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I'll preface this by stating that I hate the idea of censorship and I always have. However, were I to happen across someone motionless on the floor with a need

• ENOTTY 6y ago
  I agree with you on the harms that you have identified (overwhelming bullshit). I think it’s worth thinking about this problem by comparing and contrasting social media to traditional public spaces (like a soapbox in a town square). By comparing these two kinds of public spaces (ignoring for now the fact that social media is privately owned), one can start to identify the mechanisms in social media platforms that are enabling overwhelming bullshit and work to mitigate, modify, or eliminate those mechanisms. For what it’s worth, my opinion is that the amplification and discovery mechanisms in any media platform (from print to TV/radio to social media) play a key role in the spreading of bullshit. For that reason, I like twitter’s moves to introduce friction into retweeting. Additionally I support efforts of the social media companies to defeat bot farms.
• spuz 6y ago
  I'd be interested to know what your thoughts are on the UK and German models of "free speech" where no one has an absolute right to say what they want - certain subjects such as Holocaust denial or promotion of terrorism are banned. You could argue that we have been on a slippery slope for a long time but you could equally argue the slippery slope is a fallacy. I think it's important to think about what the actual purpose is of the rights that we value. The right to free speech is simply a shortcut to a more fundamental right to allow people to live freely without undue influence from others. It may be that the absolute right to free speech might not be the best way to achieve that.
  • nickff 6y ago
    >"The right to free speech is simply a shortcut to a more fundamental right to allow people to live freely without undue influence from others." You are asserting a series of very controversial points here: 1) Some rights are more important than others. 2) Positive rights can override negative rights. 3) 'Living freely without undue influence from others' is more important than 'the right to free speech'. Which philosophical or moral framework are you using? This may be compatible with utlitarianism and Rawlsianism (though you'd have to do the numbers on the long-term impacts, not just your short-term goals), but I'm not sure how other ethics would support it.
    • gitrog 6y ago
      > 1) Some rights are more important than others. If you've been found not guilty of a crime in the US and admit to it afterward, you cannot be prosecuted again by protection of Double Jeopardy, correct? Is that not the same thing as saying some rights are more important than others? And is (2) and (3) not just variations on (1)?
      • nickff 6y ago
        I don't see how your Double Jeopardy example demonstrates 'ranking' of rights. There's no right to punishment of criminals. The US Bill of Rights is a list of negative rights. I would say that (2) and (3) go further than one. You could say that they are subsets of (1).
• DanielBMarkham 6y ago
  I hate it as well, and if I could come up with some new way of advancing our species aside from free speech I would. I cannot and cannot see how such a thing would ever be possible. Here's a bit of sunshine: the human species has not changed in thousands of years. We're still the same hairless monkeys we were back when people were thinking up all kinds of cool shit. Knowing this, it follows that 10% or so of the population are, well, nuts. Another 10% are so are willing to do anything to become famous. It has always been this way. (Of course, I'm just guessing the exact numbers) What's happened is that these folks are using this wonderful new instant worldwide publishing tool we've made to continue their pathologies. And companies are happy to make money letting them do so as long as nobody gets too upset. We are now reaching the point where lots of people are getting upset and those companies are running around like a single fireman in a city on fire trying to figure out how to make their business keep going. The good news is that we're still the same species as before, and we've solved over and over again the problem of what it takes to have a peaceful and progressive society. The problem we have is that social media should not exist. It shouldn't be regulated, broken up, or any of that. It simply should not exist. The incentives here are not aligned with the survival of our species (There's a huge discussion of what to make instead. That's for another day) I think the problem is not easy to solve, but it's certainly easy to explain. It's not the end of civilization as we know it, at least it doesn't have to be.
  • rimliu 6y ago
    You are right. Hardware hardly changed. However, one can argue, that software that we install into the new copies of hardware changed quite a bit. I think education and developing critical thinking skills should be the key to fixing those problems. Alas, the current trend is to try a way to get an education with as little effort as possible, which is destined to fail.
    • ls65536 6y ago
      I really do think the hardware/software analogy here works quite well. In that sense, one could argue that the software has also become more complex, and perhaps more fragile, in recent times in order to better assist individuals in navigating this world. To your other point, I think that "education" and "critical thinking skills" are often conflated as one and the same, or that perhaps one necessarily leads to the other, but this is certainly not the case. While I think being educated to some degree is important in order to share a "common language" with others and to become a contributing member of society, the ability to think critically, and to act on it, is really necessary if we are to succeed and not fail catastrophically along the way. To go back to the analogy, having the ability to execute the software faithfully is one thing, but understanding when it might make sense to modify the software and how to do so responsibly given the fixed hardware we have available is really the critical piece.
• cheph 6y ago
  > I agree that what YouTube is doing here is a slippery slope and it's scary. However, I personally think that this is now a war for democracy, and things are going to need to be sacrificed. YouTube choosing what you can see is as far from democracy as it can get. Not sure how you get from that to saving "democracy".
  • bosswipe 6y ago
    But this is how it's always been, before the web people got their news from a different set of media companies NBC/ABC/CBS. 20th century media conglomerates didn't have the problem of having to censor viral user generated content but they were still censors, and much stricter censors than the social media companies because their channels had more limited information bandwidth so they had to be much more selective about what to broadcast.
    • cheph 6y ago
      Slavery was how it's always been until it stopped being how it's always been. Saying something is how it is is not a reason why it should be the way it is. If you want to support it, you actually have to make an argument for it.
  • hef19898 6y ago
    Youtube is part of a public, non-state-controlled entity. As such, it has close to nothing to do with democracy as a form of government. It does have a social impact, which then influences democracy. As such, Youtube, and FB and Twitter and all the others, do have a responsibility for all of us. And they have to be held accountable for their actions, up to know they just raked in the profits and gave shit about anything else. Them now changing that is a good thing.
    • cheph 6y ago
      What I don't see in your response is an actual argument for how YouTube doing something which not democratic is good for democracy. > up to know they just raked in the profits and gave shit about anything else. Them now changing that is a good thing. Censoring unpopular and controversial views on their platform makes it more attractive for advertisers, which is good for YouTube's bottom line. This action in no way indicates an renunciation of a profit motive.
• hnlmorg 6y ago
  Free speech isn't about all voices being equal though, it is about the freedom to speak out against the government. It's an important distinction because the latter is needed for democracy to work where as a former doesn't work in practice because some voices should carry more weight (like subject matter experts). Ironically the former seems more prevalent than ever with every nutjob on social media voicing their opinions, while Trump has been systematically eroding the latter with his "fake news" campaigns and reporter biases.
  • raverbashing 6y ago
    > has been systematically eroding the latter with his "fake news" campaigns and reporter biases. As much as I disagree with Trump, the news orgs have done that to themselves. And I'm not talking about crap like Fox News
• crististm 6y ago
  The point is that youtube is not an absolute authority and truth reference. So when they decide what is misinformation they position themselves above public scrutiny. It's not that the masses are dumb or smart. The few deciders from Youtube are not truth dispensers that we should all trust above all else.
  • CyanBird 6y ago
    And the few people on the editorial boards of selected news papers or wherever are? Do I need to mention the "kicking babies out of incubators", or the "Iraq has chemical weapons" bits? Do you honestly prefer to give the manufacture of consent machinery to the exact same people that had it before hand? The very reason why people don't trust the media is because the old "guardians of the news" thoroughly failed at their supposed mission
    • hef19898 6y ago
      That is a serious problem. Media, traditional media in print and TV and so on, has failings. Problem with all the fake news crying from certain people, it is hard to call these failings out. And the fake news crowd has some truth to point to. And that makes propaganda so much more powerfull, the most powerful lies contain a grain of truth.
    • crististm 6y ago
      The editors of those selected papers are not truth fountains either. They at least have the backbone to sign and suffer if need be.
  • gitrog 6y ago
    > So when they decide what is misinformation they position themselves above public scrutiny. But aren't Youtube doing this specifically because of pressure from government?
    • lemming 6y ago
      In the US? I doubt it. The US is currently pushing COVID-19 misinformation from the very top.
• thaumaturgy 6y ago
  > ...what YouTube is doing here is a slippery slope and it's scary... BTW, "slippery slope" was intended to be an example of fallacious thinking. Before it became a popular term, it was intended as a criticism of arguments of the form, "A will lead to B will lead to C, so A is bad." I'm not bringing this up (just) to be pedantic; the overwhelming evidence to date is that it is extraordinarily difficult to get any of these modern media giants to make any kind of move on any subject at all. You can say very nearly anything you want on YouTube's network, or Twitter's, or Facebook's, and in all cases, the most common forms of censorship are from the DMCA, not politics.
  • coldtea 6y ago
    >Before it became a popular term, it was intended as a criticism of arguments of the form, "A will lead to B will lead to C, so A is bad." Sorry, this is backwards. Before it became a criticism of arguments "A will lead to B and so on" it was a term used to signify a "slippery slope", that is, something that has the potential to snowball to something much worse. The name as a "criticism of the fallacy" resulted from the term being used as an argument -- not the other way around.
  • pritovido 6y ago
    No, a slippery slope is just that: A slippery slope. A slippery slope is a inclined surface, a place in space that once you are into, makes you transition very fast to a worse state, like your head hitting the floor at great velocity. That is you can start well, in a good state, and transition to a much worse state over time. Your definition is also valid but not the only one way to interpret it. It is an expression that has been used in literature for hundreds of years, not just in english. It is a metaphor. Do you make youtube videos? I do, and I am very conscious of what I say on my videos because I can not say whatever I want. I can not say words like "Covid"(extremely forbidden) "negro" referring to someone skin color or something the machine will mistake as me talking about people when I am really not. And it is also getting worse and worse. In the old times you could say whatever you wanted on youtube, you could even post illegal things like films(posters could abuse). Now you can not, and it is going to become worse in the future and it is youtube who abuses. The Trump and brexit events were extremely important. People did things that the status quo did not want. Before that you had people like Hillary Clinton or Bezos that believed that because they controlled most media, they controlled people as puppets. They felt very confident that they could advance their globalist program without serious resistance by the people. After that it became clear that they had to control Internet too. At least the mass media on the Internet that affects most people. I don't say that as a Trump supporter, I am not even American, but I have eyes. I see media reaction when someone gets killed by police and the media silence when a Trump supporter gets killed by a democrat radical and it is just disgusting how sectarian they are.
• keiferski 6y ago
  The solution is decentralized, verifiable forms of authority. Not unelected, unaccountable corporations that selectively (and with repeated obvious bias) choose what is “true.” Especially not YouTube, of all places, who has about as much authority as McDonalds, as far as I’m concerned. That’s it. No attempt to have a single source of authoritative information is going to work post-Internet. The cat is already out of the bag. This model of the world is outdated and needs to be put out to pasture.
  • 3np 6y ago
    This. YouTube should be free to allow or block any content they want on their privately owned and permissions platform. At the same time, no company should have the power to decide what content can be shared and spread. It’s all of our responsibilities to take back the power we always had and give it back to individuals. The other their is through open protocols through decentralized / federated permissionless infrastructure.
    • owlbynight 6y ago
      But how do you take the power back? How do you yell shark and get people to listen when they've been desensitized by an ocean full of fake sharks?
      • 3np 6y ago
        Start with yourself. Prefer better alternatives whenever possible. If you have the means: Start hosting. Contribute (code, tutorials, docs). Spread the word. Contribute funds to projects. Answer support questions/GH issues/forum posts from people who are having issues. When it comes to people you know and interact with, start with the “low-hanging fruit” (individuals who have skills/interest in technology or are already agreeing about the problem).
        • minerjoe 6y ago
          Be the change you wish to see in the world. I used to be outwardly and loudly critical of the system and people supporting it, but that got me nowhere, just isolated. When I stopped all criticism and just started aligning my life how I would like others to live, I finally started to get somewhere.
• tomp 6y ago
  What are you talking about?! Don’t blame social media, the biggest and loudest source of COVID-related misinformation have been institutions like the WHO. There is very little science (we don’t yet have enough data, and not enough time has passed), so all we have to go on is “broscience” (smartly connecting anecdotal facts and whatever little data we have, and drawing sensible conclusions). By designating one opinion as “officially correct science”, YouTube is seriously damaging humanity.
  • maxehmookau 6y ago
    > Don’t blame social media, the biggest and loudest source of COVID-related misinformation have been institutions like the WHO. This is demonstrably untrue. There is measurably more bullshit on Facebook groups than there is coming from the WHO and other institutions.
    • mopsi 6y ago
      The WHO had far more influence than a Facebook group.
      • maxehmookau 6y ago
        I'm not sure that's true, amongst some demographics at least.
  • owlbynight 6y ago
    COVID-19 is a novel virus. All information is misinformation until it isn't. I could say that the reason that some people are asymptomatic is that the virus is lying dormant in them like herpes. Can anyone credibly refute that? Logic would dictate that a novel virus -- novel in that we don't know everything about it -- is a threat to the survival of our species as a whole until disproven otherwise and that we should collectively do everything that we can to minimize its spread. What I know to be true is that to curb the infection rate, we should stop spitting in each other's mouths. Yes, there is science at the base of that assertion, but mostly it's just common fucking sense. If you can tell me how basic common sense is being subverted on a massive scale without the use of a platform of social manipulation, I'm willing to hear you out.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• throwaway1582 6y ago
  If democracy requires free speech to be sacrificed, why do you think keeping democracy is a worthwhile endeavor? Perhaps you should be questioning the validity of universal suffrage. If your mode of government can't withstand fake twitter bots, you should probably just toss it and start over with something else.
  • theaeolist 6y ago
    Fake Twitter bots are also a form of censorship. Censorship does not work just by imposing silence, but also by overwhelming with noise. Free speech is valuable because it leads to a contest of ideas. If it degenerates into a contest of who has the resources to scream louder the battle for free speech has been lost already.
    • throwaway1582 6y ago
      there seems to be a rather simple fix for this: a bloom filter for ideas. place this within the flow of information or at the intake of the government, take your pick. but it's obvious to me that democracy/universal suffrage gives incentive to actors (both foreign and domestic) to wage a mind-control war against the population. if people are legitimately willing to question something as foundational as free speech, they should really consider the other parts of the foundation too.
  • nl 6y ago
    US style free speech isn't seen in other democracies, so I don't see why this argument applies.
• jonathanstrange 6y ago
  I understand the position but let me argue for the other side a little bit. The problem with companies like Youtube, Google, Amazon, and Facebook is that they do everything algorithmically, since anything else wouldn't scale. Meanwhile, they have no incentives to care about false positives and the power relation between them and their customers is extremely asymmetric - basically, it's a system of oppression. To the false positive victims of algorithmic censorship, this can become a Dystopian nightmare of bureaucracy. Like in the movie "Brazil" or a Kafka story, only much worse because everything is automated and biased against them. You can see that with Youtube content policing, Facebook and Google ads accounts, etc. Anyone whose livelihood depends on their services can lose their income at any time for no reason whatsoever. Even spreading the risk will not help much, it still means you might loose 30% or 40% of your income over night at any time thanks to a change of the algorithms. None of this is transparent and the companies will not explain anything, so you will not even know why or how to avoid this. You might claim it's anyone's own fault to depend on such companies, but there are many types of businesses where the dependence is unavoidable. These companies have quasi-monopolies in some areas. AFAIK, the only remedy is to regulate algorithmic control of people and their content by laws more tightly. At least the appeals process needs to be more transparent and there need to be way more humans in the loop. In this case it's the same, by the way. I guarantee you that many videos will be flagged falsely and many reputable Youtube content creators will be demonetized once again for nothing. This might be tolerable here and there, but the algorithmic oppression of people accumulates across all domains and also has a strong chilling effect. In the long run, algorithmic oppression of people by a faceless company bureaucracy may turn out to be a bigger problem for society than what these moderation efforts are trying to solve. It creates strong and effective power structures that govern our lives, work in parallel to democratic power structures, and are not democratically legitimized at all. What's worse, the people who create them sometimes don't even seem to understand what they are creating, which is basically a recipe for creating systemic evil.
  • notahacker 6y ago
    I don't really see why YouTube choosing not to display stuff its algorithms (rightly or wrongly) identify as bullshit about vaccines containing microchips is more objectionable than YouTube choosing not to display stuff its algorithms (rightly or wrongly) identify as sexual content though, as it has done since the very beginning. Yes, algorithmic flagging gets things wrong, but there's nothing new in this announcement unless one believes that antivax sentiment, unlike nudity, is something YouTube ought to be obliged to broadcast
• dalbasal 6y ago
  Let's call some spades. >>I hate the idea of censorship and I always have. However... The first spade is free speech itself. Neither the custom nor the law applies to YouTube. In theory, it's a private site that chooses what videos it shows. In practice, youtube is a newly powerful monopoly. Both YouTube and Alphabet. There's a tension here. In 2020 reality, political freedoms such as speech, association and even religion are realized on Google, facebook and co. When a politician or activist speaks to voters, it's on youtube. Whether or not breastfeeding is obscene is a Youtube decision. This isn't absolute, but it is to a large and increasing extent true. Your freedom of speech is violated in all but the most technical sense when fb, twitter, and/or youtube shut your mouth. Social media is not a market, or marketplace of ideas. At best its a strip mall where two jovial consortiums own all the stores. This is the place where people decide to vote for X, that the virus is a hoax, or that climate change is real. It's at the heart of freedom of speech. The second spade you called out well. These sites are corruptible and corrupted. Malicious misinformation spreads well here. This is already causing societal harm. They did this. Another spade is reality regardless. I'm pretty confident that more, less powerful players, open protocols and such would be serving us better. This wouldn't have fixed everything though. Shared narratives have to be enforced somehow: culture, religion, media. If everyone is on a different stream, the shared narrative is broken. This would probably be true regardless of monopoly, though I think the consequences would be less severe. Shared narratives are not necessarily true. Truth is not necessarily known, or necessarily in Google's best interest at any given time. In fact, truth is expensive. Formal truth seeking systems are the legal system, scientific method, drug approval process... Going down this path means that Youtube (also fb, twitter) will be deciding and implementing the shared narrative. Religion? How about cults? Fringe activists? How about fringey elected politicians. The final spade is inevitabilities. These aren't could bes. The really hot current issues (eg the pandemic) are also hot political and even religious issues. This isn't nudity, which works as a canary for freedom of speech. This goes to the heart of political life on day 1. Gotta make the star wars warning. The galactic republic fell to raucous applause. Chaos, and the need to suppress it.
  • CyanBird 6y ago
    > Whether or not an exposed nipple while breastfeeding is obscene is a decision made in their head offices. This has been the case for the last 100 years friend > “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” ... > “Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.” - Edward Bernays, Propaganda 1927
• joshuapark 6y ago
  A war for democracy would be fighting to give everyone a voice, even to those who you disagree with. Remember: - Those who sacrifice freedom for security, deserve neither. We shouldn't sacrifice freedom allowing platforms to censor people. Annoys me the bullshit on youtube on all levels, but I don't want any platform removing the right of those people to say their ideas. People can have bots, but they will never be as strong as normal users. For example, 1mi bots giving likes to a video pro-nazism, this will trend and 1mi users will downvote it :) considering the platform that youtube is, 1mi real users is almost nothing. Also someone disagreeing with you don't mean that this person is stupid/dumb/lack critical thinking, this is a quite common thing nowadays, consider everyone who think different to be wrong and dumb, instead of analysing that most of the things break down to social, personal and moral values, which differ from people, cultures, and so on... So let the real democracy happen and downvote what you don't like or don't approve, upvote what you endorse, etc...
  • owlbynight 6y ago
    Do you think that one person should be able to vote for a president 100 times by impersonating 99 other people? Perhaps if there was someone on the other side doing the same for the other party's candidate, we can find balance? What is the outcome? Democracy?
• raxxorrax 6y ago
  I disagree. Youtube being the authority on information is as far removed from democracy as you could be. The reaction is based on unsubstantiated axioms. Does COVID-misinformation do significant damage? I don't think so. Are there concrete examples? Information gets censored, while simultaneously political information gets censored on Twitter because it implicates a presidential candidate. The reason is that it is information obtained by a hack. Good for democracy? A form of government where voters should hold representatives accountable? This is not a Trump endorsement but I feel driven to state the fact. > Truth, facts, and hoping that people can apply logic to find their way to them isn't enough anymore and the people exploiting this advantage are getting better at it. Again, I don't think so, are there concrete examples where this happened? And if so, an advertising company which has some easy ways to distinguish itself by removing unpopular opinions (yes, they are actually unpopular)? It doesn't really make sense to me in any way. Who are these manipulators? Putin? Trump? Cambridge Analytica? Communists? Capitalists? Where do we actually see dangerous misinformation? The worst decisions are made from fear and I believe your point of view adds to panic reactions. > say whatever we want, regardless of our status or wealth. This has been corrupted. Who do you think would would be able to speak freely if you put constraints here. It won't be low status or low income people. Disinformation on the internet is not a real threat. Not even compared to Nigerian prince scammers. Not having a authoritative voice might look scary, but it is actually a good development. Otherwise I would suggest church or something with more rigid believe systems.
• bufferoverflow 6y ago
  You don't hate the idea of censorship. You openly support it.
  • owlbynight 6y ago
    I don't believe that censorship from a 10,000 foot view is a binary state. You're thinking that I support redaction, I suspect; probably because it's hard to represent my beliefs in a few lines of text. My view is that attempting to convert facts -- delivered by the scientific method -- to fiction by way of purposeful misinformation is a more corrosive form of censorship than showing the door to a comparatively miniscule number of who-knows-whos seeking to corrupt our agreed upon truths for their own benefit.
    • bufferoverflow 6y ago
      > My view is that attempting to convert facts -- delivered by the scientific method -- to fiction by way of purposeful misinformation is a more corrosive form of censorship Then you simply don't know what the word censorship means.
    • lr4444lr 6y ago
      Disallowing certain information be shared, excepting libel/slander/fraud/privacy invasion/classified data and other private data, is censorship. The onus is on you to prove the non-binary nature of a very ordinary concept.
      • owlbynight 6y ago
        You happen across a skyscraper with a politically charged message on its façade that you disagree with. You can either: A) Paint over it. B) Surround the entire space around the message with hundreds of other messages -- lies -- in the same style and color, designed to sway people to an opposing ideology. The same effect has been achieved in both scenarios. Which is more insidious?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• concordDance 6y ago
  > Social media is currently poisoning our country to a degree that I think it may be too late to try and draw out the fight for free speech by using free speech alone. Why do people think this? A few selected anecdotes and some tiny numbers (1000 people liking a post talking about covid causing 5G? Tiny numbers)? What is the end-game that is so feared? If the people as a whole can't be trusted to make sensible decisions and judgements then abolish democracy and copy the Chinese system. Or, if the problem is uninformed people, then adopt a representative democracy where a random sample of 1000 voters are chosen by sortition and metaphorically locked in a room with the candidates for the governing council for a month (as if they were a jury) after which they elect a handful to government.
  • nl 6y ago
    45% of US adults think vaccines are unsafe. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-06/aoa-4oa062419.php https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-06/aoa-4oa06241...
    • adventured 6y ago
      Wildly misleading statement, especially given the tiny sample size versus hundreds of millions of adults in the US. From that same link (demonstrating Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of vaccines; which is obvious given the high vaccination rates in the US): "While the vast majority (82%) chose in favor of vaccines, 8% selected responses expressing serious doubt. An additional 9% said they were unsure." Also: "In a survey of 1,025 randomly sampled adults, 84% of respondents said they believed that it is extremely or very important that parents vaccinate their children" "Additionally, 86% believed vaccines are not more dangerous than the diseases they prevent, whereas 89% said they are aware of the advantages and disadvantages of vaccines." https://www.healio.com/news/pediatrics/20200116/faith-in-vaccines-falls-10-percentage-points-in-us-poll https://www.healio.com/news/pediatrics/20200116/faith-in-vac...
      • nl 6y ago
        None of this disagrees with the link I posted. In fact your own link quotes different research saying: The poll showed that only 45% of Americans believe vaccines do not cause autism in children. And as the link noted, measles needs a 95% vaccination rate to be stopped effectively.
• Smithalicious 6y ago
  If social media is poisonous and the powerful are using it to control ideas, the solution isn't to let the billionaire class social media giants be the arbiter of truth, methinks. "misinformation" is indistinguishable from "thinks I think are false" which in turn is hard to distinguish from "things I disagree with".
  • etripe 6y ago
    > "misinformation" is indistinguishable from "thinks I think are false" which in turn is hard to distinguish from "things I disagree with". Only if you believe the post-modern claim that there's no objectively verifiable truth and that all narratives are equally valid. There is a huge difference between "vaccines contain microchips" and "water retains the essence of homeopathic ingredients" on the one hand and "COVID spreads through droplets" on the other. EDIT: I do agree billionaires shouldn't be the final arbiter, though.
    • Applejinx 6y ago
      If the billionaire controllers of the tech giants (advertising based services!) aren't doing it, they are simply delegating this to other billionaires who are paying the bills. Like it's often said, 'if you're not paying for it you are the product'. Social media consumers are the target, not the ones directing the narrative. In the absence of the tech giants choosing what's permissible, you get different other billionaires who can define a benefit to pushing a 'you should drink bleach and overthrow the government' narrative, because THEY are not the 'you' referred to, plus it ain't their government. Acting like that's an organic social narrative is malpractice.
      • etripe 6y ago
        Can't both things be true simultaneously? a. there is objective truth b. it's not a good thing for billionaires to determine what is censored To me, there isn't an inherent conflict. I think we (the collective) keep dancing around the issue. Essentially, perhaps it is time for advertising agencies and corporate users of social media to be regulated like news publishers. At least there, there's some expectation that they don't misrepresent facts. One could argue news regulation is also on the decline. The next step is asking ourselves whether social media made everyone a "journalist" of sorts, and how that should be regulated. After all, taking on corporate entities alone wouldn't have stopped QAnon.
• hallihax 6y ago
  I think those fears are entirely understandable - but this is the system working as intended. The problem is not that social media is allowed to do what it does (i.e. give everyone a platform); the problem is that capital has warped the public realm such that a handful of gigantic social media corporations have captured a substantial proportion of the world's attention. The solution is, imo, to break those corporations up - to ensure competition and to break open these walled gardens which allow nonsense to thrive. I would seriously hazard against any attempt to restrict individual freedoms regarding free speech. The US, for all its problems - is significantly better than many countries on earth in terms of the ability for any random citizen to say what they like without fear of retribution. Granting politicians and mega-corporations the right and ability to effectively negate entire sets of views and opinions will only ultimately benefit the worst people on earth. It's a tricky problem but to my mind the issue is one of forcing capitalism to fulfil its promise; competition is the key to preventing tyranny in a capitalist system.
• lodovic 6y ago
  The real problem is that people are looking for solid medical advice on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. No amount of censorship is going to change that.
  • umvi 6y ago
    > The real problem is that people are looking for solid medical advice on YouTube The thing is... solid medical advice does exist on YouTube, so it's not entirely unreasonable to go looking for it there! "Just go to your doctor" Yes well, a) that's not free in America while YouTube is, and b) your local doctor could have been bottom of his class, you have no way of knowing. It's like saying don't watch world class programmers on youtube, hire a local programmer instead.
• lordnacho 6y ago
  Along with what I suspect is a large number of HN people, I also feel the same way. The high ideal is for people to say what they want, and we'll all think and decide what we think the facts are, and what decisions should be made. Now, it seems to not work. It is patently the case that a lot of people simply cannot think. One issue is that there's too much noise, as you mention. Money comes into it as well. But underlying that is a lack of education. Western European constitutions tended to be written just about during the early industrial age, with updates up to about the mid 20th century. That world is gone, but it left a lot of baggage for the world we live in today. In the old world, you had one chance to be educated, and it tended to be for a short period. Let's not forget that this was also a highly polarized world, where kids needed to be told which side of the great struggle between ideologies they were meant to support. So it's not as if we had a world of free thinking before the current abyss was reached. But importantly this world, especially in the West, also pretended that everyone was free to speak as they liked. We did educate a few people in how to think critically, but most people just got told what to think. If you ever heard your gran spewing out some pnemonic like ROYGBIV or the times tables, you know what I mean. As soon as you ask a question that is slightly inquisitive, there's no answer. We had authorities back then too, and the system kept them on a pedestal, to make it easy for everyone to think as they were supposed to. The authorities got all the air/paper time, but also they made sure that the Overton window was kept a certain size. Now there is so much airtime that everyone can have a say, and it turns out a large number of people simply can't think for themselves, because school is still pretty parochial. "Learn your times tables, here's your new opinion about helping the planet". (I don't hate the planet, and I agree with some of the things they tell the kids, but the way I see schools talk about it... it isn't thinking, it's indoctrination.) For an example, when I'm on FB looking at the US system, some older person will inevitably say "You kids don't know anything, we have a Republic not a Democracy, each state gets 2 senators". Which completely misses the point of discussing whether that's a good idea. School never taught people how to think critically. The closest we came to it (I did the IB Diploma) was a bit of math and science, and only the fortunate ones figured out that it's not about learning a bunch of facts, it's about how humanity came to learn those facts, and how we could potentially learn more. Nobody examines you on "how would you find this out" because it's hard to fit into the industrial school system. I'm good friends with a statistician, and he says even phd folks have problems in this area. What I see online is this world where a lot of people are simply trying their way at thinking critically. A lot of stuff reminds me of high schoolers at debate club. There's this void into which you put conspiracy theories, and people try their way at arguing one way or the other. Only thing is, they are adults with the right to vote, and with little guidance. In a way it's funny, like that flat earth documentary where the people actually buy a gyroscope and actually try to measure the flatness of a canal. So what should we do? There's no satisfying answer. Democracy was thought up by some men-of-letters who didn't think most people should have a say. I'm not an expert but it sounds they only thought smart people should have a say. It would be sad if the only way to move forward is to beat it into people what they are supposed to think, or who the authorities are, because ultimately we want reason to be the authority, not specific people.
• bergstromm466 6y ago
  > Social media is currently poisoning our country Does this really come close to diagnosing the root problem? I am frustrated when I see this argument. ”Intellectual property is the oil of the 21 century. Look at the richest men a hundred years ago; they all made their money extracting natural resources or moving them around. All today's richest men have made their money out of intellectual property.” — Mark Getty The root problem is that the Intellectual Monopoly system destroys the potential for democratic use and understanding of protocols - as well as everything else. Intellectual Monopoly means we are kept stupid because there are gatekeepers - usually people belonging to families with inherited wealth. The idea of the ‘Intellectual Property system’ is the newest means of production, whose function is to enclose and monopolize ideas, which should in fact belong to all children of the world. Especially when digital breaks the rules of economic theories, with it’s near-zero marginal cost of reproduction. So the modern Bougie both 1) parasitically extracts economic rents for something that has been made artificially scarce in the first place, as well as 2) unorganically stemming the rate of innovation - setting a limit on deeper cooperation and coherence/alignment, and harmony. But this reality is obscured by the cultural myths of Magical Voluntarism, Meritocracy and more. We are gaslighting people by telling them they have ‘mental health issues”, when in fact the system has evolved to put a limit on their learning and growth, and which sucks them dry. We need to get rid of closed corporate supply chains and move to Sensorica-type Open Value Networks that use the Resource Event Agent (REA) accounting system. There’s people working on implementing this using Holochain’s distributed data-integrity engine. In using such a system (compared to an internal corporate network), we transparently measure the actual material scarcity of the wonderful resources our Mother Earth provides. And then we can both 1) democratically decide who gets to use which resources (and where, when, how and why, etc.), and 2) we don’t have to use the Intellectual Monopoly system to pretend that having a monopoly is what is needed for successful innovation. What this leads to is a symphony of scalar gift economies. We owe it to ourselves and our children.
  • scoutt 6y ago
    While I agree that social media is not the root problem, I cannot grasp why a disquisition about Intellectual Property could help us to understand what is going on.
• sasavilic 6y ago
  The problem with censorship is that it "proves" that there is a "conspiracy" and it is like putting gas on a fire. I know this from people around me who believe in that stuff. If something is taken offline, than that "damn mainstream media is trying to hide a truth". EDIT: IMHO, it would be much better option to flag/warn that video as misleading and provide link to resources with correct information.
  • wccrawford 6y ago
    Actually, I would say the problem with censorship is that it rarely stops at a good place. It might start from good intentions, but eventually we're shushing people that go against the herd without actually knowing they're wrong. In this case, it seems pretty obvious that there aren't microchips in vaccines. I'm not even sure what those chips would do, or how they'd work. But what if some day the government really did do that, or something else that seems ridiculous? We'll be censoring anyone who tries to tell us otherwise. And 1 step worse: The government could order YouTube/etc to do that censoring, and it'll look like it's just their normal thing. The problem with censorship is that legit and valuable free speech will eventually be restricted.
    • thu2111 6y ago
      Don't be fooled by the pro-censorship narrative (although that is course the point of censorship). Claiming people believe there are microchips physically inside vaccines is a major distortion of what these people think. In fact even the Reuters article doesn't say that. It's the age-old tactic of making up something ludicrous that sounds vaguely like a group's concerns and then claiming they all believe it so they shouldn't be listened to. What they are concerned about is the creation of a system that enables rapid marking of people to identify if they've had certain vaccines or not. Sometimes this surfaces as talk about "quantum dots" or "dot tattoos" which is a reference to research into a way to imprint codes underneath people's skin. The microchip idea comes from the fact that this is already done for animals (rfid tags). This provokes concern in many people for similar reasons to the (supposed) Chinese notion of 'social credit': the point of tagging the population with a physical marker of compliance is to enable very efficient stripping of their rights if they haven't complied. Sort of a step short of imprisonment. For instance, some politicians already talk of blocking air travel for anyone who wasn't vaccinated (against many kinds of things). Now if you trust vaccines, no problem. But scientists are busy setting fire to their trust in all sorts of ways so the population of people who don't trust them will only increase: 1. Rapid "moonshot" vaccine development programmes that are skipping the long testing process usually involved. 2. Rising awareness of how politicised academia has become. See the other story about Nature magazine. 3. A Swine Flu vaccine that caused neurological damage in a small number of cases (but Swine Flu hurt a tiny number of people too, so the cure was worse than the disease in this case). 4. Insistence on a waiver of liability for vaccine manufacturers. 5. Many examples of low standards or making contradictory statements about viruses and COVID. 6. Demanding that anyone criticising them is silenced. And so on. The list could go on all day. Point is, it's entirely rational to be lowering trust in scientists at the moment, so any effective system of tracking and enforcement around their decisions is going to be legitimately controversial. You don't have to be a tinfoil hat wearer to observe that standards have been considerably loosened around vaccines this year.
• refurb 6y ago
  Social media is currently poisoning our country Poisoning how? Can you be specific? What impact are we seeing outside of social media that can be directly attributable to what happens online?
• gadders 6y ago
  Once you give people the power to censor things, you can't assume that the people with that power will act in good faith forever, even if they do currently. Would you want to give that power to your political opponents? If not it's better than nobody have that power.
  • amanaplanacanal 6y ago
    Someone always has and always will have that power though. I would rather the owner of the platform than the government have that power. Think about this: would you rather have the power to decide what speech you allow in your house, or would you rather the government decide for you? Because those are really your choices.
    • gadders 6y ago
      So the choice is between a corporation beholden to no-one apart from the CEO, or someone you can vote out every so often? People will always have that power, at least at a technical level, but they should be discouraged to use it.
• huffmsa 6y ago
  Giving up liberty for a bit of security? A certain Philadelphian would say your deserve neither.
• NDizzle 6y ago
  Free speech cannot be sacrificed. We’ll lose everything.
  • neuronic 6y ago
    I support some extremely limited baseline censorship. Pretty much just "don't incite violence or get people harmed/killed". But I guess you need a World War ravaging your continent first to get there.
  • dtoma 6y ago
    You're posting this on HN, a platform that has moderators and doesn't allow certain things to be said. So you implicitly agree that there is a trade-off between free speech and ability to live in a community.
    • NDizzle 6y ago
      No, not really. I’ll put up with draconian and biased moderation to skim curated tech articles in the morning before I start my day. Don’t confuse that with how exist in society.
    • teddyh 6y ago
      “Yet you participate in society! Curious.” — Mister Gotcha (https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/)
      • dtoma 6y ago
        Unlike the people in this comic, I'm actually making a point, which you seem to have missed: community, by necessity, doesn't work with absolute freedom. What matters is what we agree to compromise over and why we do so.
• lr4444lr 6y ago
  Democracy functions with an educated electorate. If you're saying that YouTube has to act as gatekeeper ban non-libellous, legal misinformation, you're passing a grim judgment on your fellow citizens which implies that the battle for the country is already lost.
  • gbrown 6y ago
    Well yeah, that just about sums it up for me. There’s a subtle myth in absolutist free speech circles (to which I used to belong, and which I still think envision a society worth working towards) - that people are rational. In a world of rational actors, the solution to bad speech is good speech. Humans, on the other hand, have proven themselves largely unprepared for the modern media environment. We have consumer protection laws about what can be put in our food, and I think it’s worth exploring what that would look like for media. Personally, I come down on a power*responsibility compromise. Individual people should have the broadest possible freedoms, but: 1. Wealthy and powerful people have an unchecked ability to amplify their voices, and we should think carefully about how to manage that. Returning to a sane world of campaign finance law would be one example. 2. Media corporations have a lot of power, and many have abdicated the corresponding responsibility. I think we should work towards editorial standards, mandatory complaint resolution and correction at least for those masquerading as news. 3. Platforms like FB and YT have shown themselves capable of algorithmically maximizing engagement, and it seems that for a subset of their users the effect is radicalization and conspiratorial nonsense (Qanon, anti-vax, climate deniers, holocaust deniers etc.) I don’t have the solution, but a bit more gatekeeping against misinformation would probably help.
    • Applejinx 6y ago
      I've not been an absolutist free-speech person but what you've arrived at works equally well for me. It seems obvious to me that humans… and I am one!… are not able to handle things that well. Often we have to look at outcomes to populations to really get a sense of what's going on, as we view things in this blindered way and are deeply persuadable in known, exploitable ways. And that becomes a meta-game: become immune to a particular crude argument, fall to a more multilayered argument, and so on. A key factor here is this (in my opinion): conspiratorial nonsense is not nonsense. Even if it seems bonkers and useless, there's something about it that is serving a purpose, but it's very likely not the purpose that it 'says on the tin'. For instance, there is a great deal of 'nonsense' that exists for the purpose of goading humans on to acts of random terrorism, and for grooming humans to be an extension of an army from somewhere else. Building an army to destroy a country is a VERY high-value activity, but it's not done by showing up and going, HI! I represent the army of Kazakhstan! Please acquire a weapon and shoot your countrymen for me for the glory of country that is not you! So it's done, by quite a few state and non-state actors, in different ways. And when you've got a global pandemic and the ability to propagandize your country's enemy and get 'em to normalize licking each others' nostrils… well, you do what you can. Hence 'conspiratorial nonsense' toward nonsensical or nonexistent ends, that happens to fulfill a purpose other than what's argued by the conspiratorial nonsense. The key concept here is that it's possible to misinform on purpose towards a defined goal that's orthogonal to the apparent misinformation. One VERY IMPORTANT aspect of this, as Facebook and Google have learned, is that if you're doing that and you have access to big data to inspect how your misinformation is affecting POPULATIONS where you can't directly get response data back from the targets, you can use the big data to ask questions like "Which of these two arguments for hunting lizard aliens that are also pedophiles, most inclines the target towards murdering black people? Which accusation towards this political figure most inclines the target towards inciting civil war and overthrowing the government of the target's host country?" And that's how it's done. Given sophisticated enough ability to interpret data, you can direct 'nonsense' VERY effectively towards explicit other goals which aren't hard to work out if you're not the target. You need the data, though, otherwise you're fumbling in the dark. Google and Facebook are complicit in this to the extent that they go, 'you gots the money, we gots the honey' and place themselves at the disposal of anybody wishing these services.
• dgb23 6y ago
  > things are going to need to be sacrificed I say this for emphasis, not to personally attack you: Whenever I read or hear this it makes me extremely suspicious, because it often doesn't come from those who will do the sacrifice themselves. Censorship and other forms of regulating free speech is simply never a good solution. Perpetrators of lies will even hide behind this, and create a false image of rebellious heroism, instead of facing public discourse and the consequences thereof. YouTube is a private entity but they correctly assess that they have a significant responsibility here. But curating social media content is not unheard of, Wikipedia manages it surprisingly well. Instead they could for example certify and emphasize content that is grounded in science and verify content creators of such. This is from the top of my head but there are certainly other people who have smarter ideas that don't involve straight up censorship. Talk is talk. Actions should have consequences, which is why we have rules and agreements in the real world. I also very much doubt that censorship achieves what it is supposed to. People don't suddenly become enlightened (depending on context it might be the other way around) when you ban that stuff. It can easily become worse.
  • Aeolun 6y ago
    > Censorship and other forms of regulating free speech is simply never a good solution. The almost free speech on the other side of the ocean seems to be working pretty well. You get to say anything that isn’t actively harmful to others, but you won’t be able to advertise bleach as a way to get Corona out of your system.
    • leetcrew 6y ago
      > you won’t be able to advertise bleach as a way to get Corona out of your system. you can't do this in the US either if you're actually selling bleach. are you saying in europe ordinary people aren't allowed to publicly speculate about cures for the virus?
      • hartator 6y ago
        Specially that no one died from it. The story that got famous of the couple who did it was actually a murder. The wife never took the bleach, knew it was going to kill her husband, and hated Trump. She confessed to the police and now he is prison. But of course the media stopped talking about that story as soon as she confessed. Leaving people believing that a couple did try bleach to cure covid.
• rptr4 6y ago
  I do worry specifically about what defines “misinformation”—sure, let’s ban “the vaccine has a microchip programmed to kill you” or something, but would we ban a vaccine recipient reporting adverse reactions they experienced? This will probably be the most widely and rapidly deployed vaccine in the history of the world, and I think it’s important that any and all necessary information becomes widely available, and I don’t necessarily trust the proper and official channels to always report all of that information.
  • ksk 6y ago
    Adverse reactions are not something to be taken lightly. A proper investigation is required to determine what the root cause is. One person making a youtube video would be extremely misleading. You have to look at what medications they're currently on, if they're fully healthy, etc, etc. information is neutral, but people can misapply what they think they know and project their ignorance in a way that will be amplified. I work in biotech (vaccines) and I see this kind of faulty thinking applied to vaccines quite often, so maybe I'm more sensitive than most.
• eternalban 6y ago
  "The video platform said it would now ban any content with claims about [planetary motion] that contradict consensus from local [priests] or the [Catholic Church]." __Any__ qualified individual/institution that deviates from the "authority" falls under this guidance. That means no dissent is tolerated, regardless of qualification of the source. Authoritarianism is authoritarianism. > The ability for one person to amplify their voice or ideas via hundreds or thousands of bots, paid assholes, and gullible people who lack the capacity for critical thought is a problem. It's a big problem. The problem is, actually, "gullible people who lack the capacity for critical thought". It doesn't really matter if it is "one person", or a tightly knit group, or even one's own government. > The ability for one person to amplify their voice or ideas A wonderful ability, and a cherished Human Right. > Truth, facts, and hoping that people can apply logic to find their way to them isn't enough anymore and the people exploiting this advantage are getting better at it. That is your opinion, and imo highly likely not even an original opinion. Where did you first read that "truth, facts, and [logic] isn't enough anymore"? It a very 'interesting' meme, don't you agree?
  • ksk 6y ago
    >The problem is, actually, "gullible people who lack the capacity for critical thought". It doesn't really matter if it is "one person", or a tightly knit group, or even one's own government. Since you can't wave a magic wand and expect people to get smarter in the matters of public health, you have to come up with a solution that works for todays populace. IMHO the only solution is to artificially amplify the voice of experts. Yes, some may call this "gatekeeping", but yeah we don't want to give equal time to crystals and homeopathy as we do to established accepted science.
• throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  How is your comment substantively different from someone saying "I love freedom but..." and then proceeding to sing the virtues of how ignoring the 4th amendment will save us from terrorists? We've already gone down a very similar road once we we don't like where it leads. Turns out ignoring the 4th amendment didn't help us stop terrorists and now 20yr later the government is still ignoring the 4th amendment to our detriment despite the whole terrorism thing having mostly run its course and reached a steady state. Why will it be different if we take a similar approach to a different right?
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• fetbaffe 6y ago
  If social media is poising the country, why give social media (YouTube) more powers? If it is the case then you have two options, ban YouTube or add more government regulation. Let them, with the poison, regulate themselves doesn’t make sense if you agree with that premise except if you think some poison is ok.
• arminiusreturns 6y ago
  As a very staunch advocate for free speech, I understand where you are coming from, but I have some major issues with this kind of position. For one, while the scale of information is at a new level than in the pre-internet era, I don't think the fundamental lessons from the Renaissance or the Enlightenment change because of that. This "I hate it but it's justified because of dire circumstances" position is not new, and has, as we learned from the above, been the primary tool of abuse by totalitarians and tyrants. Forgetting those lessons and falling for the same trap again is naive at best. Second, any discussion on this topic inevitably brings out everyone shitting on the most obvious surface issues as brought to the mass conciousness by the mass media, but almost never do I see discussion about nation states, corporations, military, and other non-individual actors and their actions in this realm, which means to me either people are ignorant of this, or they are purposfully omitting them. Sockpuppetry and other fine tuned military psyop techniques are at play and if they get ignored what will happen if the pro-censorship people get their way is they will silence individual voices but end up doing almost nothing to stop the more sophisticated and much more dangerous things going on. I'll know I've shown up for a good conversation when it isn't me who is bringing up Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays, operation mockingbird, the church commitee, sockpuppetry, OCA (online covert action), media conglomerate ownership, etc. Third, I think the claims that "this is a fight for democracy" are misguided, and likely to be abused in the search for justification of the censorship push. To me it's just another "we have to stop the terrorists!", a lie which I experienced the real consequences of in the form of war, one the country has never recovered from in the realm of freedoms and rights. Lies we now know were about control and not about protection. I'm telling you now, so please listen, on this topic, this is a patriot act moment (decade). Please, please don't fall for it, and have the courage to allow people not just to speak their minds, but as RMS talks about, read what they wilt, as it's just as much about the freedom to read as the freedom to speak. As for the particular topic dejour, if you want some credible reporting that slightly bucks the mainstream narrative, I suggest Whitney Webb[1][2] as a good journalist doing this work. I've been consistently impressed at not just her scoops and insights, but her willingness to say "I'm not going to speculate, lets stick to the facts." when being interviewed. 1. https://unlimitedhangout.com/author/whitney-webb/ https://unlimitedhangout.com/author/whitney-webb/ 2. https://twitter.com/_whitneywebb https://twitter.com/_whitneywebb
• deleted 6y ago
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• donatj 6y ago
  I hear people say free speech is "a threat to our democracy" often these days. I've never understood, can you clarify what you mean? Is it an actual threat to your right to vote? Or is it just a threat to people voting the way you like? In which case isn't the answer just to put out equally salacious information in the opposite direction? That seems like the democratic option to me.
  • baq 6y ago
    i suggest asking yourself a theoretical question: is a vote to end democracy democratic? then look up cases in history when such a vote took place. free speech here is used as a tool to convince people to vote against democracy (and/or free speech itself).
    • donatj 6y ago
      Do you have any examples of anyone encouraging we give up democracy?
• Fnoord 6y ago
  You don't have free speech on a platform like YouTube. It is Google's walled garden, with Google's set of rules. Free speech and censorship is for and by the government, and it was never absolute to begin with; always been a nuance.
  • antepodius 6y ago
    Free speech as an ideal is older than the US government. It means limiting negative consequences for people speaking their minds. Also, when FAANG eats the world, Google/Facebook's moderation team becomes a de facto arm of the local government.
• quotemstr 6y ago
  > Banning obvious bullshit, albeit akin to censorship, is NARCAN. I'll agree with your plan for banning "obvious bullshit" so long as I get to decide what constitutes "obvious bullshit". Don't like that idea? Then why should I like it when you get to decide? Or when some Google policy goon gets to decide? I never voted for you or for that policy goon. Whenever you give anyone power to censor b"obvious bullshit", it takes a few milliseconds for "obvious bullshit" to become "political positions I dislike". That's how people work. The disruption to the free flow of information is more harmful than any amount of bullshit. Your "war for democracy" is in fact a war against democracy, since democracy is about building a distributed consensus about what constitutes truth, not about letting unelected censors control the public. Anyone who tries to control what strangers say to each other is someone who wants to control your thoughts and rule over you. No thanks. Social media is not some kind of existential problem. What you're claiming is a massive civilization-scale problem is what people claimed about the printing press. Oh no! Anyone can make a pamphlet! This terrible danger must be dealt with! We can't allow the bible to be published in lay people's language! They might misinterpret it if they can read it without the help of priests! Smash the presses! -- this is what people actually thought. Now we think this attitude is ridiculous, because it is. The real danger we have right now is a few people using their influence over social media platforms to control public conversation and subvert democracy by manipulating the conversation. I am completely opposed to all SV attempts to decide for themselves what is true and what is false and censor eight billion people based on the result. No. They do not get to have that power.
  • deleted 6y ago
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• taf2 6y ago
  I think it’s risky to believe something is a war. It’s too often this line of thinking that is used to remove civil liberties. I take a different view. We are actively having an open debate and that is a good thing. YouTube is not part of our government, they are like a magazine or tv station of the past and they can and IMO have the right to choose what content they allow or disallow and this is totally fine and has nothing to do with free speech (in the legal sense) Now if we past a law that stated I can not speak my mind about covid that would be a law that IMO violates the 1st amendment. But what is happening today is not bad it’s just one company making a decision on it’s own. A separate question for the legal system to probably decide is whether YouTube as part of Google is acting as a monopoly to abuse its power. But I do not think anything about YouTubes decision as a business to not allow certain content published is anyway a matter of our 1st amendment rights... hopefully my perspective isn’t too poorly received - but thankfully you can down vote me, or up vote me and I don’t have to worry about being throw in jail for posting - happy hacking
  • throwmeaway_pls 6y ago
    That’s an overly simplistic and reductive view of free speech rights. Can my internet service provider shut off my access if I spend too much time reading “misinformation”? Can they give the government a list of all the people reading “misinformation”? Can they require I attend a reeducation program before restoring my access?
• ianai 6y ago
  Maybe it’s not free speech if it’s part of or promoted by a for-profit platform?
• kyle_martin1 6y ago
  The realities of censorship are and historically have been large net losses. That was one of the large premises of the founding of the United States, among many other ideals. So in the interest humanity and historical evidence, censorship is and will always be a bad idea. The best ideas will eventually win, as history has also shown us. Source: US constitution, Venezuelan history, Romanian history, British history, Korean history, Vietnam history, Chinese history, Cuban history, Cambodian history, Soviet Union history, German history. That’s just a start.
  • confidantlake 6y ago
    Let me preface this by saying I used to be a free speech absolutist, and maybe I will be again some day. I still don't think the government should be banning speech. But I think companies moderating their spaces is necessary. Good moderation is large part of why this forum is so good in the first place. The history of the internet has shown us that unmoderated spaces turn into dumpster fires. German history seems to be the classic example of an unchecked conspiracy theory doing massive damage. That is why holocaust denial was made illegal in much of Europe. I am ignorant of most of the other histories. Would love to hear your take. (Also as an aside, I upvoted you since I think you make good points and provoke an interesting discussion, even if we don't agree on everything).
    • kyle_martin1 6y ago
      Thanks for the upvote. To your point about companies censoring speech as they own the platform, I'd agree they claim to be a platform but I don't think they're acting like platform. Based on their actions they’re acting as a Publisher because they’re editing and curving speech like a newspaper does with opinion pieces. Platform has a legal definition, which was litigated in the early 90s. The result was if you’re a platform you’re not legally liable for the content of your website. The legislation calls out that’s speech must be user generated and flow of ideas cannot be restricted unless they are already illegal (eg. how to make a bomb). Publisher also has a legal definition, which social media companies certainly don’t want because then they’re liable for all content and can be regulated further. Actually these companies don’t want any regulation The business models will eventually come under attack due to overreaching privacy policies and general CEO autonomy. I’d also like to point out there’s some incestuous situations going on between the staff of Facebook, Twitter and Democratic campaigns including Biden’s. If we’re honest with ourselves we know it’s highly likely collusion and back channels exist between the two. I can provide more information if you’d like.
• tazjin 6y ago
  > I do not like the idea that hard, easily proven facts can be overwhelmed by voluminous bullshit. In principle this sounds agreeable, in practice it is often not that easy because things get muddied fast as soon as politics are involved. I'm very skeptical/opposed to this particular measure, and others like it, because well-intentioned people are also fallible. Disclaimer: I work at Alphabet, but this is strictly my personal opinion.
  • Applejinx 6y ago
    Interestingly, I'm skeptical of Alphabet for exactly the same reasons :) I feel like regarding tech giants handling relatively unprecedented expansions of social media and broadcasting, it wasn't up to you whether politics got involved. As soon as third parties started to work out exploits to your conceptual system, ya got involved. 'The algorithm' has a lot to do with this, but at heart it's an exploit and not the algorithm itself. Until the algorithm is actually intelligent and can think about itself and what it's doing, you and the company you work for are exploitable. As such, you may feel democratization of media and the ability for individuals to broadcast and information-search is vital to societies and humanity as a whole, and you'd be right, but that's not what you're doing. So long as your work is exploitable in this way, you become partisan, you are just blind to WHO you are being partisan for. And we've seen some pretty wild consequences out of the range of possible outcomes this produces.
• bengale 6y ago
  This is a great example of how rights aren't free, they are counterbalanced by responsibilities. The right to freedom of speech seems to bear the cost of education. An educated person should be able to assess the things they hear and make their own choice on what to believe, uneducated people seem unable to do the same.
  • enraged_camel 6y ago
    Yes, but worth noting that it's not just a matter of education. People who stand to profit from the misinformation are also motivated to believe it.
• Fjolsvith 6y ago
  So YouTube becomes "peer reviewed", accepting only proven research. BFD. They are just going to lose out on all the ad revenue for videos that will go elsewhere.
• throwaway894345 6y ago
  I don’t think the problem is so much social media, but the polarization of our epistemological institutions, which erodes trust in them and rightfully so—we now have to take our academic information with a particularly large grain of salt, accounting for the aligned interests of the media and certain departments in the academy. However, many go too far, moving from skepticism to positions which can’t be supported by the evidence. They throw the baby out with the bath water. The only solution in my mind is to restore heterodoxy to these epistemological institutions, so people of all stripes can trust them. I know this kind of comment draws out bad faith arguments like a moth to flame (“...biased against reality”), so I hope we can dispense with that and focus on solutions.
• umvi 6y ago
  No. Determining truth is a hard problem, and trusting huge corporations to arbitrate truth for us is extremely dangerous to our democracy[0]. [0] https://youtu.be/ZggCipbiHwE https://youtu.be/ZggCipbiHwE
  • rbanffy 6y ago
    OTOH, free speech is not a right on itself, but a tool for the betterment of society. If speech is used for a purpose opposed to that - to bring on fascism or risking our extinction - then it's natural, and necessary, to react against it.
    • pessimizer 6y ago
      > OTOH, free speech is not a right on itself, but a tool for the betterment of society. This is only true for censors. There is no such thing as a "right in itself," there are things we agree will be rights, and that we choose to guarantee. You choose to not guarantee freedom of speech, and rationalize it as some sort of natural law.
  • owlbynight 6y ago
    Do you trust Amazon to remove fake reviews?
• monkeynotes 6y ago
  Social media is a disease, regardless of the messages dispersed over it. However, a war for democracy - democracy is about what the people want, not what the self appointed overseers want. Unfortunately if the majority want to indulge in corrupt thinking then that's democracy. That's how you end up with Trump. If you want to fight for democracy then you have to let people express themselves. Free speech is the cornerstone of democracy so a fight for democracy is a fight for free speech. What you seem to be asking for in terms of sacrifice is an authoritarian intervention where we appoint people to determine what is truth and ban alternative thinking. This obviously is just as bad as what is going on now. Once you have the truth committee in place you can predict where that goes once "misinformation" is under control. Start with enforcing scientific truths, and then leaders will abuse this power to further their own truths. Imagine corporations lobbying the Department of Truth. We are fked for now. I imagine a lot more pain and difficult change is ahead of us. I lament for pre-internet times. I used to champion the idea of the internet giving equal platform for all but I never foresaw the internet being such a huge part of everyday life, and with that comes the good and the bad of humanity. The 2020 US elections are a storm coming at us, and no one knows just how bad the west will be ravaged after it's done.
• nprz 6y ago
  No no no, this is such bullshit. People wouldn't believe in these conspiracy theories if they weren't in a state of downward mobility. Look at the suicide rate in the US, especially for those without more than a high school education. Look at the increasing opiate addiction and overdoses. Is it any wonder malevolent conspiratorial thinking is increasing? It is unfortunate people are unable to correctly identify the actual cause of their suffering, but we shouldn't silence these voices.
  • nprz 6y ago
    What I mean to say is conspiracy theories are a symptom and not the disease, silencing conspiracy theories does nothing to address the actual issue. The anger and discontentment of the working class caused by declining wages is what needs to be fixed.
• tw04 6y ago
  I don't know how this ever became an issue of "free speech" in the first place. This isn't a matter of free speech and never has been. If you call up Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern in the middle of afternoon drive hour and he doesn't like what you have to say, he's going to hang up the phone on you (assuming you could get through in the first place). This is no different - google has absolutely no obligation to host your garbage on their site. If you want to post conspiracy theories, go buy a server from dell, pay for a business line from your ISP, and setup your own site, and host your own content. If the content you're hosting violates laws, it'll probably get taken down. You're free to say whatever you want, nobody else is REQUIRED to listen to you, host you, or advertise you and never has been. About the only way out of that box is if you can prove they were discriminating against you because you were a member of a protected class (in the US) and not because of the content of your data.
  • umvi 6y ago
    Free speech is a meaningless freedom if there are effectively zero public fora in which you can exercise it. "I said some garbage on Rush Limbaugh's show, so he hung up on me" "So then I put it on Facebook, but Facebook censored it" "So then I put it on Youtube, but Google censored it" "So then I self hosted, but then Cloudflare censored it" "So then I hosted it out of my own house, but then Comcast blocked it" "Oh well, I'm not in jail so that means I still have free speech I guess" I would say the above are signs of a decaying democracy.
    • CyberDildonics 6y ago
      Youtube and facebook refusing to host something is not a slippery slope to something being completely censored. Anyone can rent a server in pretty much any country. Saying the biggest companies in the world not hosting you is the same as being completely censored is like saying you will die of thirst if you aren't allowed to drink coke.
      • umvi 6y ago
        > like saying you will die of thirst if you aren't allowed to drink coke. I will die of thirst though if every source of water has a megacorp in the supply chain that can cut me off from it. Imagine a world where your tap water is ultimately sourced from Dasani. And imagine Dasani can cut off my water if I say bad things they don't like. That is the world we live in: s/tap water/information/g, s/Dasani/tech megacorps/g To reach a significant audience on the internet, you must go through a tech megacorp at some layer in the stack. And that tech megacorp can decide to cut you off from the internet at their layer in the stack if they don't like what you are saying or if Twitter mobs put pressure on them to do so.
• mistersquid 6y ago
  > Banning obvious bullshit, albeit akin to censorship, is NARCAN. This is the crucial comparison. YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook do not promulgate free speech. They are driven by algorithms that prioritize certain information over others. Such algorithmic prioritizations are not platforms for free speech and removing harmful content from these algorithmcally-generated feeds is not the same as censoring speech in the domain of free discourse. Given YouTube's algorithmically-generated feed, removing certain harmful content is more accurately identified as curation than censorship.
  • Nasrudith 6y ago
    Wrong - 1st Ammendment was already ruled to cover algorithims in cryptography export cases. You're trying to rationalize what you already feel is the truth. The definition of harmful content is already a tautology which belies horrifying implications because it puts agency of the reaction soley upon the "speech". It would mean that in Aparthiad contexts an interracial handshake would be responsible for a riot.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • colinmhayes 6y ago
      And Dred Scott was ruled to not have any rights since he was property, not a citizen. Doesn't mean it's true.
• Nasrudith 6y ago
  Can facts actually be overwhelmed by voluminous bullshit? That in itself is bullshit. If I had a billion to spend on insisting the sky had polkadots very few would believe it and most who say "the sky is polkadotted" would be taking the piss. Confusingly the zeitgeist itself is bullshit that unwittingly self-describes itself as the menance. Really the example chosen was harmless - what makes the bullshit believed isn't plausiblity but because /they want to believe it/ and you cannot censor the inner desires, fears, and self-justifications. But the facts don't stop being true even if they believe the bullshit. That is what makes successful rationalizations so dangerous as reality comes home to roost as they insist it is safe to play in the street because cars always swerved out of the way before. Really
• formerly_proven 6y ago
  FWIW I think there is a major breakdown of The West underway that begun when China effectively ripped Western ideology apart after the end of the cold war. The Western ideology after WW2 was that liberal markets (eventually) implied (rise of) a democracy with civil liberties. China showed that this ideology is false by creating liberal-enough markets while retaining absolute state control (and the Chinese state has vastly concentrated its power, and the power within the Chinese state has been vastly concentrated as well, to the point of it effectively being a Fuhrerstate). Meanwhile The East has shown that so-called illiberal democracies can be widely accepted by the people. And the US are currently testing the hypothesis whether free speech is survivable for a democratic society in the presence of so-called social media. I strongly suspect these are going to be the sucker-punch for The West in combination with Covid-related economic crises. It is likely the liberal era is going to end within this decade.
  • shadowgovt 6y ago
    Essentially, the international scope of the communications tools online has allowed for free-speech absolutism to be hacked by the propaganda methods refined via the Cold War. the NYT isn't highly likely to publish things that source to Russian propaganda ops, because they employ fact-checkers, care about pedigree of information, and change their editorial process in light of system failures. They get tripped from time-to-time, but the same trick doesn't usually work twice. My relatives on Facebook? Not so much. Nor did Facebook (until recently) care to put an editorial eye to advertising as long as the money was green. It is not a guarantee that a system structured like this is healthy for democracy, nor is it a guarantee that a democracy doesn't destabilize under it.
    • rmrfstar 6y ago
      > the NYT isn't highly likely to publish things that source to Russian propaganda ops, The people who lied us into Iraq?
      • shadowgovt 6y ago
        Yes, those people. As I said, they get tripped from time-to-time, but they modify their process when it happens. In that case, they had multiple intelligence agency sources feeding them the same bad data, so their cross-checks failed. They've down-sampled the reliability of those sources in subsequent years.
• atlgator 6y ago
  You are suggesting that we curtail 1st Amendment rights in order to save social media platforms. I would argue instead that social media platforms have been facing the abyss for some time and cannot be saved. New censors beget new methods of exploitation and platforms literally adding new continents of users will only add to the noise. Let’s not fall into the trap of throwing away our guaranteed rights for short term convenience. Instead let’s consider that social media is not a source of truth going forward and adjust accordingly.
• jennyyang 6y ago
  > things are going to need to be sacrificed. What a comically cliche and stereotypical error that people keep making. 20 years ago it was the Bush and Cheney saying the same thing. Now its the liberals saying that the "poor, ignorant masses" need to be saved from themselves. For the record, I'm also a liberal, but old school liberal, not the contemporary liberal that eschews giving the same rights to those that I disagree with. Who gets to decide what gets sacrificed? You? What happens when The Other Side gets control? The laws that protect their free speech are the exact same laws that will protect our rights when the opposition gets control. Never, ever, ever mess with the ideals of Free Speech. No one is smart enough or uncorrupt enough to navigate that properly. The only thing that will save us as a society is completely unadulterated free speech. What we do as a society is to educate as best as we can and let the chips fall where they may. Which is hard, because we have the worst levels of education in developed countries, so we are reaping what we sowed for the last few decades. But basically it's herd immunity for information.
  • blackbear_ 6y ago
    > The only thing that will save us as a society is completely unadulterated free speech. I really want this to be true, but I have doubts. Do you know any resources that expand and elaborate on this point?
• wavepruner 6y ago
  The argument you're making is common and always boils down to this belief: "most people are too stupid to discern the truth" History shows this to belief to be incorrect, and instead shows that any central power holding this belief will eventually commit terrible crimes against humanity. A small group of "intelligent" people can not possibly out-compute billions of humans' brain processing power.
  • owlbynight 6y ago
    I don't think people are too stupid to discern the truth. I think a lot of people are too overwhelmed by the minutia of navigating their own stressful lives to handle a deluge of lies designed by expert propagandists to be easier and more appealing for them to consume than the truth. The difference is that these aren't leaflets being dropped from the sky on a village of a few hundred people. These lies that span our entire country and they are coming from people that have access to analytical data which allows them to observe how their lie is being received so that they can refine their messaging immediately. There has never been a propaganda delivery system like this before. History isn't going to be useful here.
    • antepodius 6y ago
      What makes you so sure your mind hasn't been pwned in an analogous way targeted towards smarter/more sophisticated demographics? A priori, I would expect more educated people to be more easily controlled/brainwashed; that's what the original point of education was- to inclcate a certain ideology/worldview. The people on facebook get weak waves of brainwashing targeted via algorithm; people in universities get a more powerful version of the same.
• crusso 6y ago
  I personally think that this is now a war for democracy In this war for democracy, which side of the war do you think wants everyone to be able to access any information and which side do you think wants to control the flow of information? How can we value each and every voter's input if we don't value their ability to filter for themselves what is true?
  • owlbynight 6y ago
    When you order a product on Amazon that immediately breaks and then you find out that of its 10000 reviews, 9750 of them were fake, I commend your ability to put your personal feelings aside in lieu of the greater fight for free speech.
    • crusso 6y ago
      That's a poor analogy. We're not talking about a service that is trying to help users achieve clearly definable goals like eliminating fraud with their customers' consent. No one is claiming that Amazon customers object to having Amazon's help to prevent being defrauded. We're talking about communication platforms where politically motivated decisions are being made to filter out information that the decision-makers don't like, and the users are saying, "We don't want you to make those decisions for us." But also think through my original point. Why should we value democracy, the notion that each person has valuable and necessary input in building a society, when we hand control of information over to the very few? Shouldn't we cut out the middlemen and just have our information overlords be in charge of creating and implementing all our policies? Why trust people to vote when we don't trust them to choose and evaluate information?
• gdulli 6y ago
  You're exactly right that we don't have a single important principle we need to protect, we have a complex tapestry of many that we need to balance. Total censorship with total security isn't the answer. Total freedom with the total loss of truth is also not the answer. As anyone should expect, the ideal is not at either extreme. Is it messy trying to sort it out, will mistakes get made, will some decisions make some people unhappy? Yes. But it's where we're at. It's the price we pay for living in a society that's nurtured fraud and money-driven nihilism for so long.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• bitwize 6y ago
  Indeed. One of the reasons why Germany didn't renazify after WWII is because the German government criminalized Nazi ideology almost immediately. Our common, absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment dates only to the Brandenburg v. Ohio ruling in 1969. If we didn't have conservative presidents unbalancing the Supreme Court with ultra-conservative justices, we might have a Supreme Court willing to re-evaluate the First Amendment's applicability in light of widespread hate speech. But alas, this Is Trump's America...
• Noos 6y ago
  ...is it even proven that "social media is poisoning our country?" To be blunt, the only time I noticed people complaining about it was when Trump got elected. Barack Obama if I remember was actually praised for his usage of social media and targeting. A lot of this anti-social media is a reaction more against him than anything and the left is trying to lock things down to prevent a Trump from ever happening again.
• PravinLal 6y ago
  As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
• Heyso 6y ago
  > The ability for one person to amplify their voice or ideas This is nothing new, look at who possess medias that most peoples read and trust every day. It is naïve to think disinformation is something new, and oh, disinformation certainly doesn't apply to "ME". Banning obvious bullshit? Like flat earth? Do you feel the need to ban that? I don't. (Peoples) Wise or not wise enough to discern truth, you won't make anything better by tasking someone else to discern what is truth and not for others. Sacrifice some liberty for security, and you will lose both.