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> Suppose America goes to war with Examplistan. What does that mean for the Examplistanis? Will they get deplatformed as enemy propaganda? Will the internet bec

> Suppose America goes to war with Examplistan. What does that mean for the Examplistanis? Will they get deplatformed as enemy propaganda? Will the internet become a propaganda machine for wherever those large companies are headquartered? Isn't this already the case? You can post videos on YouTube encouraging people to join the U.S. Marines, but not Al-Queda. I guess I don't find this very disturbing. Why should Google be required to host data for an enemy state? > What if Google was anti-LGBT? Would we grant it the same moderation powers? Would we be ok with YouTube removing or demonetising videos featuring homosexual displays of affection? YouTube's policies reflect mainstream social mores. Had YouTube existed 30 years ago, it almost certainly would have done this, and most people would have been fine with it. If YouTube did this today, it would quickly cease to be the dominant video hosting platform.

paganel 6y ago
> Why should Google be required to host data for an enemy state? It's MS, not Google, but personally I find things like these very wrong and disturbing [1]: > GitHub, the world’s largest host of source code, is preventing users in Iran, Syria, Crimea and potentially other sanctioned nations from accessing portions of the service, chief executive of the Microsoft-owned firm said. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/29/github-ban-sanctioned-countries/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/29/github-ban-sanctioned-coun...
sneak 6y ago
> Why should Google be required to host data for an enemy state? For the same reason the telephone company isn’t allowed to arbitrarily cancel your phone service based on who you choose to call with it. > YouTube's policies reflect mainstream social mores. This is precisely the problem. Before, the bar to be silenced was the law; now the bar to be silenced is arbitrary application of “mainstream social mores”. Surely you see the problem there? Have you never derived benefit from media or creative works that fall outside of “mainstream social mores”? Even if you haven’t, YouTube’s been deleting videos of war crimes in Syria, making it harder for investigators to track them down and document them. How’s that for “mainstream social mores”?
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Are they deleting them due to graphic explicitness?
  - sneak 6y ago
    Does it matter? Wouldn’t you want evidence of war crimes to be both graphic and explicit, therefore making it better documentation of a crime and more likely to assist in the prosecution of the criminal(s)?
    - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
      It does matter why they ban things. They make mistakes too, sometimes put things back. It always matters.
      - sneak 6y ago
        I disagree. The danger is not YouTube or YouTube's policies, whatever they may be at any point in time. The danger is centralized models that permit invisible, sometimes-on, sometimes-off, point-and-click censorship. Those models fail when the military puts a machine gun in a sysadmin's face in wartime, regardless of how good or decent their censorship policies were in peacetime. It's the model that's bad, not YouTube's current policies.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    If you ban graphic depictions of war, you should ban all depictions of war. Otherwise you are whitewashing war and will warp the general perception of war, quite possibly making war more likely to occur as a result.
- cfmcdonald 6y ago
  > For the same reason the telephone company isn’t allowed to arbitrarily cancel your phone service based on who you choose to call with it. That's not an analogous case. YouTube is more like a broadcast medium like TV or radio, and those have never been treated as common carriers. A sexy phone call between two people doesn't affect AT&T's reputation, but pornography hosted on YouTube would affect theirs. > This is precisely the problem. Before, the bar to be silenced was the law; now the bar to be silenced is arbitrary application of “mainstream social mores”. Surely you see the problem there? Have you never derived benefit from media or creative works that fall outside of “mainstream social mores”? Being taken down from YouTube does not equate to being silenced. There are many other ways you can express your ideas and opinions, especially if you are willing to do so in non-video form. And the bar to expression on someone else's publishing platform has never only been legal. Every medium has had gatekeepers, generally far more stringent than YouTube's. > Even if you haven’t, YouTube’s been deleting videos of war crimes in Syria, making it harder for investigators to track them down and document them. How’s that for “mainstream social mores”? I don't see why it should be the responsibility of a for-profit entertainment company to provide hosting for war crimes investigators, any more than I would expect Hulu or Netflix to do the same. It would make far more sense to me for journalists or NGOs or governments to provide a place for people to upload their video evidence. There is no need for them to host it publicly, which is the expensive part of YouTube.
gerland 6y ago
> YouTube's policies reflect mainstream social mores. The real problem is that YT also influences those social mores. It's a snowballing effect that no one is able to stop. New social trend >> YT starts to promote it >> Becomes social norm >> YT starts to enforce it >> New social trends are able to spawn only from the previous trend. You might want to keep up this situation as long as it fits your point of view, but you have to take into account that this process will warp this exact point of view in ways that you do not control. 20 years ago the left was synonymous with freedom of choice and individualism, now there are hardly any traces of those values left. Excuse the pun. If YT always bends to the "popular opinion", then it actually means that it has knee-jerk reactions to the most emotional outbursts. What influences the norm is in reality the base instinct, dopamine fueled, thoughtless reactivity without any plan or purpose. It does not matter if you will take left or right wing ideology. Platforms like YT are instrumental in making sure that in the end we will get the worst version of it. How the hell did the left end up in a poistion where they represent the worst mixture of Orwell and Huxley? I have no doubt that it would be near impossible to end at this place without corps capitalising on social moods.

paganel 6y ago

> Why should Google be required to host data for an enemy state? It's MS, not Google, but personally I find things like these very wrong and disturbing [1]: > GitHub, the world’s largest host of source code, is preventing users in Iran, Syria, Crimea and potentially other sanctioned nations from accessing portions of the service, chief executive of the Microsoft-owned firm said. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/29/github-ban-sanctioned-countries/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/29/github-ban-sanctioned-coun...

sneak 6y ago

> Why should Google be required to host data for an enemy state? For the same reason the telephone company isn’t allowed to arbitrarily cancel your phone service based on who you choose to call with it. > YouTube's policies reflect mainstream social mores. This is precisely the problem. Before, the bar to be silenced was the law; now the bar to be silenced is arbitrary application of “mainstream social mores”. Surely you see the problem there? Have you never derived benefit from media or creative works that fall outside of “mainstream social mores”? Even if you haven’t, YouTube’s been deleting videos of war crimes in Syria, making it harder for investigators to track them down and document them. How’s that for “mainstream social mores”?

runawaybottle 6y ago
Are they deleting them due to graphic explicitness?
- sneak 6y ago
  Does it matter? Wouldn’t you want evidence of war crimes to be both graphic and explicit, therefore making it better documentation of a crime and more likely to assist in the prosecution of the criminal(s)?
  - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
    It does matter why they ban things. They make mistakes too, sometimes put things back. It always matters.
    - sneak 6y ago
      I disagree. The danger is not YouTube or YouTube's policies, whatever they may be at any point in time. The danger is centralized models that permit invisible, sometimes-on, sometimes-off, point-and-click censorship. Those models fail when the military puts a machine gun in a sysadmin's face in wartime, regardless of how good or decent their censorship policies were in peacetime. It's the model that's bad, not YouTube's current policies.
- catalogia 6y ago
  If you ban graphic depictions of war, you should ban all depictions of war. Otherwise you are whitewashing war and will warp the general perception of war, quite possibly making war more likely to occur as a result.
cfmcdonald 6y ago
> For the same reason the telephone company isn’t allowed to arbitrarily cancel your phone service based on who you choose to call with it. That's not an analogous case. YouTube is more like a broadcast medium like TV or radio, and those have never been treated as common carriers. A sexy phone call between two people doesn't affect AT&T's reputation, but pornography hosted on YouTube would affect theirs. > This is precisely the problem. Before, the bar to be silenced was the law; now the bar to be silenced is arbitrary application of “mainstream social mores”. Surely you see the problem there? Have you never derived benefit from media or creative works that fall outside of “mainstream social mores”? Being taken down from YouTube does not equate to being silenced. There are many other ways you can express your ideas and opinions, especially if you are willing to do so in non-video form. And the bar to expression on someone else's publishing platform has never only been legal. Every medium has had gatekeepers, generally far more stringent than YouTube's. > Even if you haven’t, YouTube’s been deleting videos of war crimes in Syria, making it harder for investigators to track them down and document them. How’s that for “mainstream social mores”? I don't see why it should be the responsibility of a for-profit entertainment company to provide hosting for war crimes investigators, any more than I would expect Hulu or Netflix to do the same. It would make far more sense to me for journalists or NGOs or governments to provide a place for people to upload their video evidence. There is no need for them to host it publicly, which is the expensive part of YouTube.

gerland 6y ago

> YouTube's policies reflect mainstream social mores. The real problem is that YT also influences those social mores. It's a snowballing effect that no one is able to stop. New social trend >> YT starts to promote it >> Becomes social norm >> YT starts to enforce it >> New social trends are able to spawn only from the previous trend. You might want to keep up this situation as long as it fits your point of view, but you have to take into account that this process will warp this exact point of view in ways that you do not control. 20 years ago the left was synonymous with freedom of choice and individualism, now there are hardly any traces of those values left. Excuse the pun. If YT always bends to the "popular opinion", then it actually means that it has knee-jerk reactions to the most emotional outbursts. What influences the norm is in reality the base instinct, dopamine fueled, thoughtless reactivity without any plan or purpose. It does not matter if you will take left or right wing ideology. Platforms like YT are instrumental in making sure that in the end we will get the worst version of it. How the hell did the left end up in a poistion where they represent the worst mixture of Orwell and Huxley? I have no doubt that it would be near impossible to end at this place without corps capitalising on social moods.