22 ms·
I fear there isn't "one truth" out there, despite the content providers' and fact-checkers' attempts :( The idea is: "We are the decent, good, people who know
by stcredzero 6y ago
I fear there isn't "one truth" out there, despite the content providers' and fact-checkers' attempts :(
The idea is: "We are the decent, good, people who know the truth. Now we control the platforms, so it's only well and good we control the information, and we tell the deplorable others what they can and can't say."
Almost everyone in the history books as a horrible oppressor has told themselves that narrative. Many of them were brave, noble, and well meaning, and had an ideology that told them they were in the right.
How are the employees of YouTube or any tech company exempt from those forces? What makes them somehow wiser or smarter than everyone else in history?
- mmazing 6y agoLet the market sort them out then, right?
- louwrentius 6y agoThank you for the laugh.
- mmazing 6y agoYou are quite welcome. :D
- troughway 6y agoVery hard for the market to sort out NSA-backed companies like Google, Facebook et al.
- guscost 6y agoThe market won't sort them out, but the courts will. Wait until they are deemed a publisher, and no longer exempt from liability[0] for all of the content that they publish. Unfortunately they hire a lot of lobbyists so it might be a long wait. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
- judge2020 6y agoRevoking 230 won't make the executives at YouTube go "gosh darn, guess we'll have to start taking a loss by employing hundreds of thousands of moderators to literally watch every video uploaded", they'll constrain and limit the platform in any way which still guarantees similar or greater ad revenue. That is, if there isn't any legal loophole like requiring creators sign legal paperwork which makes creators their own "publisher" or something along those lines.
- guscost 6y agoThey'll probably cull everything that doesn't earn them ad revenue, to minimize the fallout. The content will trend toward sanitized garbage and the viewers will start leaking to somewhere else.
- holler 6y agoThis is all great news if you're building a new social project...
- nwienert 6y agoOr if you just want more diversity.
- holler 6y agothat's the problem... the same handful of companies have dominated the space for the past decade and mostly monopolized the attention. we need more competitors.
- dvtrn 6y agoAny fun theories on how we ended up replicating the same issue of consolidated TV broadcasters and traditional media companies with internet media platforms and content outlets? We’ve had such a long time between the passage of things like the Fairness Doctrine and now to turn the boat (not to mention countless critiques of the consolidation of local news and syndicated television networks for examples), maybe learn a few lessons along the way that I wonder if this isn’t an emergent outcome and is in reality an inherent one. Is this an extreme terminus of network effects?
- new_time 6y agoWe can't wait for markets to sort themselves out while a few executives and their well connected friends control and decide the information we get to see and hear. The stakes are too high to wait for a market solution here.
- yters 6y agoOr a market solution will be decisive if it gets to that point. The courts broke up Microsoft, and it's not like that hurt them at all.
- twomoretime 6y agoIt's the same force that has been influencing academia for some time now.
- immutate 6y agoSources/references?
- andrewclunn 6y agoits obvious and pervasive to anyone paying atention. id make a more subatantive response, but people who speak actual truth get downvoted or shadowbanned on here (as I have), so I'll settlw dor telling you to take your smug pseuodo intellectual dismissal and shovw it.
- twomoretime 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_academics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_... Vastly understates the influence, but it's a great start. Edit: the partisan downvoting has been particularly bad as of late. I was asked for sources and I provided them. Academia is not immune to ideology.
- robrenaud 6y agoGermany bans holocaust denial. That seems fine.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 6y agoThe devil is always in the details. What does “denial of X” even mean? Can you dispute certain facts, like numbers and dates? Who gets to decide the ultimate truth? It takes a long time for the details of history to settle. For example, nobody knew most dinosaurs had feathers until the last decade.
- throwaway2048 6y agoTruth exists, sorry for those who like to pretend it dosen't.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 6y agoSo would you support banning everyone on YouTube who went against WHO’s tweet[1] saying there’s no evidence of human to human transmission? That was only in January. https://nypost.com/2020/03/20/who-haunted-by-old-tweet-saying-china-found-no-human-transmission-of-coronavirus/ https://nypost.com/2020/03/20/who-haunted-by-old-tweet-sayin...
- immutate 6y agoFirst of all, this is about “YouTube banning 'medically unsubstantiated' content.” as well as content that “would go against World Health Organization recommendations,” which (if those guidelines are followed) doesn’t mean banning of people or discourse, but rather disinformation. Secondly, the WHO tweeted that, but had actually already acknowledged human-to-human transmission multiple times[1][2] in the days before the tweet, so no, I wouldn’t support banning discussion around a tweet. 1. https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of-unkown-cause-china/en/ https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of-unk... 2. https://www.who.int/china/news/detail/09-01-2020-who-statement-regarding-cluster-of-pneumonia-cases-in-wuhan-china https://www.who.int/china/news/detail/09-01-2020-who-stateme...
- heavenlyblue 6y agoAlmost no one in previous history had an ability to directly target poor, uneducated masses which their own content created in their own bedroom. Also let’s be honest - the likes of Hitler actually came from the likes of people who would tell you to stop listening to WHO advice and to go start fires in 5G towers. Don’t get me wrong, freedom of speech et. al., and we’re probably also going to get burnt by the freedom with which today’s global platforms invent the rules - but the laws are being written now; and we’re obviously not dealing with an easy, black-and-white answer.
- calpaterson 6y ago> Almost no one in previous history had an ability to directly target poor, uneducated masses which their own content created in their own bedroom. Yes they did - where do you think Martin Luther composed his 95 theses?
- MisterBastahrd 6y agoHe didn't target poor, uneducated masses. He targeted the most educated people in his society, the clerics of the Catholic church.
- throwaway8879 6y agoHe translated the new testament from Greek to German. That helped the poor more than anybody else.
- MisterBastahrd 6y agoAnd how many people could read his 95 Thesis in that era again?
- anigbrowl 6y agoPrinting technology was the new hotness of his time. https://www.history.com/news/printing-press-renaissance https://www.history.com/news/printing-press-renaissance
- bosswipe 6y agoThanks to Google, Facebook and the others this is the golden era of being able to widely disseminate your alternate theories on everything. If that is your definition of freedom then you are less oppressed then any other humans in history.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- roenxi 6y agoSome people would like freedom to discuss the coronavirus without being oppressed. They can't on YouTube if this policy takes hold. The sort of people who contradict the WHO happened to be right on this one; they predicted a problem early and tended to pre-empt the WHO on upcoming problems. This was also expected, because the WHO only advises stuff that is already obvious to everyone. Interested parties can offer better advice than the WHO because they can move with news while the WHO has to wait. Case in point, Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity runs a prepper/doomsday style channel. He is also a very smart bloke with an honest-to-goodness PhD in a virus-related field. Who are YouTube to say his opinions are less valid than an organisation that can't say "Taiwan" in a sentence and can only say things that are politically palatable to China and the US? Chris' advice on the coronavirus has been consistently high quality, accurate, sourced and early compared to the WHO. His only fault is his standards for safety are a lot higher than are reasonable. This policy will be aimed at exactly people like him. He has been contradicting the authorities all the way.
- seppin 6y ago> freedom to discuss the coronavirus Unfortunately platforms that reach billions must prioritize the danger of misinformation spreading that far and wide over allowing for every dangerous and wrong opinion. The complete and total censorship you fear never emerges, Youtube if anything is far too lenient on allowing terrible opinions to linger on their platform. They never do away with anything besides the most harmful, hate filled rhetoric.
- 6y ago
- seppin 6y ago> The idea is: "We are the decent, good, people who know the truth. Now we control the platforms, so it's only well and good we control the information, and we tell the deplorable others what they can and can't say." Yes and the reality TV show star criminal idiot is the solution. You get me 100% with the problem, you lose me totally trying to say MAGA is the answer.
- doktrin 6y ago> What makes them somehow wiser or smarter than everyone else in history? Nothing, else they wouldn't have created these cesspools of disinformation in the first place. Of course, now that they attempt to modestly curtail the worst habits exhibited on their platform in the middle of a public health crisis they can definitely expect lots of overwrought hand wringing and hitler callbacks.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago> How are the employees of YouTube or any tech company exempt from those forces? What makes them somehow wiser or smarter than everyone else in history? Forget history (it's popular) what about technical ability to do this? We can probably share information about "my sharona" after all. Also, does youtube really want viewers it constantly has to protect from bad information?
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoThis is how all news media operated before the internet created mouthpieces for non-professionals. In addition to suppressing some inconvenient truths they filtered out crackpot ideas that have become a plague in modern times.
- etangent 6y agoThis comment has so much elitism in it I can smell the grey poupon from across the wire.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoYou're right. We're so much better off when a significant segment of the population believes that the Secretary of State is pimping out children from a pizza restaurant.
- logicchains 6y agoYes, because the idea of rich, influential men pimping out children in modern America is simply unthinkable and certainly hasn't happened recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein
- labster 6y agoThe Secretary in question is a woman. Don’t just assume all secretaries are men, that’s sexist.
- pjc50 6y agoThe conspiracy theory stuff is seemingly always exactly wrong about this. Not only does it magnify unsubstantiated allegations, it often helps suppress the genuine ones; look at how badly the Weinstein accusers have been treated.
- raz32dust 6y agoThis is a well-known issue, but what is your solution? Ban internet and go back to the 90s? It's pointless to gripe about this without a good alternative.
- ZenPsycho 6y agoSo, how many deaths are you willing to be responsible for? make sure to scale it up to youtube size.
- ZenPsycho 6y agoReally disappointed in hacker news today. Children all of you, crying for the right to scream "fire" in a crowded theater.
- tick_tock_tick 6y agoYou know they reverse the opinion on that right? You are legally allowed too.
- dependenttypes 6y agoAh, this one again. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22914333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22914333 https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
- liaukovv 6y agoDo you even understand how insulting it is to deny other people agency? That's the most insulting thing you can do or say, worse than racism, sexism or whatever else, it is plain denying that the other person is a human with their own free will.
- reaperducer 6y agoHow are the employees of YouTube or any tech company exempt from those forces? What makes them somehow wiser or smarter than everyone else in history? Just ask them. They'll tell you. And tell you. And tell you.
- SquishyPanda23 6y agoNo, the idea is "there is a massive coordinated disinformation campaign designed to make the pandemic worse, what, if anything should we do to address it?" There are two obvious options (and lots of options in between). (1) Do nothing. Pros: the propaganda gets clicks, which means revenue. The armchair libertarians are happy because nation states continue to have the freedom to saturate all communication channels with lies. Cons: The pandemic gets worse, mass graves continue to fill up, the US continues to destabilize politically and economically. (2) Learn from past mistakes and address the propaganda with some sort of restrictions. Pros: limits the spread of deadly misinformation, greater chance the US remains economically and politically stable. Cons: Lost revenue. The restrictions will never be perfect. The armchair libertarians get riled up because it reminds them of a Hayek fairy tale they once read. YouTube is part of a private company. They're under no obligation to give a platform to the propaganda arms of every world's intelligence agency.
- aww_dang 6y ago>'The armchair libertarians...Hayek fairy tale...' This is noxious. >'YouTube is part of a private company. They're under no obligation to...' This is the free-market, libertarian position.
- La1n 6y ago>This is the free-market, libertarian position. It is the status quo. Which in this case is free-market.
- SquishyPanda23 6y ago> This is noxious. Sure my tone could have been much better. You have a good point. But political dogmatism is also noxious. Personally I think HN is at its worst when discussions get derailed into a dogmatic recital of political cliches. > This is the free-market, libertarian position Right, I'm deliberately framing the issue that way.
- freeMoneySry 6y agoApple has lived on this motto. Google is joining them.
- buzzerbetrayed 6y agoHow exactly do you figure? Google has built a company around it deciding what information gets to be seen. They’ve done this for decades. Apple sells computer hardware. Even if Apple has recently started curating information, they still only curate a fraction of a percent of what Google does. Suggesting that Apple has historically been at fault here and that Google is now just joining them sounds incredibly biased.
- freeMoneySry 6y agoGoogle has been pretty open to letting creators share. Apple is like a dictator decide who is allowed to share.
- buzzerbetrayed 6y agoK but that isn’t the issue. The issue is Google choosing what information people get to know. They are the ones in the position of power to control that.
- baddox 6y agoHow are police, judges, jurors, etc. exempt from this narrative? Or do you believe that the entire legal system simply should not exist at all, given that it clearly needs to determine the truth value of important statements?
- golergka 6y agoIt should always kept as small as humanly possible. Same with other government structures, too.
- baddox 6y agoSo, people who are tasked with determining truths like whether someone committed murder is okay, but it’s not okay to determine whether an online advertisement about a medical treatment is medically accurate?
- golergka 6y agoI'm so glad we're discussing it on HN, so I can use better analogies: it's feature creep. Imagine a product wich was originally elegant and perfomant, almost in a unix way - but then dozens of product managers, each with best of intentions, started adding features to it. Oh, and the product itself was something akin to operating system kernel in terms of security - having monopoly on violence and able to literally kill people - but all those product managers wouldn't hear about moving all these shiny new features into userland, because of perfomance and ease of development. That's what a typical modern government is.
- michaelt 6y agoWho do these "judges" think they are, with their absurd, arbitrary, oppressive fantasies that "murder" exists and is "illegal"? If only our judges would get with the program and acknowledge facts don't exist, and there's no such thing as wrong or right, true of false :)
- cafebabbe 6y agoChecks and balances.
- Timpy 6y agoThere doesn't have to be one truth, there can be a landscape of truths and that's fine. Imagine a youtube personality with a large following made some absurd claim like "drinking bleach will help." You don't need to be a self proclaimed silicone prophet and be wiser and smarter than everyone else in history to censor that video, it's possible to stop stupid people from influencing other stupid people into doing serious damage without oppressing anybody. Imagine if the claim wasn't just inflicting self harm, but encouraging a bad meme that will spread the virus.
- cmeacham98 6y agoThis sort of weird slippery slope argument that banning obviously bad advice somehow leads to youtube becoming a "horrible oppressor" doesn't pass the smell test. By this reasoning, _any_ platform that features _any form of moderation at all_ will devolve into oppression. Is HN at risk of becoming oppressive due to banning flamebait and spam comments?
- arghwhat 6y agoModeration is not necessarily censorship. It is only censorship if the content is removed based on the content itself. For example, shutting down a flamewar for simply being aggressive is not censorship, as long as the same discussion would have been permitted if held in good spirit. Censoring "wrong" content likely has bad outcomes, the worst being that with only "good" content, critical thinking may get even sloppier.
- cmeacham98 6y agoHN has plenty of rules that remove content "based on the content itself". For example, HN bans job ads (outside of 'who is hiring' threads). There are no circumstances where a job ad post is allowed outside of 'who is hiring' and YC-funded companies, not even "in good spirit". Similarly, the HN FAQ says not to post comments complaining about paywalls, and there is no 'unless you are civil' exception. Again, does banning content from an internet forum inevitably lead to "oppression" or "bad outcomes"? If so, why hasn't this happened to HN/Reddit/Twitter/etc?
- prox 6y agoAs someone who did a lot of moderation in the past, people forget any platform is more akin to a cafe, instead of a public square. A cafe has rules that keep a pleasant atmosphere. A public square has a public function and needs rules to allow for a broad discourse or protests. One could argue if there is a certain size where a platform like youtube becomes a public square. But on the whole its their room, their rules.
- zepto 6y ago
- ngcazz 6y agoWHO is the _world health organization_ dude. We're in the midst of a pandemic. You're using a moralistic argument to respond to the form while ignoring the substance. In the meantime, Trump advocates injecting disinfectant, what argument have you got for him?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Udik 6y agoTo me a lot that's bad with Google's politics is epitomised by the move from "don't be evil" to "do the right thing". The first was a neutral stance: just abstain from behaving so as to cause harm; the second is an active position, where the company is encouraged to act in pursuit of whatever it thinks might be good. Thus mixing its role of technological medium with that of publisher and of political advocate.