5 ms·

I disagree. Flagging a channel should disable it solely for the overly sensitive dimwitted user that voluntarily selected to view the video in the first place.

I disagree. Flagging a channel should disable it solely for the overly sensitive dimwitted user that voluntarily selected to view the video in the first place. YouTube is not a broadcast medium. Videos are available by voluntary positive action of the viewer only. Taking a video down, much less a whole channel, doesn't protect the viewer whose sensibilities were aroused. It only serves to forbid others from making the choice of whether or not to view the content themselves.

mschuster91 9y ago
> It only serves to forbid others from making the choice of whether or not to view the content themselves. No, there is certain content that is forbidden by law in some countries, for example Holocaust denial, Nazi propaganda and other racist or otherwise discriminatory content. I do wonder why Youtube and Twitter don't disallow that kind of stuff by default, there's no reason for giving this kind of content any platform even if it's legal by law in the US. Also, fringe stuff like antivaxxers, "freemen/Reichsbürger movements", flat-earthers, chemtrail believers, other conspiracy theories or Russian fake news would be by far smaller if Youtube had decided that this content is not wanted on their platform. Instead Youtube willingly provides a platform for this content and therefore is directly responsible for the resulting problems.
- otakucode 9y ago
  >No, there is certain content that is forbidden by law in some countries, for example Holocaust denial, Nazi propaganda and other racist or otherwise discriminatory content. I do wonder why Youtube and Twitter don't disallow that kind of stuff by default, there's no reason for giving this kind of content any platform even if it's legal by law in the US. I think you are confusing things. Simply because you desire forbidding others the choice of whether or not to view the content does not in any way mean that the act of suspending a channel doesn't accomplish this. The reason it is a horrendously dangerous, terrible, horrible idea to acede to a desire to hide 'dangerous' information would, I would hope, be easily seen by now, but it's obvious that this isn't the case. People seem to have forgotten that the Nazi newspaper was banned by the government of Germany after the Beer Hall Putsch. They seem to have forgotten that prior to that, the Nazi party was some guys hanging out in a pub being angry, and once the disliked establishment banned their paper it became the thing every German 'had to read'. They seem to have forgotten that it was the exact kind of censorship they seek to enact today that catapulted Hitler and his party into the forebrain of every downtrodden German. The only legitimate and adequate response to a bad idea is a better idea. Full stop. You can not ban an idea. You can, however, drive it into hiding where it will see no opposition, no correction, no competing evidence. At that point, you guarantee for yourself the creation of an insular subculture who will draw the disaffected and opposition to the establishment. It is a Bad Idea. It has always been a Bad Idea. There has never been a happy state with heavy censorship. Had we had such censorship in the 1960s, interracial marriage would still be illegal. Had we had it in the 1800s, slavery would still be legal. Every progress of mankind begins with spitting in the face of the established order. And that Nazi morons are clearly not a part of such progress is of no great import. You (generally, in the 'your society' sense of you) will be incapable of judging the next step of progress and this is guaranteed. In the United States, there is a legal concept called Prior Restraint on free speech and it is very aggressively avoided by the courts, as well it should be. You are incorrect that various fringe groups would be smaller if YouTube became a bastion of censorship, and also that the platform owner is responsible for problems that you believe resulted from ideas being available. The existence of the fringe groups, their sizes, and the problems are all a result of widespread anti-intellectualism and a rejection of critical thinking and reason as an acceptable means of determining ones beliefs. Things like the anti-vaccine movement in particular grow far more through word-of-mouth than they do online resources. Zero of the anti-vaxxers went online to seek information about vaccines and found anti-vaccine ranting and then made a decision to not vaccinate their children. Instead, they heard about it from mothers who "just knew" that vaccines gave their kids autism. Or they listened to their president talking about how there are "just too many" with no basis. The idea that vaccines are harmful, that letting strangers, intellectual strangers who don't care, stick steel needles into their children and inject them full of chemicals and dead viruses was dangerous felt right and that is literally the only thing in the world that could convince them of any position.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    Thanks for the long reply - you have some very valid points there, but also some that I don't believe to be correct. > At that point, you guarantee for yourself the creation of an insular subculture who will draw the disaffected and opposition to the establishment. Yes, and this is exactly what I want. Loads of Nazis and trolls flocked to Voat after the banning of r/fatpeoplehate and friends, and more after the recent banwave. As a result the amount of hatespeech on Reddit has massively declined and Voat is not a place that's relevant outside of Gamergate and Nazis. The casual Internet user won't ever see a tiny bit of it. Same is also true for Twitter / gab.ai, where lots of Nazis in Germany fled. It's the same way in politics: in Germany, we have had the NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschland), which was a really vile cesspool of literal and neo-Nazis and it was mainly left to fend for itself - and it kept most of the ultra-right-wing stuff out of mainstream politics. True, it changed with the rise of the AfD, but it worked for decades. > Every progress of mankind begins with spitting in the face of the established order. Point is, we already had the Nazis in power in history (Hitler of course, but also his friends Mussolini and Franco). They're not progress, and they cannot be. > You are incorrect that various fringe groups would be smaller if YouTube became a bastion of censorship As said above: look at what happened to fatpeoplehate and friends. Or into the history of our Reichsbürgers ("freemen" in US terms, IIRC): they rose with the ability to spread their "ideas" for free across the Internet, and when taken away from mainstream, they will shrink again. > Instead, they heard about it from mothers who "just knew" that vaccines gave their kids autism. And where do they find these mothers? On Youtube and on various Facebook groups, mostly (at least this is what a children's doctor told me, when I asked him about the problem, but well the "anecdata" principle does apply here). > Zero of the anti-vaxxers went online to seek information about vaccines and found anti-vaccine ranting and then made a decision to not vaccinate their children Nope. When I type into Google "vaccines", the third autocomplete suggestion is "vaccines cause autism". Not "do vaccines cause autism". When I type into Google "Ist Deutschland" (Is Germany ...), I get "ist deutschland eine gmbh" (is Germany a company), "ist deutschland souverän" / "ist deutschland ein souveräner staat" (is Germany a sovereign state) and "ist deutschland ein staat" (is germany a state). And for each of the Reichsbürger stuff I get 8/10 results being the Reichsbürger propaganda. That can and will lead people into believing this stuff. Google keyword suggestions are dangerous, and they do influence society.
- cisanti 9y ago
  And you want to be the judge who decides what is right and wrong? Homosexuality is morally and legally wrong in many countries in the world, and sensitive topic, why not ban it by default because it's the joy of a fringe group of Americans?
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > And you want to be the judge who decides what is right and wrong? As soon as a minority is discriminated, no matter what minority it is (be it PoC, Latinos, Asians, gays, lesbians, transsexuals, or even social groups as poor people) it's wrong. Dead easy definition, and for racial and gender based discrimination it's a worldwide agreed-upon international law anyway: racism => ICERD, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationales_%C3%9Cbereinkommen_zur_Beseitigung_jeder_Form_von_Rassendiskriminierung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationales_%C3%9Cbereinko..., gender-based discrimination => CEDAW, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN-Konvention_zur_Beseitigung_jeder_Form_von_Diskriminierung_der_Frau https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN-Konvention_zur_Beseitigung_.... And for the other forms of discrimination, a judicial base may be extracted from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
    - otakucode 9y ago
      Well that's clearly not believed by most of society. The young are discriminated against ferociously and denigrated at every turn, yet few would call it wrong. Few would argue that teenagers shouldn't be spied upon, controlled, and given fewer choices in their day to day life than felons in prison. It is 'for their own good' after all. As discrimination always has been, and always will be, couched.
- dawnbreez 9y ago
  I would like to propose a law against the use of Germany's laws against Nazi symbology as an argument against freedom of speech. Given such a law, would you maintain your position, which would require HN to ban you for saying it?
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    If HN (or, for that matter, any platform!) would no longer welcome me for opposing Nazis, I'd be fine with it - so yeah I'd stick to my position.
    - otakucode 9y ago
      I think you misunderstood his question. His question was whether you would support HN banning you if there were a law protecting free speech and making 'you may not post the swastika shape' and similar laws illegal.
- frabbit 9y ago
  You've mixed up two related topics: the right of a private entity to decide their ToS, and the right of the state to restrict information. Disgusting as it may be, none of that content should be banned by the state. It places too much power in the hands of administrations which are frequently abhorrent. The right of Youtube/Twitter/Facebook to forbid content on their own servers should be exactly the same as their right to burn copies of books that they own.
cortesoft 9y ago
> Videos are available by voluntary positive action of the viewer only. Not true, you see suggested videos all the time. What about really bad stuff? Like ISIS execution videos? Should they not be blocked? If you think there exists some class of video that should be removed from YouTube, then it is just a matter of degree. You would still need some mechanism for people to flag a video and have it be removed for everyone. If you think NOTHING should be removed from YouTube, including the most horrific execution videos, then you need to never do suggested videos, which takes a way a big feature from YouTube.
- otakucode 9y ago
  You are right about the autoplayed suggested videos, but ones that are solely suggested in the right-hand bar still require someone to say "I wanna see" and click on it. And, of course, you can trivially easily disable the autoplaying of next suggested videos. As for newsworthy videos like ISIS executions, I don't see much trouble with them. They are factual, and help people to see why ISIS should be opposed. It makes it impossible for anyone to pop up that wishes to claim that their means are peaceable or compatible with peace or reason. Banning the videos puts those who would argue against ISIS in the position of having no evidence and asking those they are arguing with to trust them - a thing intellectually repugnant for anyone to do. Given the way suggested videos works, the only people who would be recommended things like ISIS execution videos would be people who were interested in ISIS execution videos for one reason or another. It's not like they would be recommended to me who mostly watches tech talks and science stuff. And of course there are certain things which should be removed from YouTube. Not because they are "offensive" (which is a free choice on the part of the audience, not the creator of the video who has no control over how their unknown future audience will have trained themselves or been trained to respond) but because they are harmful. Things like blatant copyright infringement, child pornography, revenge porn, etc are illegal not because they are gross or shocking or upsetting but because they are harmful. They cause harm.
  - cortesoft 9y ago
    So ISIS execution videos don't cause harm, but child porn does? I mean, I think it seems clear that they both cause harm in pretty much the same ways (they give an audience to horrific acts and can encourage the acts themselves).
Roodgorf 9y ago
I agree that taking the whole channel down for the flag is not the right approach, and I would have thought the "three strikes rule", in any form, would have enough evidence against it by this point to kill it for good. But I think there's a bit of nuance missed by assuming that users are solely in charge of the videos they see. YouTube will autoplay related videos if you let it; I wouldn't exactly call that a positive action by the user. And recommended videos are a pretty large part of YouTube's model beyond that, so only removing the video for whoever flagged it doesn't seem like enough. A better solution might be to unlist the video from these related lists and perhaps escalate things if a certain volume of flags are hit. I also don't see why reputation seems to have no bearing on this. How old and large is Cody's Lab's library, and how many strikes has it received (that were not later removed)? Seems like a good litmus test for false positives to me.
ThatGeoGuy 9y ago
This is really the problem that comes from Youtube's "Heroes" program and having users police each other's content. You remove choice from the equation, and as a result, content becomes watered-down and a lot of more interesting topics are suppressed. I will say that granted, some content is definitely too grotesque or offensive that it should be left off the platform (e.g. beheadings, murder, porn, etc), however I suspect this kind of content is much more "black and white" and can be detected and removed with much less controversy.

mschuster91 9y ago

> It only serves to forbid others from making the choice of whether or not to view the content themselves. No, there is certain content that is forbidden by law in some countries, for example Holocaust denial, Nazi propaganda and other racist or otherwise discriminatory content. I do wonder why Youtube and Twitter don't disallow that kind of stuff by default, there's no reason for giving this kind of content any platform even if it's legal by law in the US. Also, fringe stuff like antivaxxers, "freemen/Reichsbürger movements", flat-earthers, chemtrail believers, other conspiracy theories or Russian fake news would be by far smaller if Youtube had decided that this content is not wanted on their platform. Instead Youtube willingly provides a platform for this content and therefore is directly responsible for the resulting problems.

otakucode 9y ago
>No, there is certain content that is forbidden by law in some countries, for example Holocaust denial, Nazi propaganda and other racist or otherwise discriminatory content. I do wonder why Youtube and Twitter don't disallow that kind of stuff by default, there's no reason for giving this kind of content any platform even if it's legal by law in the US. I think you are confusing things. Simply because you desire forbidding others the choice of whether or not to view the content does not in any way mean that the act of suspending a channel doesn't accomplish this. The reason it is a horrendously dangerous, terrible, horrible idea to acede to a desire to hide 'dangerous' information would, I would hope, be easily seen by now, but it's obvious that this isn't the case. People seem to have forgotten that the Nazi newspaper was banned by the government of Germany after the Beer Hall Putsch. They seem to have forgotten that prior to that, the Nazi party was some guys hanging out in a pub being angry, and once the disliked establishment banned their paper it became the thing every German 'had to read'. They seem to have forgotten that it was the exact kind of censorship they seek to enact today that catapulted Hitler and his party into the forebrain of every downtrodden German. The only legitimate and adequate response to a bad idea is a better idea. Full stop. You can not ban an idea. You can, however, drive it into hiding where it will see no opposition, no correction, no competing evidence. At that point, you guarantee for yourself the creation of an insular subculture who will draw the disaffected and opposition to the establishment. It is a Bad Idea. It has always been a Bad Idea. There has never been a happy state with heavy censorship. Had we had such censorship in the 1960s, interracial marriage would still be illegal. Had we had it in the 1800s, slavery would still be legal. Every progress of mankind begins with spitting in the face of the established order. And that Nazi morons are clearly not a part of such progress is of no great import. You (generally, in the 'your society' sense of you) will be incapable of judging the next step of progress and this is guaranteed. In the United States, there is a legal concept called Prior Restraint on free speech and it is very aggressively avoided by the courts, as well it should be. You are incorrect that various fringe groups would be smaller if YouTube became a bastion of censorship, and also that the platform owner is responsible for problems that you believe resulted from ideas being available. The existence of the fringe groups, their sizes, and the problems are all a result of widespread anti-intellectualism and a rejection of critical thinking and reason as an acceptable means of determining ones beliefs. Things like the anti-vaccine movement in particular grow far more through word-of-mouth than they do online resources. Zero of the anti-vaxxers went online to seek information about vaccines and found anti-vaccine ranting and then made a decision to not vaccinate their children. Instead, they heard about it from mothers who "just knew" that vaccines gave their kids autism. Or they listened to their president talking about how there are "just too many" with no basis. The idea that vaccines are harmful, that letting strangers, intellectual strangers who don't care, stick steel needles into their children and inject them full of chemicals and dead viruses was dangerous felt right and that is literally the only thing in the world that could convince them of any position.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  Thanks for the long reply - you have some very valid points there, but also some that I don't believe to be correct. > At that point, you guarantee for yourself the creation of an insular subculture who will draw the disaffected and opposition to the establishment. Yes, and this is exactly what I want. Loads of Nazis and trolls flocked to Voat after the banning of r/fatpeoplehate and friends, and more after the recent banwave. As a result the amount of hatespeech on Reddit has massively declined and Voat is not a place that's relevant outside of Gamergate and Nazis. The casual Internet user won't ever see a tiny bit of it. Same is also true for Twitter / gab.ai, where lots of Nazis in Germany fled. It's the same way in politics: in Germany, we have had the NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschland), which was a really vile cesspool of literal and neo-Nazis and it was mainly left to fend for itself - and it kept most of the ultra-right-wing stuff out of mainstream politics. True, it changed with the rise of the AfD, but it worked for decades. > Every progress of mankind begins with spitting in the face of the established order. Point is, we already had the Nazis in power in history (Hitler of course, but also his friends Mussolini and Franco). They're not progress, and they cannot be. > You are incorrect that various fringe groups would be smaller if YouTube became a bastion of censorship As said above: look at what happened to fatpeoplehate and friends. Or into the history of our Reichsbürgers ("freemen" in US terms, IIRC): they rose with the ability to spread their "ideas" for free across the Internet, and when taken away from mainstream, they will shrink again. > Instead, they heard about it from mothers who "just knew" that vaccines gave their kids autism. And where do they find these mothers? On Youtube and on various Facebook groups, mostly (at least this is what a children's doctor told me, when I asked him about the problem, but well the "anecdata" principle does apply here). > Zero of the anti-vaxxers went online to seek information about vaccines and found anti-vaccine ranting and then made a decision to not vaccinate their children Nope. When I type into Google "vaccines", the third autocomplete suggestion is "vaccines cause autism". Not "do vaccines cause autism". When I type into Google "Ist Deutschland" (Is Germany ...), I get "ist deutschland eine gmbh" (is Germany a company), "ist deutschland souverän" / "ist deutschland ein souveräner staat" (is Germany a sovereign state) and "ist deutschland ein staat" (is germany a state). And for each of the Reichsbürger stuff I get 8/10 results being the Reichsbürger propaganda. That can and will lead people into believing this stuff. Google keyword suggestions are dangerous, and they do influence society.
cisanti 9y ago
And you want to be the judge who decides what is right and wrong? Homosexuality is morally and legally wrong in many countries in the world, and sensitive topic, why not ban it by default because it's the joy of a fringe group of Americans?
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > And you want to be the judge who decides what is right and wrong? As soon as a minority is discriminated, no matter what minority it is (be it PoC, Latinos, Asians, gays, lesbians, transsexuals, or even social groups as poor people) it's wrong. Dead easy definition, and for racial and gender based discrimination it's a worldwide agreed-upon international law anyway: racism => ICERD, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationales_%C3%9Cbereinkommen_zur_Beseitigung_jeder_Form_von_Rassendiskriminierung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationales_%C3%9Cbereinko..., gender-based discrimination => CEDAW, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN-Konvention_zur_Beseitigung_jeder_Form_von_Diskriminierung_der_Frau https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN-Konvention_zur_Beseitigung_.... And for the other forms of discrimination, a judicial base may be extracted from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
  - otakucode 9y ago
    Well that's clearly not believed by most of society. The young are discriminated against ferociously and denigrated at every turn, yet few would call it wrong. Few would argue that teenagers shouldn't be spied upon, controlled, and given fewer choices in their day to day life than felons in prison. It is 'for their own good' after all. As discrimination always has been, and always will be, couched.
dawnbreez 9y ago
I would like to propose a law against the use of Germany's laws against Nazi symbology as an argument against freedom of speech. Given such a law, would you maintain your position, which would require HN to ban you for saying it?
- mschuster91 9y ago
  If HN (or, for that matter, any platform!) would no longer welcome me for opposing Nazis, I'd be fine with it - so yeah I'd stick to my position.
  - otakucode 9y ago
    I think you misunderstood his question. His question was whether you would support HN banning you if there were a law protecting free speech and making 'you may not post the swastika shape' and similar laws illegal.
frabbit 9y ago
You've mixed up two related topics: the right of a private entity to decide their ToS, and the right of the state to restrict information. Disgusting as it may be, none of that content should be banned by the state. It places too much power in the hands of administrations which are frequently abhorrent. The right of Youtube/Twitter/Facebook to forbid content on their own servers should be exactly the same as their right to burn copies of books that they own.

cortesoft 9y ago

> Videos are available by voluntary positive action of the viewer only. Not true, you see suggested videos all the time. What about really bad stuff? Like ISIS execution videos? Should they not be blocked? If you think there exists some class of video that should be removed from YouTube, then it is just a matter of degree. You would still need some mechanism for people to flag a video and have it be removed for everyone. If you think NOTHING should be removed from YouTube, including the most horrific execution videos, then you need to never do suggested videos, which takes a way a big feature from YouTube.

otakucode 9y ago
You are right about the autoplayed suggested videos, but ones that are solely suggested in the right-hand bar still require someone to say "I wanna see" and click on it. And, of course, you can trivially easily disable the autoplaying of next suggested videos. As for newsworthy videos like ISIS executions, I don't see much trouble with them. They are factual, and help people to see why ISIS should be opposed. It makes it impossible for anyone to pop up that wishes to claim that their means are peaceable or compatible with peace or reason. Banning the videos puts those who would argue against ISIS in the position of having no evidence and asking those they are arguing with to trust them - a thing intellectually repugnant for anyone to do. Given the way suggested videos works, the only people who would be recommended things like ISIS execution videos would be people who were interested in ISIS execution videos for one reason or another. It's not like they would be recommended to me who mostly watches tech talks and science stuff. And of course there are certain things which should be removed from YouTube. Not because they are "offensive" (which is a free choice on the part of the audience, not the creator of the video who has no control over how their unknown future audience will have trained themselves or been trained to respond) but because they are harmful. Things like blatant copyright infringement, child pornography, revenge porn, etc are illegal not because they are gross or shocking or upsetting but because they are harmful. They cause harm.
- cortesoft 9y ago
  So ISIS execution videos don't cause harm, but child porn does? I mean, I think it seems clear that they both cause harm in pretty much the same ways (they give an audience to horrific acts and can encourage the acts themselves).

Roodgorf 9y ago

I agree that taking the whole channel down for the flag is not the right approach, and I would have thought the "three strikes rule", in any form, would have enough evidence against it by this point to kill it for good. But I think there's a bit of nuance missed by assuming that users are solely in charge of the videos they see. YouTube will autoplay related videos if you let it; I wouldn't exactly call that a positive action by the user. And recommended videos are a pretty large part of YouTube's model beyond that, so only removing the video for whoever flagged it doesn't seem like enough. A better solution might be to unlist the video from these related lists and perhaps escalate things if a certain volume of flags are hit. I also don't see why reputation seems to have no bearing on this. How old and large is Cody's Lab's library, and how many strikes has it received (that were not later removed)? Seems like a good litmus test for false positives to me.

ThatGeoGuy 9y ago

This is really the problem that comes from Youtube's "Heroes" program and having users police each other's content. You remove choice from the equation, and as a result, content becomes watered-down and a lot of more interesting topics are suppressed. I will say that granted, some content is definitely too grotesque or offensive that it should be left off the platform (e.g. beheadings, murder, porn, etc), however I suspect this kind of content is much more "black and white" and can be detected and removed with much less controversy.