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Man, this comment thread is really harshing my buzz. So many folks here seem real eager to hype their systems and methods for ensuring all this oh-so easily id

Man, this comment thread is really harshing my buzz. So many folks here seem real eager to hype their systems and methods for ensuring all this oh-so easily identifiable misinformation has no route to most, which when implemented would stop this huge threat to our civilization. Typing up their clever ideas, full of good intentions (not being sarcastic, my default presumption is you all mean well), each author implicitly assumes their superiority over the masses who are so easily duped into believing awful and dangerous mistruths based on a few headlines boosted on Twitter. The mindset, stripped of all the complications and rhetoric and real positive intent, boils down to this: "These poor fools are completely lost, already in a world of hurt, and their naivety threatens all we hold dear, and so we must protect them from themselves." Already in this thread, all the usual quibbles & arguments for & against this particular form of censorship are being studiously re-litigated. I feel strongly enough to write internet comments about very few issues and my feelings in favour of free speech fundamentalism are making it difficult to stay out of the fray. But I will restrain myself--not because it's a bad thing to do, but just because the ROI on everyone's time is so low, considering the tiny likelihood that all these words spilled out here will change even one mind. Instead, I will ask a question that thus far has not been raised, and that I think is fundamental to this issue: Q: What problems are we trying to solve here? It seems that somewhere in the recent past (if I had to ballpark it, I'd say this all began to rise sometime around 8 Nov 2016) basically everyone in society came to the agreement that misinformation is running rampant, so rampant it may be the #2 item trafficked on the web, King Porn secure in his crown. Not only do we all seem to agree that misinformation is everywhere, but we all seem to also agree that this misinformation's impact is a massive threat to our society--the camel's legs are shaking under the strain, and Zuck's machine just keeps throwing straw. This seems quite bizarre to me. Can someone here who's proposed one of these Democracy Protection Apparatuses tell me what it is y'all're trying to fix? Make no mistake--I am quite aware that basically every public communications channel, not just the web but every channel, is under pressure from a constant flood of messaging aimed at literally changing minds, changing what and how we all think about this concern or that. I am quite well apprised of how the anti-vaxxers spread their wild, unbelievable propaganda, leveraging facebook moms' groups and instagram knitting forums to spread their evil & subversive messages. I know all about how the wily Ruskies have become the world's greatest social media influencers imaginable, who can take a shoestring budget that couldn't cover a major campaign's one day hotel spend and swing the most important election on earth. Of course, as with the printing press and radio and television and fax machines and even pagers, I completely believe, based on solid evidence, that power factions attempt to leverage all broadly-adopted comms channels to their own selfish ends. I'm not denying that. But can anyone here clearly identify what problem is right now such a huge concern that we should cheer on a corporation--one that wields power over our lives like no other ever has--as it unilaterally decides what we can and cannot here? I mean, Susan's big reason here has been laid out explicitly: The 'rony pandemic is of such great concern that our ears should be blocked off from any sound that doesn't emanate from Official Authority, in this case, the WHO, an organization which five months ago nobody cared about at all and now everyone knows is about as credible as The National Enquirer (todo: insert BatBoy joke). I mean, to me it is clearly obvious that accepting censorship is a huge risk. I'm not crazy, I don't think there should be literally zero restriction on free speech. The world would be a mess of scams were fraud permissible, for instance. But the risks censorship brings are huge and asymmetric--only us little people suffer when the surveillance and enforcement mechanisms censorship requires are abused. The wealthy and connected will always have more access to information than we do. When the abuse happens, it will always be to their benefit, because they either are the censors themselves or they control the censors. As we stand to lose the most when censorship is abused, we should have an extremely high bar for any justification for it. (Just think about that phrase, "dangerous information," for a second--we're not talking nuclear launch codes, we're talking questioning public policy, this is what Susan thinks is dangerous. Clearly she thinks very little of us.) Censorship is power. Actually, censorship is the root of the power hierarchy. It's the most important tool in the shed, as a tractor is to a farmer so is censorship to Team Elite. They want to control our minds. And many people in here are cheering them on.

knzhou 6y ago
There really is no need for hysteria here. If YouTube began issuing a million times more bans, it might approach the quality of an average newspaper in terms of accuracy. Would we be living in a dystopia at that point? No, we'd be living just like we did in the year 2000, when YouTube wasn't around but newspapers were. Just like a nutjob in 2000, Icke still has print, radio, TV, going outside with a megaphone, and going door to door with pamphlets to promote his message. In fact, he's even luckier, because he still has access to the entire rest of the internet. But wait, you say: in the year 2000, Icke wouldn't have been able to get a following of millions on print or radio! They wouldn't have let him on! Indeed, so what this actually proves is that in 2020, there is far more free speech than there was in 2000. We are at historically high levels of free speech. Freaking out over this is like thinking we've gone back to the Bronze Age every time the stock market goes down 1%.
- sjwalter 6y ago
  I won't quibble the strange comparison between YouTube, whose second-most content producer is a man dubbed PewDiePie who talks about video games and anime memes, to news organizations, though it is quite tempting. This is what I find so strange. Literally zero people on this forum have indicated they are in sync with this dude's views (I hadn't heard of this guy until now, I have no idea what he's about), and from what I can tell, the crowd here, which I'd judge is a cut or two above the average web forum, finds whatever his views are absurd and his argumentation unconvincing. And so, since he says things we may all agree are wrong, we think it is the right move to remove his views from where they can be found? I mean, YT has created for itself many many mechanisms through which it can shape the messages emitting from its platform, from the blunt-force banhammer we're all here yakking about, to much more subtle though nearly as effective, like how if I watch a video by Bon Appetite, the autoplayed Next Up video is always another video from Bon Appetite--if I watched for an unbroken day, I'm sure it'd be 24 straight of test kitchen hijinx. The internet's promise was the democratization of mass communication. This entails both sides of the table, producer and consumer. Infinity websites means that I'm not stuck flipping between only 120 channels if I can't find something I like, a massive improvement over television's narrow and excitement-filled band of allowable opinion. OBVIOUSLY I don't think any crackpot should be somehow guaranteed to have his views pushed onto millions. But the reason the internet's promise was so great was that it allowed us the choice--we could, if we'd like, write and publish a piece detailing the malfeasance of my corrupt municipal government without ever needing to consider much less engage the editor in chief of the only local paper, who let's face it, could probably be easily convinced by the rich local businessdude, given his poverty-level wages. But this is why I think this is so fundamental an issue, and why I am puzzled by your response and that of many here. What damage do you really think David Icke is causing? So I gather that he's espousing a view that states that quarantines and lockdowns are terrible and ineffective, and encouraging people to ignore them and freely associate. OK. I understand that you believe the expression of that view could lead to many people deciding to ignore whatever orders or ordinances that have been imposed upon them. Here's a picture from Pier49 in NYC today: https://twitter.com/JackKaplanNY/status/1256761546451058689/photo/1 https://twitter.com/JackKaplanNY/status/1256761546451058689/... If you don't want to click the link, the picture shows an urban park packed with people, mostly young men, sitting and standing on the grass, wearing summer clothes, most appear to be in some state of enjoyment--it's definitely not any kind of overt protest, it's just a bunch of normal people who got out of their apartments and are hanging out outside as everyone wants to do on beautiful sunny days. Do you think all of these people influenced by YT or other social media content to subversively break the lockdown orders? If it were possible to prove it, I'd bet a significant chunk of my net worth that social media had basically nothing to do with the appearance of this crowd. All it took was some mercury rising and a clear sky. And so you believe that this Iche guy's messages about coronavirus and lockdown are so incredibly risky to broadcast on any major platform that his views and any like them should be verboten on major platforms--it seems you cheer this censorship on, hooray for the good guys, we killed off yet another misinformation peddler whose subversive views could have killed us all! ...and whose subversive views are by default what literally all the people in the picture, the thousands of normal people who probably like me never heard of this Iche guy before, who all it took to convince them to go outside some light and heat. Think about that: Yay Google! Continue on your path of determining what messages are acceptable not just on your platform, but by extension, setting the position and width of the overton window for maybe a majority of the population. If that doesn't seem like some hollow-ass justification for censorship, I dunno what to say.

knzhou 6y ago

There really is no need for hysteria here. If YouTube began issuing a million times more bans, it might approach the quality of an average newspaper in terms of accuracy. Would we be living in a dystopia at that point? No, we'd be living just like we did in the year 2000, when YouTube wasn't around but newspapers were. Just like a nutjob in 2000, Icke still has print, radio, TV, going outside with a megaphone, and going door to door with pamphlets to promote his message. In fact, he's even luckier, because he still has access to the entire rest of the internet. But wait, you say: in the year 2000, Icke wouldn't have been able to get a following of millions on print or radio! They wouldn't have let him on! Indeed, so what this actually proves is that in 2020, there is far more free speech than there was in 2000. We are at historically high levels of free speech. Freaking out over this is like thinking we've gone back to the Bronze Age every time the stock market goes down 1%.

sjwalter 6y ago
I won't quibble the strange comparison between YouTube, whose second-most content producer is a man dubbed PewDiePie who talks about video games and anime memes, to news organizations, though it is quite tempting. This is what I find so strange. Literally zero people on this forum have indicated they are in sync with this dude's views (I hadn't heard of this guy until now, I have no idea what he's about), and from what I can tell, the crowd here, which I'd judge is a cut or two above the average web forum, finds whatever his views are absurd and his argumentation unconvincing. And so, since he says things we may all agree are wrong, we think it is the right move to remove his views from where they can be found? I mean, YT has created for itself many many mechanisms through which it can shape the messages emitting from its platform, from the blunt-force banhammer we're all here yakking about, to much more subtle though nearly as effective, like how if I watch a video by Bon Appetite, the autoplayed Next Up video is always another video from Bon Appetite--if I watched for an unbroken day, I'm sure it'd be 24 straight of test kitchen hijinx. The internet's promise was the democratization of mass communication. This entails both sides of the table, producer and consumer. Infinity websites means that I'm not stuck flipping between only 120 channels if I can't find something I like, a massive improvement over television's narrow and excitement-filled band of allowable opinion. OBVIOUSLY I don't think any crackpot should be somehow guaranteed to have his views pushed onto millions. But the reason the internet's promise was so great was that it allowed us the choice--we could, if we'd like, write and publish a piece detailing the malfeasance of my corrupt municipal government without ever needing to consider much less engage the editor in chief of the only local paper, who let's face it, could probably be easily convinced by the rich local businessdude, given his poverty-level wages. But this is why I think this is so fundamental an issue, and why I am puzzled by your response and that of many here. What damage do you really think David Icke is causing? So I gather that he's espousing a view that states that quarantines and lockdowns are terrible and ineffective, and encouraging people to ignore them and freely associate. OK. I understand that you believe the expression of that view could lead to many people deciding to ignore whatever orders or ordinances that have been imposed upon them. Here's a picture from Pier49 in NYC today: https://twitter.com/JackKaplanNY/status/1256761546451058689/photo/1 https://twitter.com/JackKaplanNY/status/1256761546451058689/... If you don't want to click the link, the picture shows an urban park packed with people, mostly young men, sitting and standing on the grass, wearing summer clothes, most appear to be in some state of enjoyment--it's definitely not any kind of overt protest, it's just a bunch of normal people who got out of their apartments and are hanging out outside as everyone wants to do on beautiful sunny days. Do you think all of these people influenced by YT or other social media content to subversively break the lockdown orders? If it were possible to prove it, I'd bet a significant chunk of my net worth that social media had basically nothing to do with the appearance of this crowd. All it took was some mercury rising and a clear sky. And so you believe that this Iche guy's messages about coronavirus and lockdown are so incredibly risky to broadcast on any major platform that his views and any like them should be verboten on major platforms--it seems you cheer this censorship on, hooray for the good guys, we killed off yet another misinformation peddler whose subversive views could have killed us all! ...and whose subversive views are by default what literally all the people in the picture, the thousands of normal people who probably like me never heard of this Iche guy before, who all it took to convince them to go outside some light and heat. Think about that: Yay Google! Continue on your path of determining what messages are acceptable not just on your platform, but by extension, setting the position and width of the overton window for maybe a majority of the population. If that doesn't seem like some hollow-ass justification for censorship, I dunno what to say.