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We can't outsource our critical thinking to private companies. People need to develop the ability to think critically for themselves and not rely on appeals to

We can't outsource our critical thinking to private companies. People need to develop the ability to think critically for themselves and not rely on appeals to authority. This can't happen if people become lazy and simply trust whatever media is out there. This also raises concerns for me around the question of freedom of speech and censorship. I fear we are centralizing too much power into a few private companies that effectively wield more power than the government and the people for whom it represents. I'd rather have freedom of speech even if it means tons of misinformation out there. If and when there is some information that is unpopular but critical for people to know, I don't want censorship to be the norm.

antisthenes 7y ago
> People need to develop the ability to think critically for themselves and not rely on appeals to authority. This can't happen if people become lazy and simply trust whatever media is out there. That's a nice normative statement, but that battle has been lost over a century ago with advent of cheap mass media that enshrined consumerism. Consumerism advocates that the optimal behavior isn't "what is optimal and fair here?" but "what do I want ?" It erodes critical thinking at grassroots levels. Not to mention that these days media companies have perverse incentives to generate outrage and polarizing viewpoints instead of just reporting the damn news
- nightski 7y ago
  Wow I disagree. If you look at the US as a whole, it is clear we are much better at critical thinking and even thinking in numbers than ever before. YES lots of people get things very wrong. But we are now throwing data, charts, statistics in front of the general population. People are seeking out data and trying to make decisions for themselves (even if they are not doing a great job yet, it's far better than before!). I know it is fun to be doom and gloom but the reality is our society is better than it was before. People are calling out the media and politicians on their BS faster than ever before.
  - bawolff 7y ago
    Using (misleading) statistics/charts/graph to lie to people is an age old tradition. I dont think their usage indicates much about critical thinking unless viewers are viewing the charts critically
Spooky23 7y ago
You have to hold private companies responsible for the content they syndicate. If freedom is free it has no value. We ran into the same issues as mass communication started to appear in the 1920s and 1930s. The danger of giving everyone the megaphone is obvious then and now. Tight regulation limited the impact of extremists and crazy people in the United States and other places, it empowered fascists and dictators in other places. Twitter and YouTube's promise was and remains amazing. The problem is people whose speciality is garnering attention will drown out rational voices. That why the POTUS is a demented game show host.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
sp332 7y ago
There's a huge difference between freedom of speech and actually hurting people. Organizing violence, for example, is already illegal even in many jurisdictions with strong protections for speech. "Information" that's not only going to get people killed but also is factually wrong is definitely fair game IMO.
- ksk 7y ago
  They already have a policy to ban accounts that incite violence. (Which might have happened, the article doesn't say..) >"Information" that's not only going to get people killed but also is factually wrong is definitely fair game IMO. We don't want an advertising company in a capitalist society deciding that. That's the whole point.
  - sp332 7y ago
    We don't want an advertising company in a capitalist society deciding that. Everyone has the responsibility to decide that! Their platform, their responsibility.
    - ksk 7y ago
      Okay? Then consider my comment as a protest.
    - julybuffalo 7y ago
      This is actually an extremely gray legal area. The only reason platforms are viable is because they have legal protections that don't make them responsible for user content. At some level of "taken responsibility" (which I think should have been passed), they should be considered publishers and be stripped of their legal protections.
- champagneben 7y ago
  Could you not make the same argument about many politically divisive questions? Medicare for all, climate change, etc.
tcbawo 7y ago
It would be great to have some sort of Dewey decimal system-style classification of content. I'm sure it would be controversial to assign a true/false or fiction/non-fiction rating, but having a finer rubric/methodology could be beneficial. Although, for a classification system to succeed requires curation, which may effectively be a filter.
alexashka 7y ago
Appeals to authority is the inevitable by-product of specialization. No one understands even a small fraction of all branches of science, let alone engineering and the rest of it. Freedom of speech is just double-speak for the idiot masses. You're free to say things and others are free to put you in jail for hate speech, inciting violence or the other 100+ laws that limit free speech. The sooner you quit thinking in double-speak slogans meant for idiot masses, the sooner you'll realize you don't know what you're talking about, realize how much work it'd take to know what you're talking about, give up and live your life, relying on appeals to authority. Try knowing what the hell you're talking about in your professional discipline of choice, intimate relationships, physical health and parenting. That's enough for a single human being - most are utterly incompetent at these matters of vital importance to their well being. When you have those under a solid grasp - you can venture out into contemplating politics, propaganda and law.
IAmEveryone 7y ago
It's someone strange that this idea–of everyone independently evaluating everything they read or hear–is so popular, considering it's entirely impossible to do even for just a fraction of the information you consume every day and rely on. It doesn't even work in principle: as long as you are limited to receiving information over the internet, it's impossible to verify any of it from first principle. The results of some automatic processes can maybe use cryptography for verification. But any real-world fact relies on people observing it and providing you with texts/photos/videos: there's no end-to-end process to definitely proof that Angela Merkel is the chancellor of Germany. You have to either travel to Berlin and check for yourself, or you have to trust a single source completely, or you construct some most probable version of reality by aggregating many sources weighted by whatever trust you assign them. "Having trust in..." is obviously the same as "appeal to authority". And if you belief you're not relying on that mechanism you're delusional. Every time you trust Google Maps to get you to your destination, you do so because your experience with Maps specifically and Google more generally has taught you that this company and product can be trusted to a certain degree. Every time you're more open to lending your car to your spouse than some random stranger, you're acting on trust. Every time you return to your favourite restaurant, you're relying on the intuition that past behaviour is predictive of future behaviour. That's yet another formulation for "trust". Do you believe there's a virus going around right now? How do you know? Are you just counting the number of sources saying so? Because in that case I can probably find more anonymous twitter accounts denying it. Do you consider a story in the New York Times to carry more weight than @justin1256 on Twitter? That's trust. When you get a vaccination, you're relying on the combined authority of your doctor, and your country's licensing scheme for physicians, and the FDA and the company producing the vaccine. What does "thinking for yourself" mean in that context? Reading a few papers online doesn't qualitatively change anything: you're just distributing your trust more widely. In practice, it typically means giving yourself license to find whatever study or YouTube video best conforms to your priors. Those people currently setting 5G towers on fire in Britain are excellent at "thinking for themselves" and "consuming a wide variety of sources". Not relying on some sort of authority implies proving information from first principle. How do you go about it? Are you going to run your own clinical trial? That would cost billions, and expose dozens or hundreds of people to whatever danger you're trying to evaluate, defeating the purpose. It would probably also involve more work than you could do yourself, so you'd need to trust some collaborators. Foiled again! I also don't get what's so bad about trust? If you want to define it, it's making predictions (about some person's or institution's honesty and competence) based on past experiences. Is there any difference between extending someone (limited) trust after a good experience to, say, jumping headfirst into a pool after you've swam in it to check its depth? Or cuddling a dog you know to be friendly? Yes, people can change (so can dogs), which is why trust isn't binary, and needs continuous updating. Which is why it's so fortunate that nature has evolved a whole range of emotions, from love to friendship to sympathy to fear, to keep track of this elusive quantity called trust.
atomi 7y ago
I don't know how many times it needs to be said. An entity has the inherent right to control what is on it's own property. Full stop gentlemen.
- legostormtroopr 7y ago
  Then that entity becomes responsible for everything on its property as well.
  - amanaplanacanal 7y ago
    Tradition and law both disagree with you. Perhaps it should be the way you say, but it isn't now and never has been.
    - julybuffalo 7y ago
      Is the NYT responsible for its content? Why isn't YouTube a publisher now rather than a protected platform? Why couldn't the NYT justify itself as a platform instead of a publisher if YouTube is a platform?
- axguscbklp 7y ago
  Doesn't mean I have to like them when they do.
CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
Problem is that critical thinking in some parts relies on comparing to what’s expected. Now, YouTube’s algorithms are finely tuned to keep you hooked in front of the screen by continuously feeding you things that are just enough outside the expected zone to keep your attention. Slowly eroding away that critical thinking by simply normalizing the non-expected. So while I might agree on the principle I think the area is a little gray.
oxide 7y ago
It isnt censorship. At all. Freedom of speech doesnt apply on websites. It's their platform, they call the shots. Dont like it? Start a competitor and pay the bandwidth bill. Google doesn't have to allow misinformation any more than they have to allow someone being an incendiary asshole in a comment section.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  It doesn't violate the US constitution, but I'd still call it censorship. > It's their platform, they call the shots. Agreed. But let's call spades spades.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  Social-network, mass-participation and mass-publication platforms, like YouTube, are not "theirs". They are a public resource under formal private ownership. This is not unheard of, of course - in some countries it's like that for water, or electricity, or mass transit, or healthcare, or schools and so on. Allowing private owners to have total control of these public resources is obviously not what we want or need. The problem is that the formal owners of such resources also have a tremendous amount of influence - as single entities or altogether ("Big Tech") on the politics of states. And this influence is very fundamental to modern democracies, it's not some aberation. Also: 1. It's nearly impossible to "compete" with such platforms once they are established. 2. Google not only allows misinformation, it intentionally pushes misinformation on YouTube: Sources which are politically acceptable to it are strongly promoted and recommended (e.g. CNN, MSNBC, Fox) - even when they peddle misinformation, which they occasionally do.
- axguscbklp 7y ago
  It is objectively censorship, it's just not government censorship.
- bcheung 7y ago
  What about net neutrality and "common carrier"? These seem to be well established goals and values.
krapp 7y ago
>I fear we are centralizing too much power into a few private companies that effectively wield more power than the government and the people for whom it represents. Youtube is not more powerful than the government. The government has the power to create laws, levy taxes, raise an army and wage war, arrest, detain, torture and kill. Youtube only has the power to control speech on its own platform, governments have the power to do so across entire societies, and to enforce that will on businesses subject to their laws. You can say the same about any social media platform - none of them are governments, nor are any more powerful than governments. This kind of hyperbole only undermines the strength of your argument.
specialist 7y ago
Whatever engagement boosting algorithms are, they're not freedom of speech. I don't give two figs about whackadoodles and their conspiracy theories. "outsource our critical thinking to private companies" But by profiting off ignorance, that's exactly what media companies are doing.
mindslight 7y ago
The truth and I have actually been harmed by censorship of this very topic. My aunt tried to send me a link to a video discussing this, wanting my opinion. Of course the link was dead by the time I tried to view it. Which required going back and forth, what's the title of the video, what author, oh that's the one, etc. In the end I was able to view it (my takeaways: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22797275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22797275), but obviously the better the censorship machinery functions, the more effort it takes to get on the same page to address misinformation! And blind blanket assertions that the whole topic is nonsense is just a path to increasing polarization. Meanwhile the author of the video played with and mocked the censorship regime to market themselves. Spelling words out, writing them on a whiteboard, talking up how many times this information has been taken down, etc. The more a topic is censored, the more the nonsensical narratives look like forbidden knowledge. It plays directly into the conspiracy angle. If something technological needs to be done to address misinformation, it revolves around viral sharing, filter bubbles, and most importantly basic scientific literacy. Swiping at the video hosting itself is an ineffective blunt instrument from the same exact toolbox that regressive dictators always reach for.
mikekchar 7y ago
> I'd rather have freedom of speech even if it means tons of misinformation out there. I think this is a false dichotomy. There is a difference between freedom of speech and freedom to use the most popular communication service. Just because a communication service is popular, does not automatically mean that everyone should get equal access. Freedom of speech means that you are free to say what you want. You are free to publish what you want. It does not mean that the most popular distributors of information a forced to carry your message. Going back in time, it means that you are free to write a book. You are free to print the book. You are free to distribute the book. You are not free to demand that the most popular bookstore must carry your book. Neither does it mean that the most popular newspaper must publish serialised versions of your book. It also doesn't mean that you must have equal access to the most cost effective means of distributing your message. Even though the news paper (in times gone by) reached every house and syndicated stories could travel the world incredibly efficiently, it doesn't mean that they are forced to syndicate your story. They have a choice. It may be true that you can't afford to send information to practically everybody in the world like the wire services can do, but that's just too bad. These days because communications are so cheap to be practically free, people often thing that they should be entitled to the best delivery mechanism possible and that everything else should be considered censorship. A private entity choosing not to spread your message is not censorship. It's a choice and it's a choice that every private entity should be able to have. I'd rather have the freedom to choose even if it means that tons of people do not have access to the most popular and efficient means of spreading their message. Of course, if there are groups of people colluding to block your message, then that might be a form of censorship. If you have Youtube making deals with ISPs to make sure that you can't host your own content, etc, then I think that's a problem. That's the kind of action that only governments should be able to take (and with the correct oversight). But people and corporations should have the right to choose what business they want to engage in unless it impinges on special categories that we have already marked for protection (and insane consipracy theories are not marked for such protection).
- thebean11 7y ago
  I don't think comparing facebook or youtube to "the most popular bookstore" is fair, books (and movies, TV, magazines etc) are just not in the same category as facebook or twitter. I don't think facebook and twitter can be compared to something like an ISP, the truth is somewhere in the middle. I personally find it concerning that more and more everyday human communication is moving to platforms that can arbitrarily ban you from communicating.
weare138 7y ago
Well that's the thing, it's not really an issue of free speech. These people didn't get kicked off the internet. There's nothing stopping them from paying for their own hosting and posting all the videos they want. Let's say you made a site called awesomepupperpics.com for people to post people of their puppers that you're paying for and people start posting pictures of their cats. Is it your responsibility to pay to host those cat pics? No. Are you violating cat owners rights by deleting those cat pics? Also no. You as the owner and proprietor of awesomepupperpics.com also have rights. No one is saying people can't post cat pics on the internet just not on awesomepupperpics.com because puppers are awesome.

antisthenes 7y ago

> People need to develop the ability to think critically for themselves and not rely on appeals to authority. This can't happen if people become lazy and simply trust whatever media is out there. That's a nice normative statement, but that battle has been lost over a century ago with advent of cheap mass media that enshrined consumerism. Consumerism advocates that the optimal behavior isn't "what is optimal and fair here?" but "what do I want ?" It erodes critical thinking at grassroots levels. Not to mention that these days media companies have perverse incentives to generate outrage and polarizing viewpoints instead of just reporting the damn news

nightski 7y ago
Wow I disagree. If you look at the US as a whole, it is clear we are much better at critical thinking and even thinking in numbers than ever before. YES lots of people get things very wrong. But we are now throwing data, charts, statistics in front of the general population. People are seeking out data and trying to make decisions for themselves (even if they are not doing a great job yet, it's far better than before!). I know it is fun to be doom and gloom but the reality is our society is better than it was before. People are calling out the media and politicians on their BS faster than ever before.
- bawolff 7y ago
  Using (misleading) statistics/charts/graph to lie to people is an age old tradition. I dont think their usage indicates much about critical thinking unless viewers are viewing the charts critically

Spooky23 7y ago

You have to hold private companies responsible for the content they syndicate. If freedom is free it has no value. We ran into the same issues as mass communication started to appear in the 1920s and 1930s. The danger of giving everyone the megaphone is obvious then and now. Tight regulation limited the impact of extremists and crazy people in the United States and other places, it empowered fascists and dictators in other places. Twitter and YouTube's promise was and remains amazing. The problem is people whose speciality is garnering attention will drown out rational voices. That why the POTUS is a demented game show host.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

sp332 7y ago

There's a huge difference between freedom of speech and actually hurting people. Organizing violence, for example, is already illegal even in many jurisdictions with strong protections for speech. "Information" that's not only going to get people killed but also is factually wrong is definitely fair game IMO.

ksk 7y ago
They already have a policy to ban accounts that incite violence. (Which might have happened, the article doesn't say..) >"Information" that's not only going to get people killed but also is factually wrong is definitely fair game IMO. We don't want an advertising company in a capitalist society deciding that. That's the whole point.
- sp332 7y ago
  We don't want an advertising company in a capitalist society deciding that. Everyone has the responsibility to decide that! Their platform, their responsibility.
  - ksk 7y ago
    Okay? Then consider my comment as a protest.
  - julybuffalo 7y ago
    This is actually an extremely gray legal area. The only reason platforms are viable is because they have legal protections that don't make them responsible for user content. At some level of "taken responsibility" (which I think should have been passed), they should be considered publishers and be stripped of their legal protections.
champagneben 7y ago
Could you not make the same argument about many politically divisive questions? Medicare for all, climate change, etc.

tcbawo 7y ago

It would be great to have some sort of Dewey decimal system-style classification of content. I'm sure it would be controversial to assign a true/false or fiction/non-fiction rating, but having a finer rubric/methodology could be beneficial. Although, for a classification system to succeed requires curation, which may effectively be a filter.

alexashka 7y ago

Appeals to authority is the inevitable by-product of specialization. No one understands even a small fraction of all branches of science, let alone engineering and the rest of it. Freedom of speech is just double-speak for the idiot masses. You're free to say things and others are free to put you in jail for hate speech, inciting violence or the other 100+ laws that limit free speech. The sooner you quit thinking in double-speak slogans meant for idiot masses, the sooner you'll realize you don't know what you're talking about, realize how much work it'd take to know what you're talking about, give up and live your life, relying on appeals to authority. Try knowing what the hell you're talking about in your professional discipline of choice, intimate relationships, physical health and parenting. That's enough for a single human being - most are utterly incompetent at these matters of vital importance to their well being. When you have those under a solid grasp - you can venture out into contemplating politics, propaganda and law.

IAmEveryone 7y ago

It's someone strange that this idea–of everyone independently evaluating everything they read or hear–is so popular, considering it's entirely impossible to do even for just a fraction of the information you consume every day and rely on. It doesn't even work in principle: as long as you are limited to receiving information over the internet, it's impossible to verify any of it from first principle. The results of some automatic processes can maybe use cryptography for verification. But any real-world fact relies on people observing it and providing you with texts/photos/videos: there's no end-to-end process to definitely proof that Angela Merkel is the chancellor of Germany. You have to either travel to Berlin and check for yourself, or you have to trust a single source completely, or you construct some most probable version of reality by aggregating many sources weighted by whatever trust you assign them. "Having trust in..." is obviously the same as "appeal to authority". And if you belief you're not relying on that mechanism you're delusional. Every time you trust Google Maps to get you to your destination, you do so because your experience with Maps specifically and Google more generally has taught you that this company and product can be trusted to a certain degree. Every time you're more open to lending your car to your spouse than some random stranger, you're acting on trust. Every time you return to your favourite restaurant, you're relying on the intuition that past behaviour is predictive of future behaviour. That's yet another formulation for "trust". Do you believe there's a virus going around right now? How do you know? Are you just counting the number of sources saying so? Because in that case I can probably find more anonymous twitter accounts denying it. Do you consider a story in the New York Times to carry more weight than @justin1256 on Twitter? That's trust. When you get a vaccination, you're relying on the combined authority of your doctor, and your country's licensing scheme for physicians, and the FDA and the company producing the vaccine. What does "thinking for yourself" mean in that context? Reading a few papers online doesn't qualitatively change anything: you're just distributing your trust more widely. In practice, it typically means giving yourself license to find whatever study or YouTube video best conforms to your priors. Those people currently setting 5G towers on fire in Britain are excellent at "thinking for themselves" and "consuming a wide variety of sources". Not relying on some sort of authority implies proving information from first principle. How do you go about it? Are you going to run your own clinical trial? That would cost billions, and expose dozens or hundreds of people to whatever danger you're trying to evaluate, defeating the purpose. It would probably also involve more work than you could do yourself, so you'd need to trust some collaborators. Foiled again! I also don't get what's so bad about trust? If you want to define it, it's making predictions (about some person's or institution's honesty and competence) based on past experiences. Is there any difference between extending someone (limited) trust after a good experience to, say, jumping headfirst into a pool after you've swam in it to check its depth? Or cuddling a dog you know to be friendly? Yes, people can change (so can dogs), which is why trust isn't binary, and needs continuous updating. Which is why it's so fortunate that nature has evolved a whole range of emotions, from love to friendship to sympathy to fear, to keep track of this elusive quantity called trust.

atomi 7y ago

I don't know how many times it needs to be said. An entity has the inherent right to control what is on it's own property. Full stop gentlemen.

legostormtroopr 7y ago
Then that entity becomes responsible for everything on its property as well.
- amanaplanacanal 7y ago
  Tradition and law both disagree with you. Perhaps it should be the way you say, but it isn't now and never has been.
  - julybuffalo 7y ago
    Is the NYT responsible for its content? Why isn't YouTube a publisher now rather than a protected platform? Why couldn't the NYT justify itself as a platform instead of a publisher if YouTube is a platform?
axguscbklp 7y ago
Doesn't mean I have to like them when they do.

CuriousSkeptic 7y ago

Problem is that critical thinking in some parts relies on comparing to what’s expected. Now, YouTube’s algorithms are finely tuned to keep you hooked in front of the screen by continuously feeding you things that are just enough outside the expected zone to keep your attention. Slowly eroding away that critical thinking by simply normalizing the non-expected. So while I might agree on the principle I think the area is a little gray.

oxide 7y ago

It isnt censorship. At all. Freedom of speech doesnt apply on websites. It's their platform, they call the shots. Dont like it? Start a competitor and pay the bandwidth bill. Google doesn't have to allow misinformation any more than they have to allow someone being an incendiary asshole in a comment section.

BurningFrog 7y ago
It doesn't violate the US constitution, but I'd still call it censorship. > It's their platform, they call the shots. Agreed. But let's call spades spades.
einpoklum 7y ago
Social-network, mass-participation and mass-publication platforms, like YouTube, are not "theirs". They are a public resource under formal private ownership. This is not unheard of, of course - in some countries it's like that for water, or electricity, or mass transit, or healthcare, or schools and so on. Allowing private owners to have total control of these public resources is obviously not what we want or need. The problem is that the formal owners of such resources also have a tremendous amount of influence - as single entities or altogether ("Big Tech") on the politics of states. And this influence is very fundamental to modern democracies, it's not some aberation. Also: 1. It's nearly impossible to "compete" with such platforms once they are established. 2. Google not only allows misinformation, it intentionally pushes misinformation on YouTube: Sources which are politically acceptable to it are strongly promoted and recommended (e.g. CNN, MSNBC, Fox) - even when they peddle misinformation, which they occasionally do.
axguscbklp 7y ago
It is objectively censorship, it's just not government censorship.
bcheung 7y ago
What about net neutrality and "common carrier"? These seem to be well established goals and values.

krapp 7y ago

>I fear we are centralizing too much power into a few private companies that effectively wield more power than the government and the people for whom it represents. Youtube is not more powerful than the government. The government has the power to create laws, levy taxes, raise an army and wage war, arrest, detain, torture and kill. Youtube only has the power to control speech on its own platform, governments have the power to do so across entire societies, and to enforce that will on businesses subject to their laws. You can say the same about any social media platform - none of them are governments, nor are any more powerful than governments. This kind of hyperbole only undermines the strength of your argument.

specialist 7y ago

Whatever engagement boosting algorithms are, they're not freedom of speech. I don't give two figs about whackadoodles and their conspiracy theories. "outsource our critical thinking to private companies" But by profiting off ignorance, that's exactly what media companies are doing.

mindslight 7y ago

The truth and I have actually been harmed by censorship of this very topic. My aunt tried to send me a link to a video discussing this, wanting my opinion. Of course the link was dead by the time I tried to view it. Which required going back and forth, what's the title of the video, what author, oh that's the one, etc. In the end I was able to view it (my takeaways: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22797275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22797275), but obviously the better the censorship machinery functions, the more effort it takes to get on the same page to address misinformation! And blind blanket assertions that the whole topic is nonsense is just a path to increasing polarization. Meanwhile the author of the video played with and mocked the censorship regime to market themselves. Spelling words out, writing them on a whiteboard, talking up how many times this information has been taken down, etc. The more a topic is censored, the more the nonsensical narratives look like forbidden knowledge. It plays directly into the conspiracy angle. If something technological needs to be done to address misinformation, it revolves around viral sharing, filter bubbles, and most importantly basic scientific literacy. Swiping at the video hosting itself is an ineffective blunt instrument from the same exact toolbox that regressive dictators always reach for.

mikekchar 7y ago

> I'd rather have freedom of speech even if it means tons of misinformation out there. I think this is a false dichotomy. There is a difference between freedom of speech and freedom to use the most popular communication service. Just because a communication service is popular, does not automatically mean that everyone should get equal access. Freedom of speech means that you are free to say what you want. You are free to publish what you want. It does not mean that the most popular distributors of information a forced to carry your message. Going back in time, it means that you are free to write a book. You are free to print the book. You are free to distribute the book. You are not free to demand that the most popular bookstore must carry your book. Neither does it mean that the most popular newspaper must publish serialised versions of your book. It also doesn't mean that you must have equal access to the most cost effective means of distributing your message. Even though the news paper (in times gone by) reached every house and syndicated stories could travel the world incredibly efficiently, it doesn't mean that they are forced to syndicate your story. They have a choice. It may be true that you can't afford to send information to practically everybody in the world like the wire services can do, but that's just too bad. These days because communications are so cheap to be practically free, people often thing that they should be entitled to the best delivery mechanism possible and that everything else should be considered censorship. A private entity choosing not to spread your message is not censorship. It's a choice and it's a choice that every private entity should be able to have. I'd rather have the freedom to choose even if it means that tons of people do not have access to the most popular and efficient means of spreading their message. Of course, if there are groups of people colluding to block your message, then that might be a form of censorship. If you have Youtube making deals with ISPs to make sure that you can't host your own content, etc, then I think that's a problem. That's the kind of action that only governments should be able to take (and with the correct oversight). But people and corporations should have the right to choose what business they want to engage in unless it impinges on special categories that we have already marked for protection (and insane consipracy theories are not marked for such protection).

thebean11 7y ago
I don't think comparing facebook or youtube to "the most popular bookstore" is fair, books (and movies, TV, magazines etc) are just not in the same category as facebook or twitter. I don't think facebook and twitter can be compared to something like an ISP, the truth is somewhere in the middle. I personally find it concerning that more and more everyday human communication is moving to platforms that can arbitrarily ban you from communicating.

weare138 7y ago

Well that's the thing, it's not really an issue of free speech. These people didn't get kicked off the internet. There's nothing stopping them from paying for their own hosting and posting all the videos they want. Let's say you made a site called awesomepupperpics.com for people to post people of their puppers that you're paying for and people start posting pictures of their cats. Is it your responsibility to pay to host those cat pics? No. Are you violating cat owners rights by deleting those cat pics? Also no. You as the owner and proprietor of awesomepupperpics.com also have rights. No one is saying people can't post cat pics on the internet just not on awesomepupperpics.com because puppers are awesome.