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Great set of questions and points. > I struggle a bit with whether YouTube should be legally required to follow the First Amendment (they are a US corporation,

Great set of questions and points. > I struggle a bit with whether YouTube should be legally required to follow the First Amendment (they are a US corporation, not a government), but I can say that I think that their deletion of David Icke's account leaves a bad taste in my mouth- not because I like him, but because I worry that YouTube may one day bow to majority pressure and censor a topic in which I belong to the minority. As an aside to this topic, I would be a bit troubled if YouTube were enforcing policies silently without telling stating what they were. In this case, they are stating what those guidelines are, and how the criteria of how they enforce them, although that brings up another point of yours: > It would be great if YouTube adopted easy to follow policies and would terminate accounts based on clear breaches of policy, rather than just playing whack-a-mole with whatever topic is hot at the moment. There are tons of other videos spreading misinformation on YouTube about other public health topics (the anti-vax movement being a big one), why is David Icke's account being deleted and not theirs? There are tons of other conspiracy theorists on YouTube, why are Alex Jones and David Icke the only ones to get their accounts deleted? I would surmise it could be a factor of scale, but even if it wasn't I am not sure it necessarily matters. For example, let's say they state their position on an arbitrary policy (unrelated to this latest policy) and let's assume that the users would nearly universally support it. However, let's also say they only take action on "the worst offenders" (of some definition), would it be better for them to not do anything at all until they have the means to capture the majority of videos / users that violate those policies, or start with the larger groups first? Another way I like to look at these sort of problems is switching the position around in how the platform developed. If YouTube still positioned itself as a general platform from the beginning, but at their very start they stated that any health / medical content must adhere to WHO policies, and then YouTube grew to the ubiquity it is today, I am curious what sort of acceptance we would have for it in today's environment right now. Would it have made YouTube less likely to become as popular, opening the door further for competitors to enter the space?

kd5bjo 6y ago
> However, let's also say they only take action on "the worst offenders" (of some definition), would it be better for them to not do anything at all until they have the means to capture the majority of videos / users that violate those policies, or start with the larger groups first? One of the most common forms of discrimination is unequally enforced rules: they nominally apply to everyone but are in practice enforced only against an arbitrary subset of violators. For a rule to be fair, whether it’s a law or private policy, enforcement needs to be against an unbiased sample of offenders that’s large enough for the community to see that it’s unbiased. There also needs to be an effective appeals process that can overturn the enforcers’ actions in the cases where they behaved wrongly. Both of these have costs roughly proportional to the number of potential offences. In YouTube’s case, that’s the number of uploaded videos. They cut costs along the way by neglecting the executive and judicial parts of this process with regard to copyright violations. Now, when they want to institute a new policy (with good reason), they have neither the trust of the community nor the institutions necessary to implement it in a fair manner.
parsimo2010 6y ago
The issue (at least to me) isn't that they can point to a policy that Icke violated, it's that they are arbitrarily ignoring other videos that violate the same policy. An easy example is that if YouTube chooses delete David Icke's account instead of just demonetizing him, why are they only demonetizing anti-vax accounts but not deleting them? Surely the anti-vax movement has harmed more people than David Icke. Any cynic would notice that David Icke's supporters are crazy but far-right politically, while the anti-vax supporters are crazy but far-left politically. This is a bad look and lets the far-right crazies play the victim card. A consistently applied and principled set of policies would either let both sets of crazies have their voice, or neither of them. Letting them both have their voice would let YouTube claim to be more of a "pipe" and not have to spend as much effort moderating their content. Censoring both sides obviously takes more effort but is at least defensible. What they have right now is that they spend effort moderating content, but still take flak for it because it looks like they are picking and choosing based on the political winds (which is great when it's your side winning, but the winds can change direction at a moment's notice).

kd5bjo 6y ago

> However, let's also say they only take action on "the worst offenders" (of some definition), would it be better for them to not do anything at all until they have the means to capture the majority of videos / users that violate those policies, or start with the larger groups first? One of the most common forms of discrimination is unequally enforced rules: they nominally apply to everyone but are in practice enforced only against an arbitrary subset of violators. For a rule to be fair, whether it’s a law or private policy, enforcement needs to be against an unbiased sample of offenders that’s large enough for the community to see that it’s unbiased. There also needs to be an effective appeals process that can overturn the enforcers’ actions in the cases where they behaved wrongly. Both of these have costs roughly proportional to the number of potential offences. In YouTube’s case, that’s the number of uploaded videos. They cut costs along the way by neglecting the executive and judicial parts of this process with regard to copyright violations. Now, when they want to institute a new policy (with good reason), they have neither the trust of the community nor the institutions necessary to implement it in a fair manner.

parsimo2010 6y ago

The issue (at least to me) isn't that they can point to a policy that Icke violated, it's that they are arbitrarily ignoring other videos that violate the same policy. An easy example is that if YouTube chooses delete David Icke's account instead of just demonetizing him, why are they only demonetizing anti-vax accounts but not deleting them? Surely the anti-vax movement has harmed more people than David Icke. Any cynic would notice that David Icke's supporters are crazy but far-right politically, while the anti-vax supporters are crazy but far-left politically. This is a bad look and lets the far-right crazies play the victim card. A consistently applied and principled set of policies would either let both sets of crazies have their voice, or neither of them. Letting them both have their voice would let YouTube claim to be more of a "pipe" and not have to spend as much effort moderating their content. Censoring both sides obviously takes more effort but is at least defensible. What they have right now is that they spend effort moderating content, but still take flak for it because it looks like they are picking and choosing based on the political winds (which is great when it's your side winning, but the winds can change direction at a moment's notice).