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> 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 suspiciou

by 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.
    - nradov 6y ago
      That is misinformation. The Mesa Arizona police aren't investigating the death of Gary Lenius as a homicide. His wife Wanda isn't in prison. The poison was chloroquine phosphate, not bleach. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/police-say-death-arizona-man-not-being-investigated-homicide-n1195591 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/police-say-de...
    - neekleer 6y ago
      You heard or remember the story wrong. There wasn't a bleach couple. That was a form of chloroquine as an ingredient in fish tank cleaner. In some media, it was equated to (hydroxy)choloroquine as a medicinal drug even though this pharmaceutical drug has a high safety rating. Also, I don't think anyone went to prison even though it's assumed the engineer husband would have not knowingly drank poison. The wife also ingested some, but she survived. In any case, the media can't pretend they rely on arbiters of truth because there is bias all around. Trump's statements on disinfectants were not as incendiary as some people made them out to be. Disinfectants can sometimes be used in the lungs or body, but this is a question for the medical field. The media speculated about poison control calls surging after Trump's statements, but any small uptick seemed to already be present since people have resorted to rigorous use of disinfectants in the home going all the way back to March. Finally, with the focus on lockdowns and isolation, we've actually somewhat missed the point of the DHS briefing on disinfectants and UV decontamination. We were supposed to be looking for simple innovations that made going to places like the grocery store safer and more manageable, but I haven't seen much progress in this area.
- jackhack 6y ago
  Nonsense. Almost free speech is censorship by another name. Working "pretty well?" Sure, unless one tries to talk about things that really matter and strays outside the dotted lines of permissibility. Some topics are verboten. When you say "other side of the ocean," I assume you're talking about Europe. Try to discuss the muslim rape gangs in the UK. Try to discuss the surge in grenade attacks and many-fold increase in rape in Sweden. Try to discuss the homeless migrants living on the streets and the Aljerian street wars in France. Try to discuss Fulan Gong in China. Or tiannamen square. Try to discuss political assassinations in Russia, or the bribes the wife of Moscow's mayor hands out. Try to discuss alternative political parties in Ukraine. I think there are scores of political prisoners serving time for wrongthink who might disagree with your assertion that almost free speech is working pretty well. If you want to discover who your masters are, learn who you are not allowed to criticize.
  - Mattasher 6y ago
    Put another way, almost free speech works great for those with power, and badly for everyone else. When people advocate censorship of any kind, they're really saying, "I have the correct views held by the establishment, so I'm not worried about it."
    - shawnz 6y ago
      > "I have the correct views held by the establishment, so I'm not worried about it." If the establishment's views are strongly codified and checks and balances are in place to maintain them, is that so bad?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - walterbell 6y ago
        If existing reality seems to "work", is it so bad to exclude non-establishment innovations, while the larger world/markets continue to compete and innovate?
      - 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- AbrahamParangi 6y ago
  > almost free The land of the almost free just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it
  - minerjoe 6y ago
    My dad, rest his soul, would tell me when I was young: "The land of the free, only if you are brave enough to live free."
- gotoeleven 6y ago
  Speech that is controversial is the only speech that needs protecting. You don't need free speech to protect your cat pictures or tweets about a salad you ate.
  - mmmm2 6y ago
    Even in the most corrupt police state you are free to publicly praise the people in power.
- tossAfterUsing 6y ago
  > 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. Alternatively, you don't go to jail for suggesting that anybody actually implied injection of bleach as a treatment for coronavirus.
- trident1000 6y ago
  Absurd. Who are the arbiters of truth and what can and cannot be said? There is no such thing as almost free speech in a free society except perhaps for clear cut physical threats. Also big tech is going to end democracy as we know it unless we get serious. They can decide who gets elected into office and we are on a path to replacing elected representatives with kings.
  - VBprogrammer 6y ago
    BREAKING NEWS: trident1000 is a child molester; found with 6000 indecent images of children on his PC. For the record this is intended in jest
    - trident1000 6y ago
      If you want free speech you need to learn to live with free speech. That means not believing everything you see, critically thinking, and actually vetting the sources yourself. Its a societal process that plays out over time. The answer is not to have content oligarchs that decide what is truth and can be seen. Statements like this eventually are just seen as noise and ignored as people look for verifiable truth via trusted sources within platforms. In short, it works itself out.
      - VBprogrammer 6y ago
        Firstly, thanks for taking my comment in the manner it was intended. I was slightly concerned it might have gone down badly. I take your point but I think you are brave to rely on the common sense of the entire world to protect you from false or misleading claims against you. Having seen a friend being roasted in the "mainstream media" with a story which was heavily biased against her, and seeing the venomous messages sent to her in the aftermath, I think I'm ok with some limits on free speech.
    - eternalban 6y ago
      The legal system provides the mechanism to address that specific category of speech. “Defamation is an area of law that provides a civil remedy when someone's words end up causing harm to your reputation or your livelihood. Libel is a written or published defamatory statement, while slander is defamation that is spoken by the defendant.”
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  Sure, arresting people for quoting Churchill seems like a potential definition of "working". [1] There's no way that arresting people for a twitter post [2] could be abused. Nobody needs free speech for reposting rap lyrics. [3] The road to hell is paved with good intentions. [1] https://thenewamerican.com/hate-speech-u-k-political-leader-arrested-for-quoting-winston-churchill/ https://thenewamerican.com/hate-speech-u-k-political-leader-... [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-offensive-facebook-and-twitter-posts-soar-london-a7064246.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-offensive-face... [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921
  - arethuza 6y ago
    In the first case there about Paul Weston, the local Police Commisioner clarified the reasons for his arrest: "It has been wrongly suggested that Mr Weston was arrested for reciting passages written by Winston Churchill. I understand he was not welcome outside the Winchester Guildhall, the Police were called and he was asked to move on. I also understand that he was not prepared to move on and was arrested for this reason." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Weston_(politician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Weston_(politician)
  - 8note 6y ago
    I was expecting those Churchill quotes to be more long the lines of "I hate indians! They are a beastly people with a beastly religion" Or "the Hindus are a foul race" It's highly believable that quoting Churchill can be considered hate speach. There's a lot of races he did not like
rmrfstar 6y ago
> 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. So what can you conclude about the private intent of key decision makers? I find that imputing malign intent often improves my ability to forecast outcomes. Whether there is actual bad faith almost doesn't matter if the assumption improves forecasts.
- Applejinx 6y ago
  I agree. The thing that makes me suspicious is an absolute demand that things have to be taken at, and discussed at, face value. The existence of malign intent is hardly mysterious. It's like the Firesign Theater skit with a political guy declaring, "And you can believe me. Because I never lie. And I'm always right." Part of the gag is that the guy picked to read the line is capable of delivering it really, really convincingly. You go, 'wow! He really means that… hey waitaminnit…' I think it's interesting to see these tech giants react to a repeating pattern of using direct manipulative lying as a weapon. It fits with some of my 'singularity' theories: corporations are like aggregate people, and AI is a still higher level than that, and it's neither easy nor desirable to use these newer forms of intelligence to replicate the worst follies of the individual human. At some point, tolerating the wilder excesses of the individual 'cell' will kill the 'host' organism, which if it's a corporation depends on living humans, if it's an AI depends on living human societies. If you've got an AI that isn't really an AI and is just a large informational weapon, or a corporation that isn't really an aggregate person and is just the intentions of one human expressed through power, there's no constraint on the actions of the larger more powerful entity. But if you have the larger organism (whether it's a corporation or a proper AI with a broad enough awareness) it's going to eventually resist self-destructive actions even if they're expressed in a complex way. I see this as YouTube as a larger organism recognizing it is being used as a weapon and trying to protect itself against future punishment or diminishment by preventing itself from being used in a particular way.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- toolz 6y ago
chrisrhoden 6y ago
> certify and emphasize content that is grounded in science and verify content creators of such Respectfully, how does this help? My impression is that the majority of the people who believe that e.g. vaccines are detrimental think that credentialing by traditional sources that don't agree with them (e.g. mainstream media) is simply evidence that the party has been compromised. You'd be creating a subset of YouTube that is easier to ignore for the people who wish to.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Ultimately, there's no Youtube policy that could force people to believe the truth if they're dedicated to believing otherwise. But there's a lot of people who are what we might call vaccine denier adjacent. They don't think vaccines are bad, but they see the anti-vax position as something that's being reasonably and honestly debated, so they're often sympathetic to concerns like "maybe there should be fewer vaccines" or "this one vaccine might be dangerous because public figures I dislike are pushing for it". The benefit of the tagging would be to make it clear to that set of people that, no, anyone who understands what they're talking about thinks modern vaccines are very safe.
enraged_camel 6y ago
>> Censorship and other forms of regulating free speech is simply never a good solution. This is of course false. We have hate speech laws for example.
- LocalH 6y ago
  The problem with “hate speech” is that increasingly more things are being added to that umbrella. It’s kind of similar to the way that “think of the children” is often abused to cover all sorts of things.
  - TeaDrunk 6y ago
    Could you indicate some cases where the precedence of hate speech law has been expanded? Thank you!
    - tossAfterUsing 6y ago
      Canada has some good examples of this.
      - Njikl 6y ago
        Okay, then name the examples. It's not sufficient to say that examples exist without any further proof.
        ghufran_syed 6y ago
        How about a case involving human rights law? https://reason.com/2019/07/23/jessica-yaniv-da-silva-brazilian-wax-balls/ https://reason.com/2019/07/23/jessica-yaniv-da-silva-brazili...
        dashundchen 6y ago
        That has nothing to do with expanded hate speech laws, and the in fact the provincial human rights council in British Columbia ruled against the complainant in the article, and ordered her to pay restitution to the salons. I assume the GGP is referring to the C-16 bill passed by the federal government of Canada in 2016, which added gender expression and identity to existing human rights laws on discrimination. I have repeatedly seen a perhaps willful misinterpretation, popularly stemming from Jordan Petersen, that this bill criminalizes misgendering people when that's not the case. https://factcheck.afp.com/no-canadians-cannot-be-jailed-or-fined-just-using-wrong-gender-pronoun https://factcheck.afp.com/no-canadians-cannot-be-jailed-or-f... >"After Bill C-16 amended the Criminal Code, Canadian law prohibited hate propaganda against groups that can be identified based on gender identity or gender expression. The bill also allowed for more severe sentencing if it is proved that a particular offense was motivated by a bias or prejudice against a person's gender identity or gender expression. > >However, experts say misusing a pronoun would not constitute hate propaganda, nor can it be used as >sole evidence of discrimination. > >"If it's just the pronoun, not much is going to happen," explained Cheryl Milne, director of the Asper >Centre for Constitutional Rights at the University of Toronto told AFP."
BariumBlue 6y ago
> 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. Unfortunately, I think it's a bit of a classical liberal ideal that "the truth will come through and those who were wrong will see the error of their ways". To some, the truth is a tool. If it's not a useful tool, it will be discarded. Probably a more useful tool, like hyperbole, decontextualization, gross mis-interpretation, or just adding "new facts" will be used. I think it's naive to say that laissez faire speech is going to solve all issues, just like it'd be naive to say that peaceful protests would be a viable path to democracy in North Korea. (Personally, I'd like to see bias recognition, propaganda recognition, and the ability to shift perspectives taught. A dumb, noncritical society is going to do and say dumb things)
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  If you say it is naive to raise the idea that free speech alone will solve all issues, that is quite reasonable — but I would raise that is just as naive to think that a carefully administered censorship is an effective remedy, either. The only possible remedy in the end is to build our societies, our law, and our culture to be resilient against those cases when people are wrong, because they often will be.
  - oceanplexian 6y ago
    There are countless examples in history where the majority believed medical facts that were utter nonsense, such as bloodletting, lobotomies, electric shock therapy, radioactive dinnerware, etc. It seems naive to think that somehow human nature has changed and the propensity of mobs to correctly determine what is factual or not is different in the 21st century.
    - raxxorrax 6y ago
      There are countless examples in history where speech was suppressed by the general society as the main hindrance to enlightenment. And it was these times that brought such practices about.
bonaldi 6y ago
The way to preserve free speech (really "free promotion" or "free publishing" in this case, as there are other avenues for these videos) is exactly what you say — consequences. Newspapers have free speech, but are subject to libel laws, for instance. There's no real mechanism to hold YouTube to account for promoting and spreading this stuff, and they are naturally incentivised for that mechanism never to come about. To try and ensure it never does, they're obviously settling for this. Want "free speech" back? Give it meaningful consequences.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  youtubers are also subject to libel (or slander?) laws. the ones with a large audience also make enough money to be worth pursuing in court. newspapers are no more liable than youtubers for merely being incorrect.
  - bonaldi 6y ago
    well consider the laws mandating equality of coverage in broadcasting in some jurisdictions if you like — those apply directly to the publishers, not the content creators. The core point is the same: the platforms want to avoid enforced regulation, so they're self-regulating in ways that free-speech proponents don't like
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Funny how consequences always means bad ones, "people who say something I don't like get the stick!" and then later "I never thought I would get the stick sobs person brutalized with stick!". Free speech is sancrosanct for a reason.
  - bonaldi 6y ago
    Where do you get the idea that free speech means "freedom from consequences"? You're allowed to say offensive things, but you're not immune from (eg) getting fired for it
    - 6y ago
mherkender 6y ago
I really hate this hand-wringing over supposed censorship. The Internet has had to deal with trolls and cheaters from day one. If someone sends a packet that indicates they got a headshot in a multiplayer FPS, they could be cheating so we invented anti-cheat. If someone spams an email account claiming to be a Nigerian price, it doesn’t mean that’s true so we invented spam detection. If someone makes a blog post claiming product X changed their life, it could be an ad so we have ad detectors. Year after year, people find new ways to manipulate online communities. The people who run them have an obligation to prevent them from becoming toxic. Now we have powerful actors manipulating political discourse and suddenly the rules are different? It’s complicated but that’s what happens when you serve billion(s) of users.
- dgb23 6y ago
  I‘m not saying that nothing should be done to counter blatant lies and cheating. I just think it is much more effective, free and sustainable to use emphasis and counterarguments.
ardy42 6y ago
> 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. I'm 100% certain that some crank and their followers are complaining about censorship on Wikipedia right now, because that community decided to not present their tendentious opinions or lies as the truth or to not present them at all. The word "censorship" has been ruined: it's devolved into an epithet to describe any barrier, not matter how justified, between a speaker and his desired audience. It's not censorship for YouTube to ban this content, just like it's not censorship for me to ban anti-vaxxers and white suprecemists from putting signs up on my lawn. The mass dissemination of truth (or our best approximation) has always depended on decisions to not disseminate. You can't expect the common man to sort through a bag of 99 compelling lies and one truth to find the truth. That's too much work for an amateur, and too many will settle for a lie. Everyone relies on others to improve the truth-to-lie ratio to some manageable ratio that an individual can handle. It's also worth noting is that one of the main reasons Wikipedia does better than YouTube is that it's process is 100% manual. Google's bias towards totally automated processes driven by some quantity of shallow data points greatly reduces how effective they can actually be.
- dgb23 6y ago
  That last point is really intriguing. My comparison was unfair. Also the products are very different. With Wikipedia you get collectively curated and moderated content. With YouTube it’s many competing part-products that try to get attention. Apples and oranges.
KirinDave 6y ago
> Talk is talk. Actions should have consequences, which is why we have rules and agreements in the real world. But threats are talk, and threats often motivate action without undertaking it. So talk is, in a real sense, action. Many forms of speech can have profound effects. For example, I say, "Pay me $400 more a month or I will evict you." If you believe I can evict you (even if I probably can't) then my talk has changed behavior. Can I then say, "I took no action?" I think everyone would agree that's not so.

by dgb23 6y ago

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.
  - nradov 6y ago
    That is misinformation. The Mesa Arizona police aren't investigating the death of Gary Lenius as a homicide. His wife Wanda isn't in prison. The poison was chloroquine phosphate, not bleach. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/police-say-death-arizona-man-not-being-investigated-homicide-n1195591 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/police-say-de...
  - neekleer 6y ago
    You heard or remember the story wrong. There wasn't a bleach couple. That was a form of chloroquine as an ingredient in fish tank cleaner. In some media, it was equated to (hydroxy)choloroquine as a medicinal drug even though this pharmaceutical drug has a high safety rating. Also, I don't think anyone went to prison even though it's assumed the engineer husband would have not knowingly drank poison. The wife also ingested some, but she survived. In any case, the media can't pretend they rely on arbiters of truth because there is bias all around. Trump's statements on disinfectants were not as incendiary as some people made them out to be. Disinfectants can sometimes be used in the lungs or body, but this is a question for the medical field. The media speculated about poison control calls surging after Trump's statements, but any small uptick seemed to already be present since people have resorted to rigorous use of disinfectants in the home going all the way back to March. Finally, with the focus on lockdowns and isolation, we've actually somewhat missed the point of the DHS briefing on disinfectants and UV decontamination. We were supposed to be looking for simple innovations that made going to places like the grocery store safer and more manageable, but I haven't seen much progress in this area.
jackhack 6y ago
Nonsense. Almost free speech is censorship by another name. Working "pretty well?" Sure, unless one tries to talk about things that really matter and strays outside the dotted lines of permissibility. Some topics are verboten. When you say "other side of the ocean," I assume you're talking about Europe. Try to discuss the muslim rape gangs in the UK. Try to discuss the surge in grenade attacks and many-fold increase in rape in Sweden. Try to discuss the homeless migrants living on the streets and the Aljerian street wars in France. Try to discuss Fulan Gong in China. Or tiannamen square. Try to discuss political assassinations in Russia, or the bribes the wife of Moscow's mayor hands out. Try to discuss alternative political parties in Ukraine. I think there are scores of political prisoners serving time for wrongthink who might disagree with your assertion that almost free speech is working pretty well. If you want to discover who your masters are, learn who you are not allowed to criticize.
- Mattasher 6y ago
  Put another way, almost free speech works great for those with power, and badly for everyone else. When people advocate censorship of any kind, they're really saying, "I have the correct views held by the establishment, so I'm not worried about it."
  - shawnz 6y ago
    > "I have the correct views held by the establishment, so I'm not worried about it." If the establishment's views are strongly codified and checks and balances are in place to maintain them, is that so bad?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - walterbell 6y ago
      If existing reality seems to "work", is it so bad to exclude non-establishment innovations, while the larger world/markets continue to compete and innovate?
    - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
AbrahamParangi 6y ago
> almost free The land of the almost free just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it
- minerjoe 6y ago
  My dad, rest his soul, would tell me when I was young: "The land of the free, only if you are brave enough to live free."
gotoeleven 6y ago
Speech that is controversial is the only speech that needs protecting. You don't need free speech to protect your cat pictures or tweets about a salad you ate.
- mmmm2 6y ago
  Even in the most corrupt police state you are free to publicly praise the people in power.
tossAfterUsing 6y ago
> 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. Alternatively, you don't go to jail for suggesting that anybody actually implied injection of bleach as a treatment for coronavirus.
trident1000 6y ago
Absurd. Who are the arbiters of truth and what can and cannot be said? There is no such thing as almost free speech in a free society except perhaps for clear cut physical threats. Also big tech is going to end democracy as we know it unless we get serious. They can decide who gets elected into office and we are on a path to replacing elected representatives with kings.
- VBprogrammer 6y ago
  BREAKING NEWS: trident1000 is a child molester; found with 6000 indecent images of children on his PC. For the record this is intended in jest
  - trident1000 6y ago
    If you want free speech you need to learn to live with free speech. That means not believing everything you see, critically thinking, and actually vetting the sources yourself. Its a societal process that plays out over time. The answer is not to have content oligarchs that decide what is truth and can be seen. Statements like this eventually are just seen as noise and ignored as people look for verifiable truth via trusted sources within platforms. In short, it works itself out.
    - VBprogrammer 6y ago
      Firstly, thanks for taking my comment in the manner it was intended. I was slightly concerned it might have gone down badly. I take your point but I think you are brave to rely on the common sense of the entire world to protect you from false or misleading claims against you. Having seen a friend being roasted in the "mainstream media" with a story which was heavily biased against her, and seeing the venomous messages sent to her in the aftermath, I think I'm ok with some limits on free speech.
  - eternalban 6y ago
    The legal system provides the mechanism to address that specific category of speech. “Defamation is an area of law that provides a civil remedy when someone's words end up causing harm to your reputation or your livelihood. Libel is a written or published defamatory statement, while slander is defamation that is spoken by the defendant.”
vorpalhex 6y ago
Sure, arresting people for quoting Churchill seems like a potential definition of "working". [1] There's no way that arresting people for a twitter post [2] could be abused. Nobody needs free speech for reposting rap lyrics. [3] The road to hell is paved with good intentions. [1] https://thenewamerican.com/hate-speech-u-k-political-leader-arrested-for-quoting-winston-churchill/ https://thenewamerican.com/hate-speech-u-k-political-leader-... [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-offensive-facebook-and-twitter-posts-soar-london-a7064246.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-offensive-face... [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921
- arethuza 6y ago
  In the first case there about Paul Weston, the local Police Commisioner clarified the reasons for his arrest: "It has been wrongly suggested that Mr Weston was arrested for reciting passages written by Winston Churchill. I understand he was not welcome outside the Winchester Guildhall, the Police were called and he was asked to move on. I also understand that he was not prepared to move on and was arrested for this reason." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Weston_(politician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Weston_(politician)
- 8note 6y ago
  I was expecting those Churchill quotes to be more long the lines of "I hate indians! They are a beastly people with a beastly religion" Or "the Hindus are a foul race" It's highly believable that quoting Churchill can be considered hate speach. There's a lot of races he did not like

rmrfstar 6y ago

> 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. So what can you conclude about the private intent of key decision makers? I find that imputing malign intent often improves my ability to forecast outcomes. Whether there is actual bad faith almost doesn't matter if the assumption improves forecasts.

Applejinx 6y ago
I agree. The thing that makes me suspicious is an absolute demand that things have to be taken at, and discussed at, face value. The existence of malign intent is hardly mysterious. It's like the Firesign Theater skit with a political guy declaring, "And you can believe me. Because I never lie. And I'm always right." Part of the gag is that the guy picked to read the line is capable of delivering it really, really convincingly. You go, 'wow! He really means that… hey waitaminnit…' I think it's interesting to see these tech giants react to a repeating pattern of using direct manipulative lying as a weapon. It fits with some of my 'singularity' theories: corporations are like aggregate people, and AI is a still higher level than that, and it's neither easy nor desirable to use these newer forms of intelligence to replicate the worst follies of the individual human. At some point, tolerating the wilder excesses of the individual 'cell' will kill the 'host' organism, which if it's a corporation depends on living humans, if it's an AI depends on living human societies. If you've got an AI that isn't really an AI and is just a large informational weapon, or a corporation that isn't really an aggregate person and is just the intentions of one human expressed through power, there's no constraint on the actions of the larger more powerful entity. But if you have the larger organism (whether it's a corporation or a proper AI with a broad enough awareness) it's going to eventually resist self-destructive actions even if they're expressed in a complex way. I see this as YouTube as a larger organism recognizing it is being used as a weapon and trying to protect itself against future punishment or diminishment by preventing itself from being used in a particular way.
- deleted 6y ago
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toolz 6y ago

chrisrhoden 6y ago

> certify and emphasize content that is grounded in science and verify content creators of such Respectfully, how does this help? My impression is that the majority of the people who believe that e.g. vaccines are detrimental think that credentialing by traditional sources that don't agree with them (e.g. mainstream media) is simply evidence that the party has been compromised. You'd be creating a subset of YouTube that is easier to ignore for the people who wish to.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
Ultimately, there's no Youtube policy that could force people to believe the truth if they're dedicated to believing otherwise. But there's a lot of people who are what we might call vaccine denier adjacent. They don't think vaccines are bad, but they see the anti-vax position as something that's being reasonably and honestly debated, so they're often sympathetic to concerns like "maybe there should be fewer vaccines" or "this one vaccine might be dangerous because public figures I dislike are pushing for it". The benefit of the tagging would be to make it clear to that set of people that, no, anyone who understands what they're talking about thinks modern vaccines are very safe.

enraged_camel 6y ago

>> Censorship and other forms of regulating free speech is simply never a good solution. This is of course false. We have hate speech laws for example.

LocalH 6y ago
The problem with “hate speech” is that increasingly more things are being added to that umbrella. It’s kind of similar to the way that “think of the children” is often abused to cover all sorts of things.
- TeaDrunk 6y ago
  Could you indicate some cases where the precedence of hate speech law has been expanded? Thank you!
  - tossAfterUsing 6y ago
    Canada has some good examples of this.
    - Njikl 6y ago
      Okay, then name the examples. It's not sufficient to say that examples exist without any further proof.
      - ghufran_syed 6y ago
        How about a case involving human rights law? https://reason.com/2019/07/23/jessica-yaniv-da-silva-brazilian-wax-balls/ https://reason.com/2019/07/23/jessica-yaniv-da-silva-brazili...
        dashundchen 6y ago
        That has nothing to do with expanded hate speech laws, and the in fact the provincial human rights council in British Columbia ruled against the complainant in the article, and ordered her to pay restitution to the salons. I assume the GGP is referring to the C-16 bill passed by the federal government of Canada in 2016, which added gender expression and identity to existing human rights laws on discrimination. I have repeatedly seen a perhaps willful misinterpretation, popularly stemming from Jordan Petersen, that this bill criminalizes misgendering people when that's not the case. https://factcheck.afp.com/no-canadians-cannot-be-jailed-or-fined-just-using-wrong-gender-pronoun https://factcheck.afp.com/no-canadians-cannot-be-jailed-or-f... >"After Bill C-16 amended the Criminal Code, Canadian law prohibited hate propaganda against groups that can be identified based on gender identity or gender expression. The bill also allowed for more severe sentencing if it is proved that a particular offense was motivated by a bias or prejudice against a person's gender identity or gender expression. > >However, experts say misusing a pronoun would not constitute hate propaganda, nor can it be used as >sole evidence of discrimination. > >"If it's just the pronoun, not much is going to happen," explained Cheryl Milne, director of the Asper >Centre for Constitutional Rights at the University of Toronto told AFP."

BariumBlue 6y ago

> 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. Unfortunately, I think it's a bit of a classical liberal ideal that "the truth will come through and those who were wrong will see the error of their ways". To some, the truth is a tool. If it's not a useful tool, it will be discarded. Probably a more useful tool, like hyperbole, decontextualization, gross mis-interpretation, or just adding "new facts" will be used. I think it's naive to say that laissez faire speech is going to solve all issues, just like it'd be naive to say that peaceful protests would be a viable path to democracy in North Korea. (Personally, I'd like to see bias recognition, propaganda recognition, and the ability to shift perspectives taught. A dumb, noncritical society is going to do and say dumb things)

fennecfoxen 6y ago
If you say it is naive to raise the idea that free speech alone will solve all issues, that is quite reasonable — but I would raise that is just as naive to think that a carefully administered censorship is an effective remedy, either. The only possible remedy in the end is to build our societies, our law, and our culture to be resilient against those cases when people are wrong, because they often will be.
- oceanplexian 6y ago
  There are countless examples in history where the majority believed medical facts that were utter nonsense, such as bloodletting, lobotomies, electric shock therapy, radioactive dinnerware, etc. It seems naive to think that somehow human nature has changed and the propensity of mobs to correctly determine what is factual or not is different in the 21st century.
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    There are countless examples in history where speech was suppressed by the general society as the main hindrance to enlightenment. And it was these times that brought such practices about.

bonaldi 6y ago

The way to preserve free speech (really "free promotion" or "free publishing" in this case, as there are other avenues for these videos) is exactly what you say — consequences. Newspapers have free speech, but are subject to libel laws, for instance. There's no real mechanism to hold YouTube to account for promoting and spreading this stuff, and they are naturally incentivised for that mechanism never to come about. To try and ensure it never does, they're obviously settling for this. Want "free speech" back? Give it meaningful consequences.

leetcrew 6y ago
youtubers are also subject to libel (or slander?) laws. the ones with a large audience also make enough money to be worth pursuing in court. newspapers are no more liable than youtubers for merely being incorrect.
- bonaldi 6y ago
  well consider the laws mandating equality of coverage in broadcasting in some jurisdictions if you like — those apply directly to the publishers, not the content creators. The core point is the same: the platforms want to avoid enforced regulation, so they're self-regulating in ways that free-speech proponents don't like
Nasrudith 6y ago
Funny how consequences always means bad ones, "people who say something I don't like get the stick!" and then later "I never thought I would get the stick sobs person brutalized with stick!". Free speech is sancrosanct for a reason.
- bonaldi 6y ago
  Where do you get the idea that free speech means "freedom from consequences"? You're allowed to say offensive things, but you're not immune from (eg) getting fired for it
  - 6y ago

mherkender 6y ago

I really hate this hand-wringing over supposed censorship. The Internet has had to deal with trolls and cheaters from day one. If someone sends a packet that indicates they got a headshot in a multiplayer FPS, they could be cheating so we invented anti-cheat. If someone spams an email account claiming to be a Nigerian price, it doesn’t mean that’s true so we invented spam detection. If someone makes a blog post claiming product X changed their life, it could be an ad so we have ad detectors. Year after year, people find new ways to manipulate online communities. The people who run them have an obligation to prevent them from becoming toxic. Now we have powerful actors manipulating political discourse and suddenly the rules are different? It’s complicated but that’s what happens when you serve billion(s) of users.

dgb23 6y ago
I‘m not saying that nothing should be done to counter blatant lies and cheating. I just think it is much more effective, free and sustainable to use emphasis and counterarguments.

ardy42 6y ago

> 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. I'm 100% certain that some crank and their followers are complaining about censorship on Wikipedia right now, because that community decided to not present their tendentious opinions or lies as the truth or to not present them at all. The word "censorship" has been ruined: it's devolved into an epithet to describe any barrier, not matter how justified, between a speaker and his desired audience. It's not censorship for YouTube to ban this content, just like it's not censorship for me to ban anti-vaxxers and white suprecemists from putting signs up on my lawn. The mass dissemination of truth (or our best approximation) has always depended on decisions to not disseminate. You can't expect the common man to sort through a bag of 99 compelling lies and one truth to find the truth. That's too much work for an amateur, and too many will settle for a lie. Everyone relies on others to improve the truth-to-lie ratio to some manageable ratio that an individual can handle. It's also worth noting is that one of the main reasons Wikipedia does better than YouTube is that it's process is 100% manual. Google's bias towards totally automated processes driven by some quantity of shallow data points greatly reduces how effective they can actually be.

dgb23 6y ago
That last point is really intriguing. My comparison was unfair. Also the products are very different. With Wikipedia you get collectively curated and moderated content. With YouTube it’s many competing part-products that try to get attention. Apples and oranges.

KirinDave 6y ago

> Talk is talk. Actions should have consequences, which is why we have rules and agreements in the real world. But threats are talk, and threats often motivate action without undertaking it. So talk is, in a real sense, action. Many forms of speech can have profound effects. For example, I say, "Pay me $400 more a month or I will evict you." If you believe I can evict you (even if I probably can't) then my talk has changed behavior. Can I then say, "I took no action?" I think everyone would agree that's not so.