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Fundamentally I think the problem is that these platforms are not neutral, when YouTube's algorithm hoists your video to the front page they are "manipulating"

Fundamentally I think the problem is that these platforms are not neutral, when YouTube's algorithm hoists your video to the front page they are "manipulating" the system. Sure, and when someone puts weights on both sides of a scale, operating it correctly, they are still "manipulating" the scale. That's not what people get mad about. It's when someone puts their thumb on the scale, because they want it to read a certain way, that people get mad. It should be fine if the YouTube algorithm finds things which go viral, then promotes them, so long as that's neutral. It's even fine when things which are clearly abuses of the system or people are squashed, so long as that's neutral. It's not fine when it gets to the level of pushing or squashing a political agenda, however. It's not going to be easy to draw the line, but in the case of pushing politics, it has clearly gone too far.

AgentME 7y ago
>It's not going to be easy to draw the line, but in the case of pushing politics, it has clearly gone too far. In which way? I've seen a lot of arguments that YouTube pushes people into alt-right and ethnonationalist content way too easily. I don't think there's an objective way to choose what videos to promote. Obviously they're going to try to come up with some right way to put the weights, and then if they subjectively think that results in the wrong thing, they're going to tweak the weights. Even if there is a weighting that objectively results in more views, it's a value judgment to choose to use that weighting. It could be that prioritizing outrage-bait content gets more views, but I wouldn't call prioritizing that neutral or beneficial.
- stcredzero 7y ago
  There's way more than algorithm tweaking going on there. There are employees who are manually treating the same thing differently, depending on who and also subject to their own biases. The examples of this on YouTube are legion. Also, there are people who gained viral notoriety, but were going against YouTube/Google politics, then had their whole Google account disappear, then get restored, or remain disappeared. There's some thumbs on the scale over there.
- imbored 7y ago
  > I've seen a lot of arguments that YouTube pushes people into alt-right and ethnonationalist content way too easily. They do and then those people complain endlessly about censorship, demand legal changes, support first amendment violations via executive order, spread conspiracy theories about anti-conservative bias, and meanwhile they keep posting fucking youtube videos and trying to radicalize people. It's stochastic terrorism and it's all over the goddamn place.
root_axis 7y ago
> It's not fine when it gets to the level of pushing or squashing a political agenda Why not? What's wrong with pushing a political agenda?
- eclipxe 7y ago
  Exactly - Freedom of Association - its a private company, why should the government regulate that they need to be politically neutral.
  - stcredzero 7y ago
    1 - They are a platform, not a publisher. Otherwise, they don't merit the safe harbor. 2 - Freedom of Speech is more important than property rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
    - eclipxe 7y ago
      The US Government telling Google what to post/recommend on the platform they run and pay for can be a violation of Google's first amendment right to Freedom of Speech. "[Marsh] iwas raised in the somewhat high-profile 1996 cyberlaw case, Cyber Promotions v. America Online, 948 F. Supp. 436, 442 (E.D. Pa. 1996).[1] Cyber Promotions wished to send out "mass email advertisements" to AOL customers. AOL installed software to block those emails. Cyber Promotions sued on free speech grounds and cited the Marsh case as authority for the proposition that even though AOL's servers were private property, AOL had opened them to the public to a degree sufficient that constitutional free speech protections could be applied. The federal district court disagreed, thereby paving the way for spam filters at the Internet service provider level."

AgentME 7y ago

>It's not going to be easy to draw the line, but in the case of pushing politics, it has clearly gone too far. In which way? I've seen a lot of arguments that YouTube pushes people into alt-right and ethnonationalist content way too easily. I don't think there's an objective way to choose what videos to promote. Obviously they're going to try to come up with some right way to put the weights, and then if they subjectively think that results in the wrong thing, they're going to tweak the weights. Even if there is a weighting that objectively results in more views, it's a value judgment to choose to use that weighting. It could be that prioritizing outrage-bait content gets more views, but I wouldn't call prioritizing that neutral or beneficial.

stcredzero 7y ago
There's way more than algorithm tweaking going on there. There are employees who are manually treating the same thing differently, depending on who and also subject to their own biases. The examples of this on YouTube are legion. Also, there are people who gained viral notoriety, but were going against YouTube/Google politics, then had their whole Google account disappear, then get restored, or remain disappeared. There's some thumbs on the scale over there.
imbored 7y ago
> I've seen a lot of arguments that YouTube pushes people into alt-right and ethnonationalist content way too easily. They do and then those people complain endlessly about censorship, demand legal changes, support first amendment violations via executive order, spread conspiracy theories about anti-conservative bias, and meanwhile they keep posting fucking youtube videos and trying to radicalize people. It's stochastic terrorism and it's all over the goddamn place.

root_axis 7y ago

> It's not fine when it gets to the level of pushing or squashing a political agenda Why not? What's wrong with pushing a political agenda?

eclipxe 7y ago
Exactly - Freedom of Association - its a private company, why should the government regulate that they need to be politically neutral.
- stcredzero 7y ago
  1 - They are a platform, not a publisher. Otherwise, they don't merit the safe harbor. 2 - Freedom of Speech is more important than property rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
  - eclipxe 7y ago
    The US Government telling Google what to post/recommend on the platform they run and pay for can be a violation of Google's first amendment right to Freedom of Speech. "[Marsh] iwas raised in the somewhat high-profile 1996 cyberlaw case, Cyber Promotions v. America Online, 948 F. Supp. 436, 442 (E.D. Pa. 1996).[1] Cyber Promotions wished to send out "mass email advertisements" to AOL customers. AOL installed software to block those emails. Cyber Promotions sued on free speech grounds and cited the Marsh case as authority for the proposition that even though AOL's servers were private property, AOL had opened them to the public to a degree sufficient that constitutional free speech protections could be applied. The federal district court disagreed, thereby paving the way for spam filters at the Internet service provider level."