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I think I disagree with that statement. Censorship would prevent the information from being accessible, make it illegal, come with repercussions for those who p

I think I disagree with that statement. Censorship would prevent the information from being accessible, make it illegal, come with repercussions for those who publish it, or other such things. Platforms like YouTube, Google Search, Twitter, Facebook and all have a problem of amplification through algorithms that don't promote well proven, high quality, trusted content. You could almost see these platforms themselves as a kind of censorship through obscuring and creating noise around quality information. I think because of the way content is amplified on such platforms, that's why they need policies like this, to limit the possible damage and liability they might face if they'd promote something that caused a lot of damages. This is very different from someone choosing to host their own content which is equally accessible to all other content. But as soon as you rank content, as soon as you have an algorithm pick and choose content to shown you, in what order to show it to you and all that, you actually have a propaganda problem, because you become a propaganda machine, and that's really what these platforms have become.

saurik 6y ago
...so you are saying that Google should stop recommending such videos, but has no reason to ban them entirely from being posted, right?
- didibus 6y ago
  Yes, if they didn't recommend the video, if it could only be found through search, there wouldn't be any issue with it. Though even with search, if the search algorithms are biased, and prioritize things in a way that could be argued to be recommendation, like personalized results based on what it thinks you'll like for the given keywords, you could say that's also a problem, which is why I mentioned Google Search. To put it another way, you'd expect that the easiest content to find and discover, and thus be shown and recommended would also be the most commonly held opinion and current scientific consensus. But you'd also want representation for less commonly held opinions and scientific hypothesis and claims. Just that, if 1 scientist is pushing some wildly different idea, and 99 others are pushing the same idea, you'd expect that the idea pushed by 99 scientist would be the easiest to come around and that it be clear that it is weighted to 99%, while the other would be a little harder to come around and it be clear that it's weighted to 1%. The issue is those platforms fail heavily to represent things proportionally as such. Often, the outlying wild claim will be recommended more heavily, and be promoted over others. Even without algorithms, the people pushing wild claims generally employ amplification tactics by spamming and posting multiple times over and over, etc. to falsely boost their representation. So that's the problem I see here. Banning the more problematic instances of this is their poor solution to keep their platforms operating in a way that doesn't offer proper representation (because it makes more money), but avoid the extreme cases that could put them in hot water.

saurik 6y ago

...so you are saying that Google should stop recommending such videos, but has no reason to ban them entirely from being posted, right?

didibus 6y ago
Yes, if they didn't recommend the video, if it could only be found through search, there wouldn't be any issue with it. Though even with search, if the search algorithms are biased, and prioritize things in a way that could be argued to be recommendation, like personalized results based on what it thinks you'll like for the given keywords, you could say that's also a problem, which is why I mentioned Google Search. To put it another way, you'd expect that the easiest content to find and discover, and thus be shown and recommended would also be the most commonly held opinion and current scientific consensus. But you'd also want representation for less commonly held opinions and scientific hypothesis and claims. Just that, if 1 scientist is pushing some wildly different idea, and 99 others are pushing the same idea, you'd expect that the idea pushed by 99 scientist would be the easiest to come around and that it be clear that it is weighted to 99%, while the other would be a little harder to come around and it be clear that it's weighted to 1%. The issue is those platforms fail heavily to represent things proportionally as such. Often, the outlying wild claim will be recommended more heavily, and be promoted over others. Even without algorithms, the people pushing wild claims generally employ amplification tactics by spamming and posting multiple times over and over, etc. to falsely boost their representation. So that's the problem I see here. Banning the more problematic instances of this is their poor solution to keep their platforms operating in a way that doesn't offer proper representation (because it makes more money), but avoid the extreme cases that could put them in hot water.