9 ms·

And on the other end of the spectrum we have people being indoctrinated into violent conspiracy groups like QAnon, or being prompted to set fire to cell towers,

• xhkkffbf 6y ago
  Let me be contrary: who shut down millions of businesses and put millions out of work? It wasn't QAnon. It was the state -- and it looks like YouTube is aligned with the pro-shutdown folks who don't want their wisdom questioned. Now I'm a big believer in keeping things shut. I thing prudence is super-important. But QAnon's actions are mainly talk. The state's, however, are different.
  • benignslime 6y ago
    "Be skeptical of the actions of the state, regardless of the action"
  • agentdrtran 6y ago
    A Qanon guy brought a gun into a pizza place and one tried to mail bombs to politicians.
    • eganist 6y ago
      Don't forget the attempted Venezuelan coup.
  • _bxg1 6y ago
    > QAnon's actions are mainly talk QAnon is an FBI-registered domestic terror organization: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/qanon-domestic-terrorism-threat-conspiracy-theory-866288/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/qanon-... They've been connected to multiple attempted acts of violence. They aren't just talk.
    • abfan1127 6y ago
      FBI has been connected to multiple successful acts of violence.
    • techntoke 6y ago
      Terror organization who operates freely on reddit?
      • sangnoir 6y ago
        Name a better location to monitor a terror organizations activity (for investigators). Makes the feds' jobs easy.
    • blfr 6y ago
      From the article: The FBI memo cites at least two violent incidents or attempts purportedly linked to QAnon: An Arizona man harassed and doxed locals he suspected of participating in the child sex trafficking ring at the heart of the conspiracy theory; and a Nevada man at the Hoover Dam whose truck was found to contain rifles and other ammunition, who was later discovered to have sent letters to President Trump containing references to the movement. Doxing and keeping guns in your car are not violent acts and the connection is tenuous at best. By that measure you could easily classify The Young Turks as a terrorist organization, Elliot Rodger was their subscriber on Youtube. And the violence was real. Why would people on HN of all places take FBI at their word. How many hackers have been defamed, and even jailed, by FBI like that.
  • cfmcdonald 6y ago
    Actually it was mostly the populace who shut down business activity of their own accord, at least in the U.S. See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/upshot/pandemic-economy-government-orders.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/upshot/pandemic-economy-g...
  • JohnBooty 6y ago
    Let me be contrary: who shut down millions of businesses and put millions out of work? Well, I'd blame the pandemic itself. Sweden provides an imperfect but interesting what-if scenario for countries wondering what would have happened if they'd imposed little to no lockdown restrictions. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/30/coronavirus-sweden-economy-to-contract-as-severely-as-the-rest-of-europe.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/30/coronavirus-sweden-economy-t... Their economy is still taking a very severe hit despite retail businesses remaining open there, because people are shying away from making purchases and visiting shops. You can (correctly) say that many governments took the decision out of peoples' hands. Perhaps the people of country XYZ would have made a different choice. But Sweden's example suggests that economies would have been screwed pretty hard no matter what.
    • Hoasi 6y ago
      > Well, I'd blame the pandemic itself. Exactly. In most countries, people are willingly staying mostly at home. More, they continue to restrain from shopping and eating out after the lockdown ended.
      • myk9001 6y ago
        This is not the case for Sweden. For details, take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23266698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23266698 I don't think this is the case for Germany, Switzerland, or Denmark either. What countries do you have in mind where lock downs ended and most people are staying at home?
    • erebrus 6y ago
      On top of that, Sweeden is recording very high death rates and latest estimates point to around 7% in immunity.
      • mc6 6y ago
        The 7% was a month ago, ie that was when the tests took place. If you believe the disease is rampant in Sweden, it’ll be much higher now. If it’s not, then the hard lockdowns elsewhere were superfluous.
  • acqq 6y ago
    > QAnon's actions are mainly talk. The state's, however, are different. Isn't QAnon directly promoted by some people directly related to the president of the state? Don Jr. wears it: https://www.etsy.com/dk-en/listing/716574473/the-official-q-flag-pin-9733-made-for https://www.etsy.com/dk-en/listing/716574473/the-official-q-... The President himself reused their hashtag: https://www.businessinsider.de/international/trump-retweeted-qanon-hashtag-to-his-68-million-followers-2019-12/ https://www.businessinsider.de/international/trump-retweeted...
• abstractbarista 6y ago
  Frankly those people are just dumb, and there's nothing we can do to truly protect society from them. So, you might as well allow such content to exist.
• tomcam 6y ago
  How is QAnon violent? How does their violence level compare to Antifa?
  • tomcam 6y ago
    Ah, downvoted with no reasons given or proof presented. I hoped for better from the good citizens of this community.
    • polynomial 6y ago
      Welcome to hn.
  • BLKNSLVR 6y ago
    This doesn't directly answer your question of "violent" (and it seems on the whole the QAnon protests have been non-violent), but the FBI assessed QAnon Extremists as a domestic terrorism threat[0]. (The qualification here is "QAnon Extremists" which appears to, probably correctly, separate the extremist element from the majority). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon#FBI_domestic_terrorism_assessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon#FBI_domestic_terrorism_a...
• naasking 6y ago
  > There's a line to be drawn here - and it's a tricky line, to be sure - but "YouTube should be totally neutral and not pull anything" is not a viable answer. It sure can be given other means of combatting misinformation. But sure, let's just go with the sledgehammer every time.
  • minhazm 6y ago
    What are the other means?
    • naasking 6y ago
      Active information campaigns. Deprioritizing in search/related results rather than banning. Partitioning verified from unverified information and always showing a minimum number of factual content when showing unverified content. That's just off the top of my head. There are dozens of possible strategies, but companies will always do the cheap and easy thing that will stop the bad PR quickest, even if it hurts some people. We should demand better.
• HomeDeLaPot 6y ago
  That's a fine point, but YouTube isn't restricted to the option of taking down videos. They could stop recommending these videos, and they could pull them from search results. Actually, YouTube might be a better place if new videos were unlisted by default and teams of curators were responsible for approving new channels. But then maybe someone would just build their own YouTube index and search engine.
  • saulrh 6y ago
    That works right up until the content-creator community or HN or Reddit riots about "the algorithm".
    • 2019-nCoV 6y ago
      Opposed to them rioting about "the vehement censorship"?
• contravariant 6y ago
  I'm not too sure if true neutrality is not the best answer after all. I think these bans are detracting from the real problem, which is that it's Youtube's system for promoting content that is causing problems, not the content on Youtube itself. Youtube has made itself too important a platform to be left in charge of deciding what content people should watch. Frankly I would feel much more at ease if we could all decide that Youtube doesn't get to decide what content should be deleted, provided they also can't keep recommending videos. Let me explain. By recommending videos youtube has a huge amount of influence on what content is promoted and what content isn't. However youtube's bottom-line isn't to recommend good content (despite what they claim it is) but it is to maximize ad revenue, which means they need to make people watch as many videos as possible. Superficially this would seem like it should drive Youtube to recommend good content, but it's beginning to look like it is biased towards addictive content, which has questionable quality at best, but might veer towards harmful conspirational theories at worst. It's a classic example of value drift, Youtube has turned into a paperclip maximizer that is beginning to harm humans to produce more paperclips.
  • nyhc99 6y ago
    This is a great point and is also true of Facebook and a number of other platforms. Roger McNamee spoke at length about this issue with Sam Harris on his podcast back when it was called Making Sense. His point was essentially that the AI that controls the recommendations is trained to maximize clickthrough rates, and so it learns in its own way to feed us articles that make us angry, because we click and share more that way. Hence the tendency to lead people down rabbit holes of extremism.
  • pchristensen 6y ago
    The podcast "Your Undivided Attention" gets into the tech and public policy of this. Basically, their suggestion is to modify Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, so that storage and retrieval is still a safe harbor for providers, but recommendation algorithms should be treated as editorial decisions and be open to the same liabilities that other communications media are exposed to. So a chronological feed of subscriptions to InfoWars, Stormfront, Plandemic, etc would be protected by law, but YouTube, FB, etc could be held liable for harm caused by content that they recommend. People retain their freedom to speak and publish, but they have no right to promotion or amplification.
• sneak 6y ago
  Censorship isn’t the answer to the things you fear. YouTube banning these things won’t stop them from spreading. YouTube not banning these things won’t cause people to commit violence. Try replacing “being indoctrinated” with “reading” or “being prompted to” with “watching crazies talk about how you should”, and try your sentence again without the biased framing. You misattribute the agency of the viewer. Video games don’t make kids shoot up schools, and stupid videos don’t make people light cell towers on fire. Even the entirety of Pizzagate led to exactly one guy out of hundreds of millions picking up a gun, and even then no one was hurt. Meanwhile, YouTube is taking down videos of ACTUAL war crimes in the Syrian civil war, which is destruction of evidence and is hindering prosecutorial efforts. Censorship is not the solution.
  • ta17711771 6y ago
    No, but a hard drive was shot - right through the heart!!
    • polynomial 6y ago
      You give censorship a bad name? <confused>
      • ta17711771 6y ago
        I have no idea what you're trying to say.
        • RonanTheGrey 6y ago
          It's a play on the "You Give Love a Bad Name" song by Bon Jovi. "Shot through the heart, and you're to blame, you give love <sic:censorship> a bad name"
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• __s 6y ago
  Two things could be done for this content: - Don't list these videos in watch-next / suggestions. This avoids people getting lost down these strange rabbit holes - Insert a prompt which notifies the viewer that the content has been flagged as misinformation. Ideally include links to resources to find out more. This prompts people to check out the widely accepted truth to compare what they'll see in the content Just because something needs to be done about misinformation doesn't mean censorship is necessary
• 2019-nCoV 6y ago
  What is wrong with relying on the existing legal foundation? Arrest them for arson, if and when they decide to ravage a cell tower. Should we halt the sale of knives because they can be misused to murder?
  • ta17711771 6y ago
    Hey, it worked for the UK!
  • modriano 6y ago
    Nationally, the clearance rate for arson is typically under 23%, meaning the vast majority of arsonists get away with it. In general, clearance rates are pretty bad across most crimes. The homicide clearance rate is typically below 62%, clearance rates for non-fatal shootings is typically below 55%, clearance rates for reported rape is typically below 40%, clearance rates for motor vehicle theft is typically below 20%. And the actual clearance-by-arrest rates are lower than those values. And conviction rates are even lower. (*edit: relative to the total number of crimes. Conviction rates are pretty high for the cases that State's Attorneys or prosecutor's offices accept and agree to prosecute) The standard of proof for State's Attorneys/prosecutors to accept a case from Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) is pretty high, and it's expensive to build and prosecute cases. Clearance rates would be higher if law enforcement agencies had high definition surveillance camera networks covering all public spaces, but I think people would also find that solution unappealing. I'm a homicide researcher in Chicago and I've come to the conclusion that the legal system will never be able to solve or even make a significant dent in the homicide problem, and taking a "law enforcement only" approach is the same as just surrendering to the problem forever. If you want to solve crime problems, you have to explore preventative solutions, namely give people better paths and eliminate paths that empirically lead to only bad destinations. [0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-2017/tables/arson-table-2.xls https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
    • 2019-nCoV 6y ago
      > If you want to solve crime problems, you have to explore preventative solutions, namely give people better paths and eliminate paths that empirically lead to only bad destinations. Education is the preventative solution. Censorship is just security through obscurity.
• ta17711771 6y ago
  Let the votes decide.
• cthor 6y ago
  You've just given a bunch of evidence that those things are happening despite our benevolent censors' best efforts. I think giving people the idea that they've stumbled onto dangerous truths just makes them more resolute. Or do you think the issue is they just need to be suppressed even harder?
• int_19h 6y ago
  If it's so dangerous that it should be banned, let legislatures pass laws banning it, and let YouTube enforce those laws.
• kfrzcode 6y ago
  What? "because of YouTube videos," isn't that like saying "violence happens because of video games," etc.?
  • nkkollaw 6y ago
    Of course, yes. Doesn't make any sense.
• covidSurvivor19 6y ago
  Let's not forget why idea censorship exists. We are ruled by those we are not allowed to criticized. Even the guys setting fire to cell towers, can we believe that a video is going to convince anyone reasonable of actually doing it? Do you yourself feel tempted?
• nkkollaw 6y ago
  It is. There are books on all kind of things, are we going to burn books we don't like, next? The line is already there, we don't need corporations to draw it for us. If something isn't illegal, it should not be censored. If people commit crimes they'll get arrested. Including those that commit crimes because they watched the extremely fringe and dangerous Qanon conspiracy theory you mentioned--which from what I've heard makes you torture and kill small animals right after the first video, to continue onto progressively worse things as you keep watching (stay away from it, kids!).
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• jakeogh 6y ago
  ...... Joe ....... Hillary ..... Chuck Like him or not, the President is a master at branding. If you really think he is going to have his record setting rallies literally filled with people with Q shirts on and not have control of that situation; it's you who is confused. Notice how the hit pieces never link to the actual posts. People who want can find them @ q map dot pub, or a level up at crowd sourced news sites like we are the news dot ws, or even a level up from that at citizen free press dot com. It's common knowledge that the President of the United States posts on 8kun. We are not waiting for the mockingbirds. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23112787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23112787
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• d3ntb3ev1l 6y ago
  Google is a private company. They should be allowed to do whatever they want. They are not a government.