7 ms·

You're not treating them like they are truth. You're a video hosting site and it's a video. Just let the videos rank how they will. Stupid videos being promoted

You're not treating them like they are truth. You're a video hosting site and it's a video. Just let the videos rank how they will. Stupid videos being promoted and trending will let more people know they are stupid. When more people learn about who Alex Jones is, and he becomes a household name for being an idiot, when a gullible lad stumbles across him they are likely to be like "oh this dude is the idiot I heard about", rather than thinking they found some secret censored truth.

pjc50 7y ago
Except we can see that's not how it works, and Alex Jones became incredibly successful all the way up to slandering the parents of murdered children. It turns out that's where the line is. People do treat Google search results like truth. There's not a great deal google can do about that, and it's irresponsible for google to feed people lies.
- acollins1331 7y ago
  This problem is solved by better education, not censorship. I know for a fact we currently don't teach people how to tell whether a youtube video is bullshit in school or not, teach it. People are agents, not pawns to be controlled into thinking what you want. There will always be bad apples.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    > People are agents, not pawns to be controlled into thinking what you want. I have some bad news for you about the world's largest advertising company.
  - krapp 7y ago
    >This problem is solved by better education, not censorship. Education is censorship. If it's unacceptable for Youtube to derank lies and extremism, it must also be unacceptable to teach children that lies and extremism are incorrect. If we can't trust one one arbiter of truth, then surely we can't trust any. The free speech solution would be to treat all ideas equally, regardless of their merit, and allow the marketplace of ideas to educate people and let everyone decide for themselves what truth is. But that just leads us to where we are now, with social media being overrun by cancer, and ever more people believing QAnon and Alex Jones and anti-vaxxers and flat earth. The inconvenient truth is that education sometimes works, but often doesn't. Censorship sometimes works, but often doesn't. Context matters (not all speech is equally valid, not all attempts at censorship inevitably lead to Orwellian dystopia) and the problem is more complex and nuanced than heated internet debates will allow.
andrepd 7y ago
That's your intuition, but in practice we find that this is not how it goes down. The truth is these videos work on many impressionable people that can't see past the (thin) veil.

pjc50 7y ago

Except we can see that's not how it works, and Alex Jones became incredibly successful all the way up to slandering the parents of murdered children. It turns out that's where the line is. People do treat Google search results like truth. There's not a great deal google can do about that, and it's irresponsible for google to feed people lies.

acollins1331 7y ago
This problem is solved by better education, not censorship. I know for a fact we currently don't teach people how to tell whether a youtube video is bullshit in school or not, teach it. People are agents, not pawns to be controlled into thinking what you want. There will always be bad apples.
- pjc50 7y ago
  > People are agents, not pawns to be controlled into thinking what you want. I have some bad news for you about the world's largest advertising company.
- krapp 7y ago
  >This problem is solved by better education, not censorship. Education is censorship. If it's unacceptable for Youtube to derank lies and extremism, it must also be unacceptable to teach children that lies and extremism are incorrect. If we can't trust one one arbiter of truth, then surely we can't trust any. The free speech solution would be to treat all ideas equally, regardless of their merit, and allow the marketplace of ideas to educate people and let everyone decide for themselves what truth is. But that just leads us to where we are now, with social media being overrun by cancer, and ever more people believing QAnon and Alex Jones and anti-vaxxers and flat earth. The inconvenient truth is that education sometimes works, but often doesn't. Censorship sometimes works, but often doesn't. Context matters (not all speech is equally valid, not all attempts at censorship inevitably lead to Orwellian dystopia) and the problem is more complex and nuanced than heated internet debates will allow.

andrepd 7y ago

That's your intuition, but in practice we find that this is not how it goes down. The truth is these videos work on many impressionable people that can't see past the (thin) veil.