am not in the US, nor is youtube limited to the US, so I don't see why the discussion should concern only the US.
And please don't put words in my mouth - I did not 'frame' immigration as an invasion, or as anything else - my statement was as dry as possible. If you can offer a more neutral phrasing that captures the same meaning, I'd be grateful.
How about PHP devs? Furries? Racists? KKK members? Pedophile activism? Nationalism? Pro-EU content?
I will happily allege that people who aren’t racist are superior, and that racists should be discriminated against, segregated, and excluded wherever possible. Is that video permitted?
YouTube is going too far. This will either be the biggest footgun due to unintended blast radius, or will be selectively enforced so that they have an excuse to editorialize and shut down stuff they or their advertisers personally find icky (entirely subjectively) while ignoring other stuff that breaks these rules.
> YouTube is going too far. This will either be the biggest footgun due to unintended blast radius, or will be selectively enforced so that they have an excuse to editorialize and shut down stuff they or their advertisers personally find icky (entirely subjectively) while ignoring other stuff that breaks these rules.
Pretty sure it'll be the latter. Selective enforcement seems to be the name of the game in SV, and IMO that's going to bite them in the ass eventually. (this isn't to say that selective enforcement is avoidable with the ruleset they've chosen, because it's probably not, but instead that policies that minimize the opportunity for selective enforcement should be used)
The whole idea that a mass censorship policy can be implemented in a way that is "unbiased" is absurd. This would be true even if it wasn't being implemented by a company with incredible political bias like Google (Youtube).
> "videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion"
What if the group is a political party alleging they are morally superior in order to justify "intolerance of intolerance" and "bigotry of bigotry" as a tactic to decry, discriminate, and exclude political opponents?
I think there's a difference between how we should recognise someone socially and the reality of an individual's biology. What's worrying here is that stating a biological fact can be viewed as too extreme if it goes against a certain political ideology.
But there are plenty of examples like this. I know people have been kick off of social media for suggesting the Prophet Muhammad was a pedophile, or for discussing racial crime stats. And many of the examples I've seen of this don't appear to be in bad faith either, in fact most seem to be in the interest of honest dialogue. They just had the wrong opinions.
It feels you're taking the least charitable interoperation of what I'm trying to say.
I believe trans women are "real women" in just about every way that matters. I only make an exception when I absolutely have to. For example, in sports, or in a medical context.
It might help to remember the word "women" is just a label we assign to people who share a certain common set of social and biological traits. And the majority of these traits trans women share, however in the case of trans women there are some exceptions. But it's not just trans people who don't fit cleanly into these groups, there are similar difficulties to be had with intersex people for example.
There are no easy answers here. Life isn't black and white. It's silly to think we can cleanly divide the whole of society into to clear categories.
I think you mean well, but are maybe a little out of touch with how things have changed in the last few years. Wikipedia does a good job of analyzing this topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender
The way I read it is that it's taken over 50 years for "gender" and "sex" to become different things. It's still a word that's transitioning (ok, some pun intended), but essentially we're past the tipping point now and you'll offend people if you use gender words incorrectly.
It does feel a little bit like when "literally" changed meaning to "figuratively", but this distinction is really important to an ever growing group of people.
It's also worth noting that it applies to gender words like "man" or "woman" which are different than sex words like "male" and "female".
I still don't understand how non-binary people fit into this, but if you embrace the "singular they", you'll probably not offend anyone.
If you define "woman" as "able to bear children" you're also cutting out a lot of cis-women as well. Defining gender based on reproductive ability is just a shitty thing in general, anti-human if you will.
And there's only four lights, let's get the accusations of Orwellianism out of the way too.
It's not a matter of "my side has facts and your side has opinions." It's that we disagree on what the facts are. You can find a lot of scientists from a few centuries ago confidently asserting that black people are subhuman. It doesn't magically make them not-racist because they believed it to be a true fact.
Well, yes, there is a creepy element of Orwellianism to this. And the creepy Orwellianism comes in when you make comparisons like the one you just made - that I’m somehow wrong today because, centuries ago, a few scientists had some pet racial theories that turned out to be wrong. It’s a deliberate inversion of language meant to get people to submit.
To some people the word means woman as a biological sex, in which case it would be "has 2 X chromosomes, or otherwise falls in a slightly muddy intersex situation." To some the word means woman as a gender, which itself can also mean either biological sex or gender identity. Watching people make concrete assertions to one another on the basis of definitions they do not share is as predictably pointless as you'd imagine.
Not everyone wants an inclusive definition, some people want discriminatory definitions. And I don't mean discriminatory in a negative sense. If "four" means 4, it would be more inclusive if it also meant 5 and 6, but it loses some utility in its inclusivity.
My problem isn't with your definition, it's with your implied assertion that we should "we want a simple inclusive definition," which is clearly not the case, as the differing priorities in definition are literally central to the debate.
> But there are plenty of examples like this. I know people have been kick off of social media for suggesting the Prophet Muhammad was a pedophile, or for discussing racial crime stats. And many of the examples I've seen of this don't appear to be in bad faith either, in fact most seem to be in the interest of honest dialogue. They just had the wrong opinions.
I find the trend of "this fact/data is not to be discussed" to be particularly disturbing.
Muhammed being a pedophile/child molester by modern definitions is pretty damn clear in the Quran. Saying we can't discuss it is very odd.
There are significant differences in racial crime and academic stats in the US. The causes can be debated - the existence of a difference less so.
And for a less controversial parallel to the previous... there are major differences in gendered crime stats in the US. Again, the causes can be debated - but a difference most definitely exists.
Under what standard is "racial crime differences are a forbidden discussion" reasonable where "gendered crime differences are a forbidden discussion" is not? What level of fact are we willing to memoryhole if it ends up politically inconvenient?
This is patently untrue in some domains that could be life-impacting, particularly in healthcare/medicine where differences in gender matters for treatment.
If a trans-man is given medicine in doses as a man, and not a woman, they have a much higher risk of overdosing because of differences in how the body metabolizes drugs for each gender [0] [1]. It isn't transphobic to identify them as a woman and give them the proper dosage for their gender. I'd prefer to be given the correct amount of medicine than to pretend there aren't important gender differences and that my actual gender and the gender I would prefer to identify and portray myself as differs [2].
Then you get into the mess of trans-women competing (and usually one-sidingly dominating) in women's sports because lo' and behold there are still gender differences between men and women regardless of how they choose to identify.
I'm becoming accustomed to being told how I should think. Must be my internalized transphobia speaking for me though and not that political correctness is going to cost someone their life one day and that that person could be me.
It's important for doctors to know your medical history, that's obviously true.
Do you know how trans people on HRT respond to Ambien, as your first link brings up? I sure don't. Depends on why the drug works differently.
If you're scared that you'll die because your doctor thinks you're cis, tell them you're trans.
That doesn't mean you have to tell your doctor "I'm really a man, despite being a trans woman, and it's definitely important for you to store an M in your records because you might suddenly forget that I'm trans and also I'm sure my reaction to medicine is the same as a cis man's."
Just be an adult and talk with your doctor honestly.
>If you're scared that you'll die because your doctor thinks you're cis, tell them you're trans.
I'm more scared that my doctor will know I'm trans but not give me proper treatment as a result of being scared of losing their career to backlash from the politically correct. It's a far more realistic fear than my doctor not knowing my gender and it isn't something that would be brought up because it is a taboo to ask someone their "real gender".
I'm happy to expand on this if necessary, but this fear of social backlash has already caused problems in other fields of work such as policing certain minority groups in the U.K. It isn't too large a stretch to see it impacting healthcare.
This is all a bit besides the point though. The point is there are many physiological differences between trans-women and women and that trying to conflate the two as being equal actively harms both groups. It's a social feel-good statement said by people who's identity is more important to them than reality and any of the negative externalities caused when adhering to their view of the world.
As far as I am concerned, letting trans-women compete in any physical sport against cis-women is harmful to women and the concept of women's sports. There are biological reasons many sports are segregated by gender. I don't care if this hurts any feelings because it's reality and it is harmful to people to ignore reality just to avoid hurting some feelings.
Hang on: your doctor knows you're trans, but they don't know your birth gender, and you think they're too scared to ask, and that you'll get a slightly wrong dose and then you'll die.
>This is patently untrue in some domains that could be life-impacting, particularly in healthcare/medicine where differences in gender matters for treatment.
Why not? Do you have to share the views of every single person within a group to be considered a supporter? What if they vote for every pro-LGBT politician that runs for office? What if they vote for every pro-LGBT legislation that they come across? What if they give support and words of affirmation to LGBT family members that are close to them? Why is he suddenly not a supporter because he disagrees with a small part of the discussion? This seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
My understanding is that most trans women don't want to be identified as such, and that "passing" is a really big deal.
"Tall" is an acceptable descriptor for a person, obvious to all and not usually very sensitive. "Trans" isn't like this and remarking on "how trans" someone is carries a very different meaning than remarking on "how tall" someone is.
Maybe it's still acceptable or useful to accept "trans women" as their own group, but eventually that will probably go away and "trans woman" will become a dated and bigoted term.
You may find yourself shocked that you ever used the term "trans" in the same way that it's now shocking that black people were once referred to as "colored".
Or alternatively, being trans might become an identity badge of honor, in the same way "gay" has in many places.
My point is that these things evolve over time, so either people are going to be allowed to make mistakes and have debates and figure things out in public, or we have to only use useless tautologies to describe people.
When you tell the GP (who claims to be pro-LGBT) that they're not pro-LGBT because they're struggling to speak correctly on the topic and they used the "wrong" language, you might not be having the effect you intended.
In this case, the GP mistakenly believes the dated idea that "gender" is a biological term, but enlightened folks are aware that gender is now a social construct. I think they simply meant "biologically male people are not female" instead of "trans women aren't women". The language is confusing because it's evolving, but getting everyone on the same page is going to require a lot of public errors that would be better met with debate than shaming.
I'm a trans woman, so I'm gonna go ahead and be gentle when I say that my understanding does not match yours.
Some trans women are as you describe, preoccupied with passing and going stealth, especially for safety reasons. Many aren't.
You can speculate on if the term is gonna go away, but right now it's the best adjective to describe trans people. It's not offensive or a slur, it's literally the community's chosen language.
And you're right, sometimes it's better to be nice and gentle to people who are wrong. I won't be mad if you pop back upthread and correct them gently. We can do one of those good cop bad cop things.
The elephant in the room is that "passing" is often little more than wishful thinking, and people are starting to understand this. Ultimately, a shared focus on full transparency about being 'trans' or 'cis' is quite helpful at de-escalating hostile attitudes and discrimination about the matter - one could admit of rare exceptions, but by and large, anyone who feels like they must hide themselves for "safety reasons" is likely better off leaving the unsafe environment entirely!
Unfortunately, even a lot of places that are generally trans-supportive won't admit refugees fleeing anti-trans violence - or when they do, they're not treated much better than the place they left.
I'm not sure what your first comment is meant to imply, but I suspect you might be suffering from confirmation bias if you think that passing isn't realistic.
I made my attempt to explain it upthread for cis folks who haven't got it sorted yet.
I'm surprised that my understanding is already out of date or was wrong in the first place. Maybe 5 years ago or so, the rule I learned was that cis people should make no distinction between trans or cis, so as not to separate people into groups. I figured that extended to everything, which is why we don't make a distinction between cis and trans in things like sports or bathrooms, because there should be no distinction to make.
It's all a bit confusing. I'd like to get it right, but there's a lot of change happening and it's hard to keep up.
Because they are different. No transwoman can give birth or have a period. None of them has a womb. None of them are genetically female. Most of them have all the advantages of a man like higher bone density, more upper body strength.
Why are you so afraid of different groups of people being physically different? As long as you treat all groups as humans, it shouldn't be a problem. Denying basic biological facts is not a path to truth.
The distinction is supposed to be that "biological facts" no longer include gender. Gender is now fluid psychological term, not a biological one. In other words, you said "advantages of a man" instead of "advantages of a genetic male", which is now wrong.
But apparently I'm incorrect in thinking that you're not supposed to discuss "trans women" as a group, which is still confusing to me.
Sure, gender is different from sex. The point stands. There are major biological differences between females and trans women. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just a part of life. Pretending everyone is equal is just lying to yourself.
But of course, people should be treated equally (in most cases).
Most people are not information or media literate, they don't do their own research to fact-check claims, and they believe any authority who says something similar to what they already believe. The "marketplace of ideas" requires people to put in the effort I describe, effort that they clearly aren't, so the responsibility for checking and enforcing content limitations passes to the platform owner.
If you don't like this outcome, argue for more humanities and social science classes in primary and secondary education to educate society in evaluating claims and the other aspects of information and media literacy.
To all the people here who are decrying this as “censorship”, remember that during the early 2010s, Islamic radicals were getting radicalized on YouTube by pretty benign sermons (Ex: Awlaki and his “tour of Paradise” lectures that inspired Boston 2013, fort hood and a bunch of other international attacks). YouTube removed all that out and I think Muslims getting radicalized on YouTube plummeted.
White supremacy is a much bigger deal with a worse tail risk than Islamic extremism. Don’t see why anyone would object to removal of Neo nazi content yet go along with the removal of wahabi sermons.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
What a wretched, demoralizing 118-comment subthread. A white supremacy vs. Islamic extremism cage match was the last thing we needed, and of course it hopped via WWII and Nazis to capitalism vs. communism—the mother of generic ideological flamewars, whither all return. None of this is good discussion for Hacker News; it's predictable, nasty, and the essence of what we're trying to avoid. To the extent it proliferates like this here, we might as well just shut the damn place down.
> White supremacy is a much bigger deal with a worse tail risk than Islamic extremism.
Wait... you're saying that white supremacy is worse than islamic extremism? Is you opinion perhaps a manifestation of your perspective? I'm sure there are some people in Syria, Afghanistan, etc... that would disagree with you.
BTW, I'm not saying one is worse than the other, just that they are both bad, both a problem, and both should be removed from social media.
White supremacy was the cause for the worst wars of the 20th century. A white nationalist uprising in Europe would be deadlier (again) than Islamic extremists taking over most middle eastern nations due to the resources that will be available to them.
> White supremacy was the cause for the worst wars of the 20th century.
I'm not sure this is accurate. Perhaps you could say that racial supremacy justified some of the worst wars of the 20th century, but "germans are better than slavs" barely pattern matches to "white supremacy", and "japanese are better than koreans/chinese/etc" doesn't at all. As for justified vs caused... There's a fine line to be drawn here, but I think it's worth drawing. Would Germany and Japan have gone to war without views of racial superiority? Quite possibly. Both were in rather poor strategic situations in the 1920s, and war was an acceptable way to resolve that at the time. Would they have poked the world's largest powers with a stick without that superiority to fall back on? Perhaps not.
White Supremacy was a key platform of the Nazi Party, which initiated World War II. Their definition of "white" including most of Western Europe but essentially none of Eastern Europe. While Slavs and Russians were better than the Roma (aka Gypsies) or Jews in Nazi eyes, they were accorded a lesser status than Germans or other Western Europeans.
In absolute terms, more Russians died as a result of Nazi action than any other group.
This is not a matter of perspective. This is what actually happened.
If you recognize that racial supremacy goes hand-in-hand with the imperialistic expansionism of Nazi Germany and Japan, I think it's fairly apt descriptor of one of the major causes of the war.
The parent assertion was "White supremacy was the cause for the worst wars of the 20th century"...
gaogao switch the convo to "racial supremacy". Not to say that it doesn't have something to do with wars of the 20th century.
It might even be seen that by making this switch and excluding non-imperialistic wars, we would be minimizing the atrocities and war crimes committed in Africa and the rest of the third world against native populations.
> Are you seriously denying that Nazis were motivated by ideology of racial supremacy?
I'm not even going to acknowledge this statement. How on earth did you made this cognitive leap?
>A white nationalist uprising in Europe would be deadlier (again) than Islamic extremists taking over most middle eastern nations due to the resources that will be available to them.
Reckless speculation considering the latter did happen. You're fearmongering in order to drive censorship and oppression of viewpoints you disagree with.
How is he fearmongering? A white nationalist uprising is quite literally relatively recent European history, and resulted in the torture and slaughter of tens of millions.
Before Al Queda, the West's biggest fear was domestic white nationalist terrorists like Timothy McVeigh.
EDIT: It's very disturbing that so many people don't understand what the Nazi platform was all about. The supremacy of the "Aryan Race" was literally a platform of the Nazi party from the beginning. The subjugation of Jews was a part of the party platform from the beginning. The use of paramilitary squads to enforce ideological purity was a part of the party from the beginning. And it just got worse from there.
The battleground was fascism vs. capitalism vs. communism. Fascism was, at it's core, reactionairy to the rise of communism and it's dishonest to describe it simply as "white nationalism".
Furthermore, for a "white nationalist" movement they spent a whole lot of time killing and oppressing other "whites".
Fascism started as a reaction to modernist political ideas that developed out of the enlightenment (like egalitarianism) and existential concerns like the perception of national decline (which fascism usually blames on decadence and libertine behaviors). It may have taken hold due to anti-communist sentiment, but that's separate from its philosophical underpinnings (which for fascism are a bit shaky)
Communism is problematic to them because it tries to eliminate social hierarchies deemphasizing national identity. Liberalism (in the classical sense) is problematic to them because of its (perceived) amoral decadence and its ability to empower "undesirable" "outsider" individuals to garner power inside a nation through wealth.
> They were primarily concerned with Pan-Germanicism.
If that was the case, then why did their policies include the murder of millions of German-speaking Jews, Gypsies, and people with disabilities. What was it about those people that made them not fit the category of "German"?
The answer from clearly documented history is that the Nazis systematized the categorization of humans on their deeply flawed model of the Aryan "race", and singled out those who didn't fit for subjugation or extermination.
Conversely they also planned to further "purify" their own people by planning to subject Scandinavian populations to forced interbreeding programs upon conquering them, and kidnapping "Aryan" children from neighboring countries.
> If that was the case, then why did their policies include the murder of millions of German-speaking Jews, Gypsies, and people with disabilities.
Because Jews and Gypsies weren't considered ethnically German. Re: disabilities, it's a mix of rabid utilitarianism (they were called "useless eaters") and a belief that disabilities stemmed from corrupted bloodlines (hence the term mongoloid -- it was a popular theory that retardation was the result of Europeans/Asian intermarriage).
> Because Jews and Gypsies weren't considered ethnically German.
What defined German ethnicity?
Clearly it wasn't the ability to speak the language, or being descended from many generations of ancestors living in Germany, otherwise the Jews and Roma both would have been considered German.
Clearly there was something else attributed to them that didn't fit the definition of "German". It was that they weren't considered racially German. Race is literally what the Nuremberg Laws were about:
Given the preponderance of clear historical evidence for the Third Reich's racially based rationale for its actions, one wonders why would anyone try to water it down to the more innocuous seeming rationale of "German ethnicity".
I'm not sure I understand your contention. Pan-Germanicism was about uniting ethnic Germans. Are you implying that there's no ethnic difference between a German and an Ashkenazi Jew or a Romani?
No, I'm saying that the way that the Nazis defined German identity was their biological model of "racial" classification, and not a cultural feature like ethnicity. The Nazis then (as today), have an explicitly biological notion of identity, not cultural.
I'm not making that up - it was right there in their laws that I linked to.
Otherwise, why shouldn't people who had been living in Germany for generations, speaking languages closely related to German (Yiddish, German Romani), be considered German?
How can you interpret those laws as being about anything but racial categorization - unless you have an agenda to sidestep and downplay the fact the Nazis repressed and murdered people whom they saw as not being part of their own presumed "race".
The point I was making above was that Nazis were concerned about German-ness (well, Aryan-ness) not whiteness. Classifying them as white supremacists is generally incorrect.
The problem with that argument is that the Nazis considered the German "race" to be the paragon of "whiteness", and other less-German white peoples, like European Jews, to be degraded. They absolutely conflated "whiteness" with their idealized German identity.
There is also historical conflicts between ethnic Germans and other ethnic groups. The Nazi's had a plan to exterminate most Slavs which includes Poles, Russians and Ukrainians after they won the war.
Slavs were explicitly not German according to the Nazi's definition. However, they were interested in re-absorbing ethnic Germans from Slavic territories.
Fascism was not "reactionary". It was, in many ways, a sibling ideology to 'communism', but with glorification of violence, a broadly "irrational" (i.e. explicitly anti-intellectual, and almost relishing in the use of blatant propaganda as a means of influence) attitude to mass politics and either nationalist or (in the more extreme Nazi version) racially-supremacist ideology as major selling points. "White nationalist" is somewhat inaccurate as you point out but "reactionary" is totally wrong, and Soviet propaganda is the only reason why some people today still think of fascism as "conservative" or "reactionary".
It is absolutely reactionary, but it's a reaction against enlightenment thinking. This explains many of its key attributes: Use of propaganda, anti-intellectualism, and rejecting egalitarianism.
It's also why it's not easily dispatched by enlightenment thinking... it survived those battles back in the 20th century and ultimately had to be put down with exercises of power (often military, sometimes social, rarely diplomatic).
Fascists gained power in Italy, Germany, and Spain as a direct result of anti-communist sentiment (and in the case of Germany, a failed communist revolution). Mussolini's early writings were directly proposing nationalism as the answer to communism's failures. Everywhere fascism had success it was because it was pitted against the threat of communism. I don't know how the rise of Fascism was anything but reactionary.
I agree that facism's rise was tied to nationalism's rise.
But we're talking about the root causes of WWII. And one of the Nazi party's specific goals when invading Poland was to exterminate the Jews and Roma (Gypsy) populations of Europe.
Yes I disagree with white nationalism. And Islamic extremism. I don’t buy your point :).
Islamic jihadis do control a few middle eastern nations. But they are quite powerless in front of the west. Even having access to natural resources like oil doesn’t protect the extremists (do I even need to give examples?). The most concerning Islamic state is Pakistan as it has nukes.
But if far right folks take over Austria or Germany again, or other European states or Russia or the US, they will control massive economies, WMDs and have the ability for complete domination in a way never seen before.
Let’s just say it is better to be in control of any European nation as opposed to Libya, Syria, Iraq or Iran.
This is historically illiterate. WW1 was a war between Imperial powers both sides of which were entirely white. WWII was caused by a German supremicist movement opposed to all non-Germans — it’s not as if the Polish are non-white.
White supremacism is supported by a fraction of a percentage of white Europeans. Support for Islamic fundamentalism is substantially higher in the Muslim world.
(Plenty of Europeans are opposed to large scale immigration, but you’re not conflating that with white supremicism are you?)
What do you mean white supremacy was the cause for WW1/2?
Edit, this is an honest question. It's my impression these wars were caused by nationalist movements. The first didn't even involve "whites" until later and it certainly had nothing to do with white supremacy.
The second world war got very white supremacy eventually but again, zero fucks to do with the cause. Hell America turned a blind eye to ALL of it until they got dragged in, that's how little it had to do with anything.
(Not some gun toting denier nazi here, it happened it was disturbing as fuck and it was a big deal, but please don't run around claiming this made up narrative)
"White supremacy" wasn't involved in either WW1 or WW2. And "a white nationalist uprising in Europe" is a contradiction in terms, since Europeans do not in any way identify with a "white nation" of any sort.
This whole "rah rah whites" stuff is something that people in the U.S. came up with during the Progressive Era, as a supposedly-'unifying' alternative to national/ethnic identities, some of which were quite openly "disfavored" by that time especially wrt. Central Europe. (Again, WW1 was a non-trivial factor there.) People outside the Anglo world generally think of it as quite silly and misguided, not to mention racist.
I’m not sure why this is being down voted, 'white' is very much an American concept.
British people are not French people are not Hungarians are not Greeks are not Italians are not Spanish people.
We're Europeans, but we have very distinct and different cultures and we don't regard ourselves as 'whites' - it's rare (outside radical left circles) for Europeans to speak that way.
The native people of most Mediterranean regions - Spain, Southern France, Italy, Greece and Turkey don't have pale skin - it would be odd to speak of 'whites'.
The "white people" concept is increasingly gaining popularity in Europe and especially among the European far-right though. This is due to the massive influx of non-European migrants over the past decades, which makes the racial divisions much more visible.
Likewise - there's either concern about competition from eastern Europeans (who are as pale as Brits are), or the increase in Islamic terrorism (which is obviously a religious concern rather than a racial one).
Both are not advocating any kind of racial supremacy but rather self-interest, and - like them or not - relatively common as judged by recent election results.
You should brush up on your history. First World War had nothing to do with "white supremacy" - every side whose opposition led to it was lily white, Germans, French, Belgians, Russians, British, Sebrians, whoever you point to - they where white. It was a very complex tangle of reasons that led to the war, but "white supremacy" had zero to do with it.
Second Word War, as we all know, has been mostly led by Nazis, who were, among other things, undoubtedly very very racist. However, even then they gladly paired with Japanese - most definitely not "white", Arabs - not really considered "white" by most Nazis - to achieve their goals. And they had absolutely no problem suppressing and massacring Eastern Europeans (very "white") when it suited them. Their goal was, ultimately, world domination under the aegis of the Nazi party, and their "white supremacy" was mostly "Nazi supremacy" - if you were white but not agreeing with Nazis, you were dead. So it was a standard totalitarian approach, which is no different in any totalitarian regime, racism notwithstanding. Nazis where definitely racial supremacists (though just "white" didn't go nearly far enough for them) but even if they weren't, it would end up in the same way.
And as history teaches us, totalitarian regimes like to expand, if they can, and cause wars, if they have resources for it (fortunately, North Korea has none, but even then they are trying to provoke something constantly).
> A white nationalist uprising in Europe would be deadlier
There is no white nationalist movement in Europe even close to pulling something like this off. In fact, I don't think there's even one serious "white" nationalist movement in Europe at all - most nationalist parties are specifically "nationally" nationalists - e.g. French nationalists, British nationalists, Hungarian nationalists, etc. and they couldn't care less about other "whites" as soon as they aren't French, British or Hungarian. Of course, racial movements exist too, but again - they are minuscule compared to nation-based movements.
OTOH, ISIS has already pulled off a major war in Middle East, and while it fortunately looks like they're ending up on the losing side now, it already cost major loss in life and economic damage, and it is very far from the end. Taliban in Afghanistan is far from being beaten too. They are massively in force right now, while "white nationalist uprising" is nothing but an extremely unlikely hypothetical.
Communists slaughtered more people than Nazis (of course, not due to any virtue of the Nazis). Also, the current geopolitical situation is very different from the early or mid 1900s.
That would require the capitalism to end, so I hope we never get to see that. And considering that the only realistic scenario of ending capitalism before any of the people reading this are dead is world takeover by China - you probably hope that too, once you think about it.
Capitalism only "kills" people in a counterfactual sense. For example, you might posit that, had society gone out of its way to provide medical care to a sick individual, that person still would be alive. But that counterfactual is actually pretty complicated; it requires long chains of causation and dubious moral assumptions.
Communism kills in a very real sense: it literally murders by the million and creates deadly privation where there was previously none.
Maybe focusing on which is worse (itself something difficult to define - do you count just death toll? respective groups' political power and impact? future murdering potential? self-inflicted damage like airport security theater and civil liberties?) is a mistake, and we could just go with "both are really, really bad and should be strongly opposed"?
> radical Islam basically just wants you to convert
Then what do you call actual radical islam that preaches death to all infidels, women honor killings and unending war-on-the-west, among other equally grotesque actions?
White supremacists are fine with "lesser races" be subjugated and "taught their place" under the rulership of their "true masters". Practically none of supremacists want to exterminate other races - only to take superior position over them. Which matches the position of Islamic supremacists - you can live under Islamic rule (either as Muslim subject to Islamic authority, or as infidel recognizing Islamic law supremacy and bowing to it) or die.
I'd be willing to say both are terrible and have zero value in our society. I think it would be a great move if Youtube put a policy in place that banned content that pushed content that pushed extreme views (including Islamic extremism and white supremacy).
But do be aware that white supremacist have committed more acts of violence in the US than Muslim extremist. And this not counting lynching which is a systematic form of terrorism that lasted more than a century.
The same people who cheer blocking Al Qaeda now claim that blocking neo-nazis is suppressing conservative views, so right-wing extremism has been and is far more tolerated and prevalent than other violent extremism.
This is what I mean by "perspective". Youtube is a global platform, much like the rest of social media. We no longer have the comfort of compartmentalizing our opinions into convenient buckets like the "US". Radicalization in any form is transferable through social media as we have seen countless times, ending in countless tragedies.
The point is that the Nazis were motivated by an ideology of racial supremacy, and that this was a significant factor in triggering WWII. This isn't some kind of wacky revisionist history I'm putting forward here. Look at any historical account of the Nazi invasion of Poland (which of course precipitated WWII) and you'll find "Lebensraum" mentioned quite prominently.
You can argue that the use of the term "white supremacy" is anachronistic in this context (as the Nazis were technically "Aryan supremacists" rather than white supremacists). But the current white supremacy movement has evolved in significant part from Nazi ideology. Take a look at the Wikipedia article on David Duke, for example, and you'll find such statements as "Picketing and holding parties on the anniversary of Hitler's birth, he became known on the LSU campus for wearing a Nazi uniform."
In short, if we're talking about racist movements within the US and Europe that are directly inspired by Nazi ideology, then whatever quibbles you might make about terminology, you can't deny that it's reasonable to project the dangers of the latter onto the former.
> You can argue that the use of the term "white supremacy" is anachronistic in this context (as the Nazis were technically "Aryan supremacists" rather than white supremacists).
You can generalize to ethno-national supremacy. Which covers Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and US White Supremacists.
Yes, indeed. I think it's pedantic and missing the point in this context to nitpick over whether the Nazis were "white supremacists" in some technical sense.
The war where a bunch of white and Asian people fought against a bunch of white and Asian people? The one where the Nazis said that the Japanese, Arabs, even Jews could be "honorary Aryans" when it was convenient for the cause?
It's amazing how many people actually think this, and how discussions like this bring them out of the woodwork. A couple of years ago I got into a pointless discussion with someone on HN who went so far as to say that Hitler wasn't a racist. (No, really.)
This is why white supremacy is dangerous. The history of WWII and the rise of the Nazis is rapidly being forgotten, and a surprisingly large number of people have a massively inaccurate conception of it.
Rebelgecko's comment (which is what I was responding to - not the entire thread) clearly suggests that the Nazi's racist ideology was just for show, and that they didn't really believe it.
I doubt you can point to any reputable historian of World War II who denies that the Nazi's racist ideology, and its expansionist tendencies, played a major role in the outbreak of WWII. Think Sudetenland.
Not at all what they were suggesting. Those things bloody happened.
And again, nobody here is denying Nazis were racist.
How can you say it played a major role in the outbreak of war when you can't even say it without tacking on the real causes with an "and" all while ignoring the USA turned a blind eye to the lot of it until Japan got involved?
Nobody here has said it didn't play a role. And it did play a major role later on in WW2 but that's not what this thread is about is it?
Did white supremacy cause WW1 and WW2. No.
Did it play a part? Yes. Why are we talking about this? Because AP minced their words and should have just said nationalist racism.
>Not at all what they were suggesting. Those things bloody happened.
This is clearly what the comment suggests. It is playing down Nazi racism by suggesting that the Nazis just pretended to be racists when it suited their purposes. (Note the inclusion of “even Jews”, as if to suggest that even the Holocaust was not racially motivated.)
>without tacking on the real causes with an "and"
The expansionism and the racism were intimately linked. Lebensraum.
That certainly wasn't the impression that I meant to give with my comment. So I can write more clearly in the future, can you tell me what I said that made you think that I'm claiming Nazis aren't racist?
I just think it seems overly simplistic to the point of being almost nonsensical to say that WW2 was caused by white supremacism. White supremacism certainly didn't make Japan invade China. While I'm no expert, at the very least I can say that the Wikipedia article for "Causes of World War II" seems in agreement with what I said— while racism played a role, facism/militarism and plain old nationalist expansionism were much bigger factors.
You said "The one where the Nazis said that the Japanese, Arabs, even Jews could be 'honorary Aryans' when it was convenient for the cause".
It's particularly the mention of Jews here that makes it clear that in your view, the Nazis' racism was merely a matter of expedience, not conviction.
After all, would it not have been "convenient for the cause" for the Nazis to make all of Europe's Jews "honorary Aryans", and thus save themselves the trouble of murdering six million of them? The reason that they didn't do this is - obviously - that racism and anti-Semitism were a core part of their cause.
>White supremacism certainly didn't make Japan invade China.
A red herring, surely. We're talking about the cause of the war in Europe in this context. But in any case, there was certainly a racist component to Japanese nationalism too.
>nationalist expansionism
The Nazis' nationalist expansionism was intimately connected to their racism. Hitler invaded Poland so that racially inferior slavs could be replaced by racially superior "Aryans".
White supremacy can be reasonably credited for the Holocaust, but not for the war itself. The usual intervention after a major war was for a few hundred years to carve up the major belligerent into smaller states. This happened fairly regularly throughout the early modern period but curiously stopped being a thing after the Napoleonic wars.
I suspect this is because carving France back up into kingdoms at that point would have left Germany the sole uncontested power of Europe. Wars and nations were just getting too big to fail. When this fear materialized with Germany and Austria-Hungary teamed up to try to take over Europe again, while Austria-Hungary were divided into their constituent nation-states, Germany was expected to pay war reparations and so was kept largely intact so wealth could be extracted.
These war reparations are ultimately what drove WW2, by breaking the backs of the Germans, making them extremely receptive to populist politics.
> White supremacy can be reasonably credited for the Holocaust,
Not so! There is significant, though not watertight evidence that Hitler intended the Holocaust to be followed by mass extermination and enslavement of Slavic peoples (so-called Generalplan Ost), whom Nazi Germans regarded as an "inferior" race according to their racial ideology, and surely not "Aryan" - despite, y'know, Slavic languages sharing a common ancestry with both Germanic languages and Indo-Iranic ones! Nazi German attitudes to the "supremacy" of race, culture and the like were a lot weirder than people are usually ready to admit these days; while they may have been rooted in some sorts of shared vocabulary from the early 20th-century, to a far greater extent they were just "Nazi Germany and the friends of Nazi Germany good, everyone else bad!" Of course, this is the story of supremacist ideologies everywhere; but the point is that we should not grow complacent and reassure ourselves that there's anything especially peculiar about white-supremacist nationalism; it's just one of many, many ideologies with broad similarities in their appeal to hateful sentiment.
Sure. But to say the Nazis weren't white supremacists because their ideology differs from today's white supremacists isn't really saying anything at all. It's still racism, just differently defined.
I'm breaking with my usual rule of not commenting on downvotes, this only seems to happen with historical topics, to say that trying to make a distinction between the Aryan supremacy of the Nazis, as weird as the details would sound to a 21st century mind, and the racists of our day, is just a distinction without a difference. You see the exact same mentality, the exact same sorts of arguments.
If today's white supremacists found power, they'd look exactly like Nazis. The enemy might be different, but the mindset of fighting that enemy would be exactly the same, and the white supremacist suddenly finding power would find no other example to take heed of than the Nazis, so we can pretty much almost assume that that's what would happen.
> ...is just a distinction without a difference. You see the exact same mentality, the exact same sorts of arguments.
Sure, but it's important to realize that this is true about any supremacist ideology. There's nothing exclusive about either Nazism or white supremacism. ISIL's Islamofascism is the same old crap for example, and it too has a line of historical descent from, e.g. early-20th-c. anti-Semitism. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a raging anti-Semite who met Adolf Hitler and ardently supported his most heinous atrocities.
I'm not disputing that racism was at the heart of the Nazi Party, what I'm disputing is that the Nazi Party singlehandedly brought about the war. The war would have happened anyway. It would have been somewhat different without Hitler at the helm, but that Germany would give it another go was inevitable once the ink was dry on the Treaty of Versailles. There were many many more war hawks in Germany than the Nazis.
Those were völkisch (as in "Germans are the best, we need that space for us"), not white supremacist (since Poles, Russians, European Jews etc are white as well).
Hi. If you downvote factual statements, please leave a comment. It's annoying if you're using downvotes and flags as "I don't like that somebody says this". Write an argument, don't abuse moderation tools.
And racism makes no sense, because we are all members of the human race. Therefore, I posit that American Slavery was not based on racism. Aren't pointless semantic games fun?
Nazism was absolutely white supremacy. That it excluded ethnic groups that you consider to be white, or stack-ranked various white ethnic groups has nothing to do whether or not it was about white supremacy. Please, pray tell, what exact role were non-whites expected to play in Hitler's Brave New World?
You are using an incredibly narrow definition of the term, to try to make.. What point, exactly?
The distinction between racism and nationalism matters. You can ultimately never completely quell racism. Racists emerge out of the woodwork any time they think they can find solidarity. It's evil, and evil is fought through awareness.
Nationalism however is the fundamental basis behind modern sovereignty. It's an identity based on shared geography rather than appearances. Nationalism ultimately prevents the people in the nation from getting conquered by other nations. You don't want the sentiments running away on you, but a certain amount of national pride is good for a people.
Nazism hid racism behind nationalism, in order to meld the two political forces together to form a ruling coalition. This was fundamental to its success. You cannot merely say the Nazis were racist, to turn them into the bogeyman, without acknowledging that the rest of the world had a role to play in bringing them to power.
The West, collectively, brought about World War 2. We didn't listen to the lessons learned over a thousand years of grappling with warfare on the continent, we did not do what was needed at the end of World War 1. It was so obvious that Germany was going to rearm and try again that France immediately went to considerable expense to fortify their eastern border.
We left an enormous power vacuum in Germany in the name of greed. We would not make that same mistake again at the end of WW2, though honestly the spectre of nuclear war had a lot more to do with it than moral imperative.
WW2 wasn't caused by white supremacy, it was caused by nationalism. It was part of the Reich's propaganda to say that they were waging war against the jews (and socialists and communists…), but they were doing this because they though that Germany was superior to its neighbor and was fit to conquer and rule them.
I think Germany could have probably managed some form of German-supremacist propaganda, instead of Aryan. It might have even worked better strategically if they managed to avoid driving away / killing a large portion of their engineers and scientists.
Also please be aware that you will see terms like "white" supremacy be used in these discussions instead of more appropriate terms like "Aryan" to make the topic easier to approach for an American audience.
I believe that's what is called "a distinction without a difference".
You can argue that whatever your local xenophobic hatreds you have going on aren't technically white supremacy, because you have different historical and cultural understandings of race etc, but at the end of the day, your hating haters sure seem to hate basically the same people as our hating haters, so I'm not sure why it's worth arguing about the distinction between the two groups.
This is pretty much the point i tried to make... that there is no huge difference and it is totally fine to simplify to "white" in communities like these. But re-reading my comment, i can now see how it can be seen as nit-picking instead of approving of this idea.
Those looking to be radicalized will look at this as an example of the conspiracy. Look at QAnon. Or look at things like Conservapedia: https://www.conservapedia.com/Paul_Manafort
Go ahead and read that article on Paul Manafort. That's just one, mundane article—you could pick any. Understand that, true or false, it doesn't matter anymore—this is a narrative and a set of facts that around 100 million people in the United States now subscribe to.
We are way, way, way, way past removing a few thousand YouTube videos. That might have been marginally effective ten years ago. But there's been a decade of rhetoric now about how "they" control the media and will try and censor it. Sometimes it's "they" and sometimes it's (((they))).
Jews control the media, shadow governments, deep state, extreme hate against muslims, gays, etc.. This stuff is mainstream. Patrick Little ran for Senate in California, of all places, as an actual nazi and got 1.2% of the vote. That's 50,000+ people who went out of their way to vote for someone who was relatively unknown, all because his platform was based on removing Jews from the United States.
I don't know what the solution is, I really don't. But I DO know that removing videos from YouTube won't make it better. It may make it worse.
I don't know about your conclusion. There's a lot of people out there arguing that deplatforming works. I think it was considered to be effective in reducing Alex Jones' influence.
> But I DO know that removing videos from YouTube won't make it better. It may make it worse.
I think you're right, and I have some first-hand knowledge on the matter. I've debated QAnon types and flat earthers alike. In both cases, they often see an absence of information as some overarching conspiracy. I'm not really sure who is worse (the flat earthers are a subset of a broader "government-is-hiding-things" conspiracy), but they both follow a cult-like structure in that if you disagree with them, you're not "one of us" and are either not smart enough to understand the implications of their beliefs or are willfully blind to their "truth." I doubt YT would ever remove QAnon or flat earth videos, but if they did, I suspect the fallout would be far worse than just leaving them alone. In some cases, it's helpful to cite their own predictions (and have something to cite) to dismantle their argument! Admittedly, this isn't useful in direct debate, because they're forever moving the goalpost, but it can be helpful for illustrating deficiencies to third parties that might be sympathetic to their views but are still open to the idea that there are problems with the opposition's argument[1].
Now, I say this as a conservative with some libertarian leanings. I don't like censorship, and I think it's harmful to shield people from ideas they don't like. However, I think moderation within a community is incredibly important to its survival provided it is applied equally. Nothing is worse for reasonable discourse than having someone jump in and start slinging pejoratives, insults, and abuse for no other reason than they don't like what you've said. As an example, I've personally had someone stalk my admittedly limited social media presence across various sites in order to post screenshots "proving" some inane belief they had about me supporting some ridiculous conspiracy. They then repeatedly posted insults and diatribes across numerous unrelated comments until I blocked them. That type of behavior should be an immediate--and permanent--ban.
[1] We might be passed this point, because the number of undecided people with regards to any particular conspiracy (for or against) is diminishing. I used to think the flat earth groups were largely trolling, but I've spoken with some people who have encountered them in real life or have friends who have been duped into believing the conspiracy. I also know a small handful of people who believe QAnon. No amount of evidence is going to sway either party. And no, I don't know what the best solution is other than to continue engaging where appropriate and banning where there's abuse.
The time for moderation is over. Way over. If YouTube and Facebook has moderated in the beginning their would be no problem. That would just be the way it is.
They didn't get into heavy-handed moderation early on for a very good reason. Now they are seeing why. Once you do it for some groups you have to do it for everyone.
There's no winning this battle of censorship, it will never be enough for the mob. While the other half is saying it's too far. And a small percentage of crazies becomes even more convinced of a global conspiracy. And the actual extremists will use their banning to justify why they were right to be extremist in the first place.
They should have stopped at people promoting violence, spam, and other obvious illegal stuff. Jumping into being the central body that moderates what is 'acceptable speech' online is minefield riddled crazy town with very little real ROI. Which will hopefully quicken Facebook's decline.
The point is, awlakis sermons were not even “extreme”. They didn’t call for violence. They just talked about how great heaven was. YouTube rightly removed those videos because they were inspiring suicide attacks by teaching pretty mainstream Islamic beliefs like: martyrs go to heaven.
Would be for or against YouTube removing videos that encouraged suicide in depressed individuals?
Wait, so talking about how great heaven is now considered extremism? That's bad news for most Abrahamic religions. I suspect you are trying to pull the narrative in diametrically opposing directions - to show the videos were both very benign and super dangerous - and the narrative just tears up.
> because they were inspiring suicide attacks by teaching pretty mainstream Islamic beliefs like: martyrs go to heaven.
Wait, so if I say that good people go to heaven, and somebody believes it's good to kill infidels, I am now an extremist? I think your narrative is missing something.
The paradox here is that calling what are mainstream views within Islam “extremist” is in itself an “extreme” and potentially “bigoted” view ... which could get you banned.
Suicide / death is as extreme as things get for living organisms.
It's not bigoted to state facts you don't like. Mean, maybe, if I time it right. In fact someone calling you a bigot in this isntance actually makes them a bigot.
Its so concerning that you simplify ridiculously complex issues down to a soundbyte like "islamic radicals were getting radicalized", like the videos are some kind of hypnosis spiral that turns a promising young middle eastern boy into a monster.
Seems like the last part is pure speculation.. Islamic extremism, is what happened in Syria, and the root of pretty much all terrorism in Europe and parts of Africa..
> Islamic radicals were getting radicalized on YouTube by pretty benign sermons (Ex: Awlaki and his “tour of Paradise” lectures that inspired Boston 2013, fort hood and a bunch of other international attacks). YouTube removed all that out and I think Muslims getting radicalized on YouTube plummeted.
Regardless of the effects, this was also wrong, IMHO.
If you are a supporter of radically free expression, sometimes you have to allow radicals to express themselves too.
Edit: I know there will be a contingent that disagrees with this. For many people, the ends justify the means, regardless of the corrosive effect to civil liberties. In my opinion this is a myopic view.
I'm reasonably certain our invasion and destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and our bombings in a host of other countries had more to do with "fomenting radicalism" than any Youtube videos.
> Don’t see why anyone would object to removal of Neo nazi content yet go along with the removal of wahabi sermons.
Setting aside the fact that this culling has nothing to do with Neo nazi content... maybe islamic extremism is a greater threat because we've had decades to implement countermeasures to a resurgence of white supremacy, whereas islamic terrorists exploit existing gaps in our society's trust model? I'm confident that had the KKK employed trucks of peace in the 50s, civil engineers wouldn't have assumed that nobody would be insane enough to drive down a pedestrian thoroughfare at full speed.
Now back to the issue at hand. This is a purge of alternative media at the behest of Vox Media, of which Comcast is the majority shareholder. This has been going on for well over a year now, the old media making demands for Youtube deplatformings and policy changes. I started listing them, but the list of crybullies is effectively a list of all media companies founded before Youtube. It is really amazing how stupid Google has been in all this, because it seems that they don't understand who their competitors are in the attention market, and how those competitors have effectively transformed them from a relatively low maintenance and legally protected platform - into a legally exposed publisher full of upset content providers. Youtube has been a loss leader for a long time, which might explain the leadership selection and the lack of corrective action for laughably stupid executive decisions... but it is well beyond the point of just being a money hole - it is in the precedent setting legal liability zone at this point. They aren't even subtle about being a publisher anymore, selectively editorializing user generated content with editor's notes under the guise of fighting disinformation.
"The term Radical (from the Latin radix meaning root), during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, identified proponents of democratic reform, in what subsequently became the parliamentary Radical Movement."
"The term political radicalism (in political science known as radicalism) denotes political principles focused on altering social structures through revolutionary or other means and changing value systems in fundamental ways. "
And of course the classic Rules for Radicals book about community organizing and starting grassroots movements.
Let's not label all radical things bad, it can become a way to suppress dissent and societal change.
> remember that during the early 2010s, Islamic radicals were getting radicalized on YouTube by pretty benign sermons
Yet I am reading every day now about how "hate speech" has to be banned from Youtube, but I almost never hear Islamic radicals cited as an example. Most vividly discussed usually is some spat between a left-wing loudmouth and a right-wing loudmouth (usually both Americans of course, because that's where all the world's problems are, shut up Al Qaeda, ISIS and Taliban, you are all JV team compared to a rich American youtuber that says hurtful things about a rich American media personality), and usually the latter gets all passes in the world for calling for actual physical violence, and the former gets banned.
> and I think Muslims getting radicalized on YouTube plummeted.
You think that based on what data? What about Muslims radicalized not on YouTube? If they are just radicalized in other places, but in the same way and the same numbers, what's the point?
> White supremacy is a much bigger deal with a worse tail risk than Islamic extremism.
What you mean by "white supremacy"? If you mean actual people that think White race (whatever the hell that is) is supreme and are willing to take action to ensure its power - it is demonstrably false, the number of these people are tiny, and they could never pull off even one hundredth of what ISIS has been pulling off for years. In fact, every manifestation they do draws like 10x more counter protesters. The only power they have is the press attention they get because they are useful to agenda-pushers as a scary monster that can justify giving more control over the speech to the government or megacorps.
OTOH, many people use "white supremacy" as synonymous to "Western culture" (I even saw presentation calling things like logical reasoning, competitiveness and insistence on keeping schedule being signs of "white supremacy"). In this case, it is a bigger deal that Islamic extremism, that is true. It is huge, strong and achieved much, though of course its history, like most of cultures, is filled both with heroic achievements and disgusting atrocities.
> Don’t see why anyone would object to removal of Neo nazi content yet go along with the removal of wahabi sermons.
One could maybe justify removal of the content calling for direct violent action. Otherwise, I do not see why a Muslim sermon calling for hating infidels is worse than a sermon from a Congress member calling for attacking and publicly harassing members of the opposing party. Both are despicable, but then let's start banning Congress members too - why should they get a free pass?
> but I almost never hear Islamic radicals cited as an example.
That's probably just because banning radical Islamists isn't very controversial.
>What you mean by "white supremacy"? If you mean actual people that think White race (whatever the hell that is) is supreme and are willing to take action to ensure its power - it is demonstrably false, the number of these people are tiny, and they could never pull off even one hundredth of what ISIS has been pulling off for years.
Over this period, white extremism — an umbrella term encompassing white nationalist, white supremacist, neo-Nazi, xenophobic, anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic ideologies — accounted for about 8 percent of all attacks in these regions and about a third of those in the United States.
What about other 92% of overall attacks and 2/3 of US attacks? Would it be insane to suggest that 92% of attacks deserve a bit more attention than 8% of attacks?
Also:
We examined attacks perpetrated by anti-immigrant extremists, anti-Muslim extremists, neo-Nazi extremists, right-wing extremists, anti-Semitic extremists, neo-fascists, white extremists, anti-Arab extremists, the Ku Klux Klan, anti-Sikh extremists and incel extremists.
This lists all anti-Semites as "white supremacists" even though there is a lot of anti-Semitic extremists who have nothing to do with white supremacy movements (Hamas and Hezbollah would be "white supremacists" by that definition!). To add on top of that, it also for some reason puts incels into the pile, which have nothing to do with racial angle at all. Moreover:
For episodes in which the identity of the perpetrator was unknown, we made a determination about ideology based on the target or through further research. We excluded episodes with insufficient evidence of ideological motivation.
That looks like it means each time a target who has been frequent target of racist extremists in the past was attacked, and the reason for attack is not known, it was assumed it's "white supremacists", if the researches themselves deemed the motivation "sufficient", by some unknown criteria. That is a good recipe for seriously biased results. For example, a string of Jewish centre bombing threats has been proven recently to be a work of one distubred Israeli teen. Has it not been known by now, it would be listed as "white supremacist" attacks, as it's clearly would be obvious that somebody who bombs a Jewish center must be a Nazi.
And with all that, it's still 8%. Is this getting only 8% of the press attention and other coverage and assigned 8% importance compared to other violent threats?
You'd have to see how big the other categories were to draw any conclusions.
In recent years, it's been widely reported that white supremicists have been responsible for more violence in the USA than Islamist extremists. See e.g.
My point, though, was not that white supremacy is necessarily more of a danger than Islamist extremism, but that you were massively understating the danger it poses in your original comment ("they could never pull off even one hundredth of what ISIS has been pulling off for years").
> This lists all anti-Semites as "white supremacists" even though there is a lot of anti-Semitic extremists who have nothing to do with white supremacy movements (Hamas and Hezbollah would be "white supremacists" by that definition!)
I think you're pulling a bit of a "no true white supremacist" move here. If you want to get into that kind of thing, we could also pick over the question of just how much "Islamic" terrorism is really Islamic in its motivation.
> Is this getting only 8% of the press attention and other coverage and assigned 8% importance compared to other violent threats?
I think so (?)
I don't have figures, and I'm not sure where one would obtain them. But I'd say that Islamist terror attacks certainly get more press coverage than white supremacist terrorism.
The actual rules is very impartial (btw, [1] should be the actual link):
> Today, we're taking another step in our hate speech policy by specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status.
If they apply this rule to every instance of allegation of superiority (regardless of age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status) it is a very sensible rule and not censorship at all.
The problem is when there is some "asymmetry" in what kind of (otherwise identical) behaviour is allowed and what is forbidden based on the exact characteristics they outlined above. Then it just becomes "picking favourites" and, yes, full blown censorship (which, to preempt the usual retort, can yes be practiced by private corporations, as opposed to "violations of first amendment rights" that, yes, can only be done by US jurisdictional governments)
Hate speech is free speech. We know this both through logical deduction and through multiple different Supreme Court rulings. The "impartial" label just obscures the fundamental problem of it being absurd to consider any speech harmful to anyone, ever, especially within the context of an online content platform that isn't meant to be a publisher with a prerogative to edit said content.
Which deals specifically with preventing the government from censoring your speech. You are not obligated to use YouTube, nor is YouTube obligated to host your speech.
Germany isn't the U.S. Germany has a 5th article[1].
Germany acknowledges that there are human rights (plural), that they occassionally conflict and that there are tradeoffs that must be made to achieve some balance and maintain all human rights in some reasonable form.
> According to the annual report of Germany's interior intelligence service (Verfassungsschutz) for 2012, at the time there were 26,000 right-wing extremists living in Germany, including 6,000 neo-Nazis.
> The National Socialist Movement (NSM), with about 400 members in 32 states,[195] is currently the largest neo-Nazi organization in the United States.
It seems the right to free speech and the right to association has led to FEWER Neo Nazis in America than Germany despite America's population being 4 times larger than Germany's.
The problem with this is that mediums like facebook and youtube have completely monopolized the attention of the masses. You basically have to use them. So either play along or be irrelevant. No alternative.
If Youtube deems your content inappropriate for whatever reason then they remove you. This is a problem when they control the channel for the vast majority of content. You can't apply the simple ideology to it anymore. It is its own government at this point.
He's being downvoted because his comment is not constructive and is a knee jerk reaction to reading the title of the post, not because people disagree with him
I would've said that 20 years ago saying "Censorship Bad" wouldn't have been constructive, but these days with all these people against free speech, I would say it's a very constructive comment.
Are you sure? I've seen quite a few "censorship is good if it censors bad things" comments upvoted while free speech absolutists generally get downvoted into the ground.
There are comments being removed from this thread even though they are not supremacist. People need to wake up to the control of big tech, big govt, etc.
I'm surprised this post is even still up. HN usually removes anything remotely controversial. A couple weeks ago, they removed a NYT article solely because the article had "White Liberals" in the title.
How do we deal with cases where a topic is important and relevant both technically and politically? I agree with you generally, but it would also be a big shame if many socially and technically interesting and impactful stories simply could not be found or discussed on Hacker News.
And here we go. As usual the "racist" pretext is being used to censor videos.
I have no doubt that there are some terrible awful racist videos in that lot but you have to wonder how many times this is ALSO used as a mean to censor pretty much any video that the youtube execs don't like. Censorship is getting worse
Edit: Replacing "Censorship is coming back" with "Censorship is getting worse"
I'm not sure why we should give them a pass on censoring ANY legal political content, including racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, or any other political stance outside of the corporate mainstream.
The fact is that YouTube has become one of the primary places (along with Facebook and Twitter) where people not rich enough to own a newspaper or television station engage in political speech. Preventing people from meaningful participation in the public political debate is a precursor to real world violence, because you leave people with little other choice to advocate for what they view as their interests.
YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and all other corporate entities attempting to regulate political discourse are driving us toward a civil war. There is no good reason for us to allow them to do that.
Reminds me of the shooting at Youtube HQ. Nasim Aghdam also went postal because she was deplatformed by them. Wouldn't surprise me if another nutter decides to take revenge in the future.
What is the end game of this censorship nonsense? Do people really think that if they play whack-a-mole against every instance of speech you don't like online, it will improve the world somehow? How, exactly? Other people won't see it, so they won't be "infected" by it? What is the theory, exactly, because it always looks to me like an inane reactionary conclusion...something a mob would do.
I personally don't understand the anti-censorship argument wrt racism.
YouTube has always been free to remove any content they'd like for any reason. When they more specifically define the content that they will be removing, it somehow now becomes controversial? This surrounds the argument with uncomfortable undertones. The idea that your message deserves equal treatment despite the content seems to be a value promoted by racists.
Also, Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, etc, don't owe anyone a platform. If this were not true, I don't quite understand how corporations could reasonably comply.
Censorship never left. What's changing is who controls the Censorship and those few people are wielding very very powerful weapons of mass surveillance that will ultimately "disrupt" civilization as we know it.
If this is what "extremism" means here, I'm also fine with it in principle. But I don't trust Google to be neutral and refrain from censoring views that run counter to their interests. Removing recommendations to remove that risk would be worth it IMO.
YouTube/Google can already take down any video they like, for any reason, or for no reason at all. And they already do this literally all the time, ask any content creator with more than a handful of videos on the platform.
The only reason there is a press release for this particular event is for the inevitable positive press and media attention it will garner.
The statement "censorship is coming back" is simply not true, it's been here the entire time. YouTube has been censoring videos since probably the very beginning. They've already had the power to and have already silenced certain political opinions on their platform. This is nothing new, they're simply (maybe) expanding it.
Since when do they need a pretext? Countless videos from LGBTQ+ people and people of color got wiped out due to mass reporting and inaccurate automated removals. All the people who usually cry censorship were silent.
That was a while ago, right? From what I remember, the "usual suspects" (aka libertarians, liberalists etc) weren't that silent, they pointed out the irony that the try to control platforming backfired, but did oppose the bans.
Might be something newer, of course, in which case I didn't see it and can't comment on it.
It's an ongoing thing, and not just on YouTube. I see people popping on to Mastodon every day because they said, on their own timeline to people following them, that (for example) "transphobes can fall off a cliff." Banned for threats. Sometimes permanently. Most big instances have the :guillotine: and :trebuchet: emoji because of one such case.
This is way more than the few cases that float up into your attention. It's been going on for years across all these big silos. People who fully endorse actual censorship know they can abuse automated systems to silence marginalized people.
People who fully endorse actual censorship know they can abuse automated systems to silence marginalized people.
Very true. This statement is neutral with regards to both the left-right axis and authoritarian/anti-authoritarian axis. In order to have a society in which people can speak truth to power, in 2019, we have to be on the lookout for new forms that censorious power can take.
Technology is a double edged sword here. New tech introduces ways of circumventing censorship, but also introduces new forms of censorship not covered by old laws.
That's the problem with policies like this: they might apply them to everyone. If a feminist tweets "men are scum", they are going to get in trouble. If some white supremacist wrote "anti-whites can fall off a cliff", I suppose many would support removing/banning that.
You won't get large companies to officially make value calls and say "no, it's okay if this user says that because they are part of a special group", they will be too vulnerable to public/media/political pressure, especially in a culture that is generally pro free speech.
Conspiracy theorists and/or political extremists (on both sides) should have to seek out their extreme content with prejudice. No more marketing birther theories alongside CSPAN videos on YouTube, or click-bait "TOP 10 UNEXPLAINED PHENOMENON" when someone looks for academic material. It shouldn't be possible to "stumble" onto a video that promotes falsehoods like vaccines causing autism or holistic medicine alongside legitimate medical content. It's damaging our society because not everyone has the acumen to know when they're being gaslit.
If these content creators were doing this as satire and advertised as such it wouldn't be an issue. What we have are content creators creating deliberately misleading content and then pushing it deliberately to the most gullible audience they can.
The first amendment shouldn't be used as a weapon to trick stupid people. It's diluting real political discourse and creating factions of people who don't have substantial opinions, just a bunch of inaccurate facts and unscrupulous sources for information.
GoDaddy banned the gab.com domain name from their registrar. What's next? "No censorship. You are still free to establish your own telecommunications infrastructure and publish your extreme political views there." ?
If your political view you want to promote is so extreme that no company wants to do business with you, although they legally could and you offer good money, then, yes, probably you have to build your own TelCo or Internet or whatever.
Also note: YouTube is already a heavily moderated platform, see pornography.
Do you have some good reason why we should not change the regulations so that they are "otherwise regulated"? No one is claiming they are currently breaking the law by refusing to conduct business with e.g. gab or the daily stormer or whoever else.
In the US, allowing Free Speech on your property is distinct from conducting business on your property. Going by that logic, you can demonetize them, but you can't necessarily deplatform them.
Sure. We might as well allow public speech in cities and towns to be controlled and limited as well, and if you don't like it you can always just go settle your own town somewhere. There's tons of open land in the US available for cheap after all.
We didn't decide to guarantee free speech in "public spaces" for funsies. We did it because guaranteeing people the ability to meaningfully participate in the public political debate is a preventative measure against real world violence. If people cannot peacefully advocate for their interests, they are going to do so violently.
The fact of the matter is that places like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are where a substantial amount of the public political debate takes place. Users banned from there are significantly less able to participate in the political debate, and so significantly less able to peacefully advocate for what they see as their interests.
If you find those people so deplorable that you don't want them to be able to advocate for their own interests, don't be surprised when they return the sentiment with fast moving lead.
> We didn't decide to guarantee free speech in "public spaces" for funsies. We did it because guaranteeing people the ability to meaningfully participate in the public political debate is a preventative measure against real world violence. If people cannot peacefully advocate for their interests, they are going to do so violently.
Is this supposed to threaten me?
I don't know where you're from but here in Germany there is a difference between public spaces and private spaces. You can suppress free speech in private spaces. You don't even have to allow access to private spaces while it's the other way around in public spaces. There are laws for that.
The amount of people does not matter. You can't display swastikas in a Bundesliga stadium just because there are plenty people there. The owner would throw you out and probably even report you to the police.
Censorship is something the state forces upon you. It restricts things in public spaces. There is no place left you can go in a state with censorship present to challenge that.
Misusing "censorship" for moderation of private spaces plays down the word. It wears it out and it ridicules people who really suffer under true censorship.
And please...spare me the drama. I grew up in a state with true censorship and I've been online long enough to see this ridiculous whining as what it is...
I'm not sure what that would mean in this context.
>You can suppress free speech in private spaces. You don't even have to allow access to private spaces while it's the other way around in public spaces. There are laws for that.
The point I'm making is that it's probably not a good idea to allow certain private spaces to suppress free speech.
>You can't display swastikas in a Bundesliga stadium just because there are plenty people there.
As I understand, you can't display them anywhere in your country, because your country has more restrictions on political speech than some other parts of the world, e.g. the US. Regardless, I am not suggesting that stadium owners should be forced to allow political demonstrations on their private property. I'm suggesting that certain key internet websites where a significant portion of the public political debate takes place should not be given carte blanche to reduce the ability of people to spread political ideas which the owners of those sites do not like.
>The amount of people does not matter.
What matters is whether people feel as though they have lost their ability to peacefully and meaningfully advocate for their interests.
>Censorship is something the state forces upon you. It restricts things in public spaces. There is no place left you can go in a state with censorship present to challenge that.
I'm not interested in debating your strange and highly restricted meaning of the word. I'm interested in the real world consequences of the actions that these mega-corporations are taking.
>It wears it out and it ridicules people who really suffer under true censorship.
The people you mean to refer to are not my concern.
> The point I'm making is that it's probably not a good idea to allow certain private spaces to suppress free speech.
And it's a good idea to force private spaces to allow everything on their spaces or declaring it public spaces even if they are not? What about the implications? If your private space becomes a public space, does it make you some kind of government?
> As I understand, you can't display them anywhere in your country
Sure you can. You can have as many swastikas in your living room as you wish. You can also have them on public spaces or on TV if they are part of some artistic performance for example. But that's derailing the actual argument. The amount of people present on a private property do not take away the owners rights.
> What matters is whether people feel as though they have lost their ability to peacefully and meaningfully advocate for their interests.
Nobody takes that away from them. They can still express themselves elsewhere. Those places exist.
> I'm not interested in debating your strange and highly restricted meaning of the word.
And I guess this is the core of the problem. You just chose to blindly ignore that in favor of the use of the phrase to advertise your point which is based upon a misunderstanding of private vs. public.
> The people you mean to refer to are not my concern.
But they should. Especially if you want concern for your own position. This is how a healthy society works.
>And it's a good idea to force private spaces to allow everything on their spaces or declaring it public spaces even if they are not?
It's a good idea to force some of them to allow some things. You don't believe private property rights are somehow absolute, do you? You understand that there can be competing concerns that are more important than property rights is some cases, surely.
>If your private space becomes a public space, does it make you some kind of government?
I'm not sure what that means. Plenty of private companies are heavily regulated, such as utilities. They're not governments.
>The amount of people present on a private property do not take away the owners rights.
>Nobody takes that away from them. They can still express themselves elsewhere. Those places exist.
Anyone can express himself in his own living room. But that doesn't do him any good. Telling certain people that they can't express themselves somewhere that it matters, while letting other people express other political viewpoints in that same place, and justifying that by telling them they are free to express themselves in a dark room, is not going to be particularly satisfying to them. Sure, anyone can go put his videos on a website of his own creation, but if no one is on that website, it's not going to do any good. And people know that. Your alternatives are not real alternatives, because they don't solve the problem those people are trying to solve.
>And I guess this is the core of the problem.
Your problem, perhaps. Not mine.
>based upon a misunderstanding of private vs. public.
What do you think I'm misunderstanding? I know what you mean by censorship, and I don't care to make you feel otherwise about the meaning of that word. I don't care if what YouTube is doing meets your definition of censorship. I care if people think YouTube should be stopped from doing what it is doing, regardless of what word is used to describe it.
>But they should. Especially if you want concern for your own position. This is how a healthy society works.
You're referring to people in different countries, where there is what you call real censorship. I don't live in a place that qualifies under your definition, so I'm not part of their society. And I'm not looking for sympathy from them.
And the world is a more violent place because of it.
Nevertheless, there is big difference between the way violence is advocated for between moderates and extremists in terms of severity, frequency, and justification.
I didn't ask you who advocates for violence, I asked you why you thought the unrestricted public speech of extremists leads to peace.
Please be specific. Whose political speech do you believe is going to result in more real world violence, and what is the chain of events that you foresee?
I've already explained why I think restricting political speech results in increased real world violence. People are going to advocate for what they perceive as their interests, and if they can't do it peacefully, they're going to do it violently.
If people are banned from the places where a substantial portion of the public political debate occurs, e.g. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, their ability to participate in the public political debate is substantially reduced.
People advocate for their interests peacefully by participating in the public political debate.
If their ability to participate in the public political debate is substantially reduced, then their attempts to peacefully advocate for their interests are a waste of their time.
You are making an assumption which contradicts your conclusion. If we are assuming that (1) YouTube is effectively the public square and that (2) people will advocate for their interest peacefully, then you cannot conclude that people will forego self-moderation of content deemed extreme and immediately turn to violence.
If your YouTube video gets taken down, you can re-upload something that is better reasoned and less prone to inciting violence. If you can't do this, then you message is inherently violent, and there was never any peaceful outcome in the first place.
Either way, I'd still rather have extremists arming themselves than spending their lives convincing others to take up violence on their behalf.
>If we are assuming that (1) YouTube is effectively the public square and that (2) people will advocate for their interest peacefully, then you cannot conclude that people will forego self-moderation of content deemed extreme and immediately turn to violence.
Could you word this another way? I do not understand what you're saying.
>then you message is inherently violent
Can you please be specific and give an example of a political ideology that is inherently violent, and also one that is not inherently violent, other than pure pacifism?
>Either way, I'd still rather have extremists arming themselves than spending their lives convincing others to take up violence on their behalf.
Because you are worried that people are going to buy what they're selling? Why are you worried about that, specifically?
You are supposing that there exists a peaceful YouTuber who's (a) dedicated to the peaceful advocacy of their interests, (b) banned from YouTube, and (c) unwilling to advocate their interests on any other platform except through the use of violence. (a) and (c) are contradictory. Supposedly you are justifying this by assuming YouTube is the only platform from which one can peacefully advocate their interests. It is not. You could even return to YouTube with moderated content.
I do not find this hypothetical YouTuber to be a peaceful advocate for anybody's interests.
>You are supposing that there exists a peaceful YouTuber who's (a) dedicated to the peaceful advocacy of their interests, (b) banned from YouTube, and (c) unwilling to advocate their interests on any other platform except through the use of violence.
No, I'm not. First, the people driven to violence are not necessarily going to be the content producers. The audience can also be driven to violence by seeing the message they agree with censored. Second, the point is that there are no other equivalent platforms to YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, in terms of their reach.
>It is not.
What are the other platforms where people can meaningfully participate in the public political debate?
>You could even return to YouTube with moderated content.
It's up to YouTube to decide what counts as "moderated content". They are currently under no obligation to act in good faith.
> And the world is a more violent place because of it.
I don't think the world becomes more violent because people defend themselves and others. And if it does, it's still worth it compared to surrendering to every would-be tyrant without a fight.
This is only a sensible argument if you define censorship as violating the letter of the law of the US constitution or of another constitution that does require individuals and companies to respect basic rights. But if you consider the purpose of freedom of opinion -- to enable the public discourse necessary for a democratic society -- this is absolutely censorship.
I disagree, and could reasonably take offense at the notion that the only possible reason I might disagree is that I'm confused. I don't think this is censorship by its common, colloquial definition. It is indeed censorship if you take a broader, more literal definition - in which case private forums deleting hateful, illegal, or simply forum-rule-breaking comments also counts as censorship, and such a broad definition is simply pedantic and not really useful for conversation.
Censorship isn't limited to government even though that's the first example that rushes to mind. Any organization or person (i.e. "self-censored") can censor themselves or others. So yes, YouTube is most definitely censoring others who advertisers might object to -- dangerous considering YouTube's position as the new town square.
transitive verb
: to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable censor the news also : to suppress or delete as objectionable censor out indecent passages
"Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
A free society has costs, including tolerating speech you find deplorable. To support censorship because it aligns with your current political leanings makes you no different than the politics you take issue with.
Will you complain if Google mass fires left leaning employees? It's entirely within their right to do. You could even start a competitor to hire those people!
That's an argument for active participation in the political process and an engaged electorate, not censorship. To default to the support of censorship of what you disagree with is simply laziness (and antithetical to the fundamental principals of a democratic society). If your government and society can't withstand the free expression and discussion of unpleasant ideas, you have problems with the current implementation of government and society (and the unpleasantness isn't at fault). Masking the symptom doesn't solve the root cause.
To your example, you put misplaced blame on a propaganda machine, not uneducated, unengaged, emotional citizen voters.
I prefer a democratic society that suppresses its enemies while trying to solve the root cause to one that gets destroyed and definitely won't solve the root cause.
Can’t suppress enemies in a democratic society without violating the very rights enumerated and protected by said society. The populace itself must inoculate itself against such malicious actors with activism, intelligent discourse, critical thinking, and political engagement.
Okay, we've established you fully support the right to freedom of speech without compromise.
As a question, do you own any property? If someone planted signs in your lawn or decided to yell at you on your property, would you accept this? Any compromise would be a violation of their right to freedom of speech and you would be censoring them. Would you let them into your home lest you censor them?
Then how is Tim Pool labeled Alt Right? How is Ben Shapiro labeled Alt Right?
I'll be satisfied that the Left doesn't want to use corporate power and force to silence people, when the Left starts calling out the left for doing it.
Nazis don't support the free speech of other people, or even their freedom to exist in many cases. 'No smoking' signs in gas stations sorta restrict freedom too, don't they?
It's totally ok to not tolerate the extreme intolerant in some places [1]. Again, no laws change, it is just a company telling to very extreme people: Not here. Please go outside.
The issue here is that Youtube is already known to ban people that clearly didn't show any extreme views. This was used as an easy pretext for the ban though.
I don't have to tolerate speech from people who threaten my life or community. And I don't mean 'threaten' in the sense of holding an opinion I find disagreeable, I mean threaten as in making straightforward threats to life. That speech does not have to be tolerated.
I don't have to tolerate speech from people who threaten my life or community. And I don't mean 'threaten' in the sense of holding an opinion I find disagreeable
Then you should understand that when "threatening speech" is used to censor people on false pretexts, then this dilutes reasonable concerns about threatening speech. If one is really concerned about truly threatening speech, one should be actively calling out such abuses from one's own side. Also, what naturally goes with that, is the calling out of actual violence from one's own side.
This is also why civility is useful for the public discourse. It acts as a sort of "DMZ" wherein actual hostility is more readily visible. (And certain people on all sides of the public discourse should be called out in this regard.)
Perhaps you should have written your initial interjection with the same precision you now seek to apply. Since it was written in English, I invite you to reflect on how it might be received by the unwary reader.
It's not my fault you wrote your message out the way you did, although you have subsequently edited it. You are worried about some future pretextual censorship whose existence you presume, I am worried about actually existing threats made in the recent past and present.
Or to put it in very simplistic terms so that there is no misunderstanding, I am more worried about people who want to promote or engage in genocidal behavior than I am about missing out on possible future contributions to society from genocide enthusiasts who had difficulty reaching a sufficiently wide audience.
It's a pretty big stretch between a company taking down content on their own service that violates their terms, and the holocaust. Have a little perspective please.
"They came for the Nazis and I protested. Then they came for me and it was the Nazis."
Tolerating extreme views is okay as the price for freedom of speech. It does not mean large platforms are obligated to give them megaphones. Some kinds of speech do cause harm far beyond someone getting angry at someone else's views.
It's curious to me that people who were absolutely up in arms about ISPs censoring content are 100% okay with Youtube doing it. Not that I support the views that these videos they're removing espouse (I don't) but it seems to me to be a pretty big about face by this community.
Well YouTube isn't a pipe but a platform in spite of its popularity. I can always head someplace else with a website. I can't just switch ISPs casually as entering a different URL.
If you believe that YouTube unjustly engages in censorship on their platform then boycott YouTube and encourage others to do so. Just because YouTube is popular doesn't mean YouTube is obligated to host your videos for free. In reality, YouTube is unimportant and not something the government should guarantee you access to.
As an antifascist I welcome this move, though at the same time I fear the risk of abuse.
FTA: "... and videos denying that violent incidents occurred"
This one seems perfectly tailored to match with the Chinese Govt. negationism about Tiananmen Square events, so that would be generally A-OK for us, but what about videos or comments by police officers denying violent behaviour of their colleagues? Would their videos/comments be axed the same way?
Then what about governments lying about civil deaths figures or use of banned weapons in military attacks?
100 Euros and a beer that the rule will be heavily bent case by case.
YouTube is a privately owned and operated proprietary delivery platform. This is no different from a TV station deciding what to air. If you don't like it, switch platforms or just host stuff yourself somewhere.
Yes I am concerned that these dragnets will delete a lot of content that doesn't even match the stated criteria. In my experience Google/YouTube's evaluation of content for compliance is not very deep or well considered. It's generally performed by underpaid overworked folks that lack any domain expertise.
This is part of why I am a data packrat. If something is really interesting I snarf it and store it on my personal NAS. Easy to do and means I'll have backups of things that get "disappeared" and can share them with others if needed. If more people did this I think we'd have less of an issue with this.
> YouTube is a privately owned and operated proprietary delivery platform.
Are there any public online social platforms? There literally isn't the equivalent of a "public space" online so many view it as a de facto public space.
If YouTube wants to be treated like a TV station who can choose what to air, then they need to stop receiving the benefits of section 230. If they are allowed to choose what content is allowed and what is not, then they must be held directly accountable for the content that they don't remove. This includes content that infringes copyright, content that is illegal, etc. They can't have both.
'“Opinions can be deeply offensive, but if they don’t violate our policies, they’ll remain on our site,” YouTube said in a statement about its decision on Mr. Crowder.'
I'm sure those policies will shift stealthily until everything except Baby Shark videos is banned.
Left, right or center politically? But a little too spicy for your average 8-year-old? Banned. Gotta keep the Coca-Cola ad execs happy.
It's a curious hyper-puritanical yet simultaneously secular social order we find ourselves in today. I'm sure this won't lead to any social unrest or civilization-wrecking upheaval.
We can always go back to liveleak and vimeo. I think all the youtube I watch would be fine for an 8 year old and I think most of the people who use youtube are the same. The most popular platform should be the most innocuous. But there should be alternatives.
Good luck trying to monetize that. Good luck getting viral traction with that. (I will be happy if someone succeeds, because that will be the end of the YouTube monopoly on video commentary.)
It's bad enough that NYT can be pretty biased on its own, but the comment sections are always full of low-tier thinking that just push whatever narrative is currently in the Overton window.
What I find distressing is how people remark that a telecom and advertising giant acting as a de facto government over the public square isn't a violation of free speech principles because they're a "private business", as if that's an original thought that's profound. Funny how people say "it's a private business" when it suits their own political interests.
We wouldn't blindly allow company-owned cities or states to pass laws, especially vague or undefined ones, that potentially violate our rights, so why do we allow "states" in cyberspace to be run in such a way?
Ban people promoting violence? Sure, why not. I'm as against hate and violence as the next person. But not only is censoring "hate speech" becoming a slippery slope at the company level, it's bad for the public in general because it sets a greater precedent for what the big corporations that run our everyday lives can tell us what we can or cannot do, and with no forgiveness. I don't find it hard to imagine a world where individuals can be instantly and permanently banned from doing everyday things, just like they are on YouTube, because they said or did something off the platform.