6 ms·

One man's "extremist" video is another man's political views. Where does it stop? Does a video supporting Trump become an extremist video if enough people comp

• tamana 10y ago
  These walled gardens have have TOSes. Extremist or political, content that violates TOS gets taken down .
  • jimmywanger 10y ago
    From the Facebook TOS, and YouTube's is much the same, with different, more casual verbiage: You will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user. You will not post content that: is hate speech, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence. That is such a broad swathe that any unpopular opinion can get disqualified. Is me posting a video of how to sharpen a kitchen knife threatening? Or someone advocating that the Civil War should have never happened because of the right of states to withdraw from the Union? We need the freedom of speech to protect unpopular opinions, not popular ones.
    • caseysoftware 10y ago
      Or as US Supreme Court Justice Stewart said: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it That was in reference to identifying "hardcore pornography" but seems appropriate in talking about hate speech, threats, bullying, and a variety of other issues.
    • dave2000 10y ago
      They need broad rules because whatever rule you come up with, some clown is going to try and get around it. Or just post something obviously against the spirit of the rules then argue about it. Users don't have a stake in Facebook, YouTube etc, but the companies running them do. They'd probably all prefer to just have "don't be a dick" but we live in a world full of pedants and lawyers and professional irritants so by having something a little more concrete it preempts a lot of rather tedious complaints. If you're a rebel prophet with something exciting to say then no-ones stopping you paying a small amount of money for a domain name and hosting and away you go. If you can't do that then I'd agree there's censorship and there's a problem. Other than that, you should have absolutely no expectation that other people are going to do the heavy lifting for you, whether that's paying for your hosting/bandwidth, or taking the heat when users, advertisers etc complain about your content.
    • jimmywanger 10y ago
      I guess I didn't make myself clear enough. The guidelines are all very subjective. Pornographic is a gray area, but "bully, intimidate, or harass". Who decides that? The victim? And the guideline "Don't be a dick" is the exact opposite of what my point is. Unpleasant people, pendants, trolls, irritants, those are the people the free speech are designed to protect. If you're generally pleasant and say nothing controversial, you don't need any legal protection. A firm belief that people who espouse unpleasant and unpopular opinions are what a democracy needs is what we need to protect, cause those are the people who effect change or inject new ideas into society.
      • cpncrunch 10y ago
        So what exactly is your solution? Are you happy with facebook leaving up nasty cyberbullying, which then results in people killing themselves? What about people posting and sharing plans to blow up schools? Or how about if I posted something on facebook saying that jimmywanger is a pedophile, and your neighbours saw it and then drove you out of your home? A lot of these things are covered by libel, cyberbullying and hate speech laws, and it is a jury of your peers who decides whether or not it fulfils the critera. It seems to make sense - from both a moral and legal standpoint - for companies to nip this stuff in the bud before it reaches the point of going to court.
        • jimmywanger 10y ago
          My solution is just to let people post stuff that is legal (with existing statues). "Hate speech", "cyberbullying" are both ill defined terms that can apply to both every type of speech and no type of speech. It's interesting how quickly you leap to suicide, explosives, and pedophilia as your examples. Those are all absolute worst case scenarios, and all these things are currently illegal. Nip this in the bud? Is this minority report? Last I checked, you had to do something substantive to get penalties, not "Your thought patterns don't agree with public opinion, therefore private companies should as a public service suppress them."
          • cpncrunch 10y ago
• lanevorockz 10y ago
  Agreed, there is a fine line and it should not be decided by companies.
  • cinquemb 10y ago
    I think companies are free to do what people are willing to subject themselves too, but I also think that people are also free to subvert/undermine/exploit such. From some ip addr locations, their TOS are toothless (as well as the legal repercussions of ignoring such).
  • dave2000 10y ago
    If it's that company's site then I don't see who else has any business getting involved. Do you want someone telling you what (legal) content you can or can't show? Why?
    • jimmywanger 10y ago
      Youtube, Facebook, Twitter all loudly trumpeted their attempts to assist "free speech", especially during the Arab Spring. And they were only doing that when what they were doing was going along with the cultural democratic zeitgeist at the time. If they were more open about "Hey, we're providing you a free service, we can shut you down if you don't conform to public opinion" that's fine also. But you can't have it both ways. Either you support the free expression of unpopular opinions, or you reserve the right to censor anything at all you find objectionable. You can't say "I support expressing opinions, as long as I approve of them, and I support freedom!"
      • cinquemb 10y ago
        >You can't say "I support expressing opinions, as long as I approve of them, and I support freedom!" Yeah, they can say that, but reality doesn't have to conform to such when the chickens come home to roost :P
        • jimmywanger 10y ago
• cisstrd 10y ago
  I remember Reuters for years refused to use the term "terrorist(s)" because "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" (that's how I remember it), current guidelines see [1] The same applies here, is a violent political organization fighting an authoritarian regime by means of terrorist attacks an "extremist organization" worth blocking, or people fighting for freedom? A good recent example for how hard it can be to distinguish is what happened in Egypt with the Muslim brotherhood [2] This will just reinforce the sense of people with unpopular opinions and populist movements that they are being discriminated against because of political correctness [3] [1] http://handbook.reuters.com/?title=T#terrorism.2C_terrorist http://handbook.reuters.com/?title=T#terrorism.2C_terrorist [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood#2011_revolution_and_after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood#2011_revolu... (try to tell me who is the bad guy and who is the good guy at any given point in that period? It isn't that simple) [3] http://europe.newsweek.com/college-campus-free-speech-thought-police-463536 http://europe.newsweek.com/college-campus-free-speech-though...
  • sjg007 10y ago
    I think you can make a moral argument in many cases.
    • Aoyagi 10y ago
      But morality is just as subjective.
• hacker42 10y ago
  The problem is that current social media software just makes it too easy for extremist bubbles to form. There is no feedback, no discussion, no diffusion, no guiding culture and plenty of false information spread by people who would be unable to publish anything to larger audiences if it wasn't practically for free. To a certain extent, economic systems do filter out people who are challenged at seeking truth. Internet technology has weakened this filter and here we are witnessing attempts at fixing this problem.
  • TruthAndDare 10y ago
    That sounds like a different issue, really. Do you mean that it is an argument for classifying videos as "extremist" and disallowing them?
  • cisstrd 10y ago
    But people not only "bubble" themselves, Google and Facebook (everything personalised to one's liking) heavily encourage that, so using the "bubble effect" as justification for removing radical content is really strange.
    • hacker42 10y ago
      I was just hinting at what I think is the core problem. If you want to avoid radicalizing bubbles without blocking content, you need to encourage diffusion of ideas, discussion and confrontation. Perhaps, however, radicalized people are just too closed-minded for any such software solution. Then the question is what is worse: An occasional discussion about the decision boundary of what kind of content should be blocked, or dealing with radicalized groups of people more often, potentially risking more terror attacks and also the freedom limiting laws that ensue.
• danblick 10y ago
  This reminds me of a topic from Neil Postman's excellent "Amusing Ourselves to Death". To paraphrase: we're probably worrying too much about media censorship, and not enough about the mindless content media does provide that is filling up our time and dumbing down public discourse. """ ...in the Age of television, our information environment is completely different from what it was in 1783.; that we have less to fear from government restraints than from television glut; that, in fact, we have no way of protecting ourselves from information disseminated by corporate America; and that, therefore, the battles for liberty must be fought on different terrains from where they once were. For example, I would venture the opinion that the traditional civil libertarian opposition to the banning of books from school libraries and from school curricula is now largely irrelevant. Such acts of censorship are annoying, of course, and must be opposed. But they are trivial. Even worse, they are distracting, in that they divert civil libertarians from confronting those questions that have to do with the claims of new technologies. To put it plainly, a student's freedom to read is not seriously injured by someone's banning a book on Long Island or in Anaheim or anyplace else. But as Gerbner suggests, television clearly does impair the student's freedom to read, and it does so with innocent hands, so to speak. Television does not ban books, it simply displaces them. The fight against censorship is a nineteenth-century issue which was largely won in the twentieth. What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual: that is to say information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves. Tyrants of all varieties have always known about the value of providing the masses with amusements as a means of pacifying discontent. But most of them could not have even hoped for a situation in which the masses would ignore that which does not amuse. That is why tyrants have always relied, and still do, on censorship. Censorship, after all, is the tribute tyrants pay to the assumption that a public knows the difference between serious discourse and entertainment-and cares. How delighted would be all the kings, czars and fuhrers of the past and commissars of the present to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest. """ - http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Broadcast_Media/AmusingOurselves_Postman.html http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Broadcast_Media/AmusingOur...