110 ms·

YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

• troughway 6y ago
  > We welcome ongoing debate and discussion and will keep engaging with experts, researchers and organizations to ensure that our policies and products are meeting that goal. And as always, we'll apply learnings from this election to our ongoing efforts to protect the integrity of elections around the world. Check out the world police on that one.
• firloop 6y ago
  > Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect. Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election... This is likely going to make a lot of conservatives in the US unhappy, since a number of elected officials in Congress (!) are openly questioning the election results. Also seems a lot more severe than Twitter’s approach, where Twitter is labeling “disputed claims” rather than taking them down. I don’t believe that the 2020 US presidential election was rigged, but I think it’s heavy-handed to take these videos down outright. After the 2016 election, many people went wild with Russian conspiracy theories that proved to mostly be bogus, and that content never got this level of platform scrutiny or censorship.
  • smt88 6y ago
    As far as I know, no senator is seriously contesting the results. The House always has at least a few crackpots in it, now including a Q believer. I'm not sure why YouTube should cater to conspiracy theorists just because they'll get upset that their conspiracies are not blasted from YouTube's megaphone. YT is within its rights, and there are thousands of other video sharing services (including Mega, which is totally unregulated) for them to share their content on. They can and do self-host as well.
    • firloop 6y ago
      Ted Cruz is at least one Senator fighting the election results: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/529146-cruz-offers-to-argue-pennsylvania-election-case-before-supreme-court https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/529146-cruz-offers-to-ar...
      • ojbyrne 6y ago
        The Supreme court declined to hear that case yesterday. https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/529334-supreme-court-rejects-gop-bid-to-nullify-biden-win-in-pennsylvania https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/529334-supreme-...
        • slumdev 6y ago
          That is false. The Supreme Court denied a request for emergency injunctive relief. They did not deny certiorari.
          • jcranmer 6y ago
            That is false. The request for emergency injunctive relief was also the request for certiorari. In denying the relief, they closed out the docket and denied certiorari in the process. And yes, I did look through SCOTUS's docket to find any other docketed case referring to Kelly v PA.
            • citilife 6y ago
              Kelly was discussing that this morning on the radio still had it pending at SCOTUS. They believe it may be merged with the Texas case. So, unless I'm missing something, the former comment appeared correct.
              • jcranmer 6y ago
                This is the link to the actual docket of the case: https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/20a98.html https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/do... There's no indication in the docket that anything about the case is still live. If you read the original brief, this is what it requests: > Petitioners also ask the Court to consider this Application as a petition for certiorari, grant certiorari on the questions presented, treat the Application papers as merits briefing, and issue a merits decision as soon as practicable. In denying the application, it is by proxy denying the request for certiorari, although I believe it would be theoretically possible to actually reapply for certiorari. (Looking through SCOTUS's rules, it does seem that Rule 22.4 suggests that this is the case)
  • rubyist5eva 6y ago
    The safe harbour deadline is mostly procedural anyway. Justice Ginsburg even said something along the lines that the only real date that matters is when Congress actually certifies the electoral college votes - in January.
    • elicash 6y ago
      She said that... in a MINORITY opinion. The majority of justices disagreed and gave it much weight.
  • jonathanstrange 6y ago
    It would be a catastrophe if the current US administration indeed was unable to ensure free and fair elections in their country - for the first time in US history, unless previous elections such as the 2016 election were fraudulent, too!
    • gitweb 6y ago
      Right... if this election was fraudulent, then might as well cancel the 2016 elections as well. They also had 4 years to help improve election security, which conservatives waited until after they lost to cry fraud.
  • kgwxd 6y ago
    Openly questioning in bad faith. They've gotten way more attention for it than they ever should have, time to move on.
  • bamboozled 6y ago
    YouTube is run by a private company, they can do what they like with the content they own. If they don’t want to show the content, tough luck. Don’t like the content? Don’t watch it. Don’t agree with their ethics ? Don’t use their product. It’s simple.
    • mmastrac 6y ago
      Freedom for me, but not for thee.
      • nobody9999 6y ago
        > Freedom for me, but not for thee. You mean that you wish to require others to say or host the things that you want, and if they don't they should be forced to do so? That's freedom for you but not for others, not the other way around.
    • erichocean 6y ago
      > YouTube is run by a private company Sigh. YouTube is run by a public company, has been for many years.
  • Moway 6y ago
    Anyone who hasn't seen the video of the 2016 post-Trump-election meeting at Google should watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRf9UxsM-NE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRf9UxsM-NE It should give you an idea about what kind of ideological bias you can expect from this company.
• macspoofing 6y ago
  For God's sakes ... What underpins this need for social media companies to virtue signal about protecting 'election integrity' is the false notion that 2016 was stolen from Hillary by the Russians - a claim that had no evidential support (and no, that some trolls bought a minuscule amount of Facebook ads does not raise this claim to that level) but the entire Democratic party, with media allies, promulgated for the last 4 years and pressured social media leadership to adopt as well. And now social media companies are engaged in full-scale curation and editorial control over any content that even comes close to questioning or even having regular open discussion of unfolding events. Ridiculous. > Since September, we've terminated over 8000 channels and thousands of harmful and misleading elections-related videos for violating our existing policies. Over 77% of those removed videos were taken down before they had 100 views. Yay! Thank you YouTube interns for protecting me from making up my own mind about these dangerous ideas. I also like that the authoritative sources are ... the same media companies, owned by multinational corporate conglomerates, that are always pushing for deplatforming of independent news sources. No self-serving policies here! Tell me again NYTimes how Philip DeFranco and Joe Rogan are a gateway to the alt-right.
  • JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
    You are mis-stating the assertion. The Government said that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election. They didn't say it changed the results.
    • rayiner 6y ago
      No, Democrats said Russia hacked the election results. For example Neera Tanden, Biden's OMB appointee, the President of a major liberal think-tank: https://twitter.com/neeratanden/status/817744398939197442 https://twitter.com/neeratanden/status/817744398939197442 Trump claimed that "Voting machines were not touched" by Russians in the 2016 election. Tanden said that was a "lie." The media massively amplified claims of Russian election hacking that never panned out: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/russia-election-hacking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/russia-electi.... They played fast-and-loose with terminology, saying that "Russia hacked the 2016 election" when they meant that Russia hacked and leaked DNC emails. (Part of the problem here is that the media has taken to regurgitating Democratic talking points. Saying "Russia hacked the 2016 election" is a clever way for an Democratic activist to describe what happened, but its misleading when that same "hacking" terminology is used by the media.) Nalder said that, without impeachment, Trump would "rig" the 2020 election: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-08/nadler-says-without-impeachment-trump-may-try-to-rig-election https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-08/nadler-sa... And people believed them. Even as of 2018, 66% of Democrats believed that "Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President": https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2018/03/09/russias-impact-election-seen-through-partisan-eyes https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
• mmastrac 6y ago
  Jeez. They could have been doing this for the last month before it became endemic. How much damage did the Trump team do to America's democracy with a month of sore-losership?
  • rubyist5eva 6y ago
    Probably the same amount of damage that Gore did in about 1.5 months of sore-losership.
    • JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      ? That was very much closer, and subject to reasonable recounts. This egregious slandering of any state that voted for Biden is of a different nature altogether. 306 to 232 - I mean, get real. Recounts at this stage (or really, any stage since election night) are rabble rousing pointless grandstanding.
      • jeltz 6y ago
        Yeah, recounts are pretty silly at this point since it is virtually impossible that they could change anything. On the other hand this election has yet again (just like when Al Gore lost) highlighted how bad some US states are at holding elections and counting votes. Why is it so hard? There are many states and countries who can hold an election without this chaos.
        • AnimalMuppet 6y ago
          You're right, but this one was worse than usual because of Covid. Far more mail-in ballots, more spacing between observers and workers, fewer observers, and some of it having to be figured out on the fly. That makes this one messier than normal. Don't judge their ability to run elections by this election - it's not a fair test of normal circumstances.
    • tzs 6y ago
      That was a 500 vote difference out of 6 million votes, a 0.009% difference, in a single state, where there were known to have been severe issues with the ballots. Both sides agreed that there were serious issues with the ballots and counting, with the only dispute being how to address them because the issues made it pretty much impossible to determine who actually would have won if the system had been able to correctly register the intended vote of every voter. There were no serious allegations that anyone did anything illegal or tampered with the votes. I have a hard time believing that you are seriously comparing that to 2020, where those trying to overturn the election are alleging intentional widespread fraud in multiple states, without being able to offer any creditable evidence that it happened. All the evidence they offer generally falls into three categories: 1. Things that are outright factually incorrect. For example, that video of vote counting in Pennsylvania (I think that was the state...) that supposedly shows suitcases of fake ballots being snuck in and opened late at night. If you watch the full surveillance video, instead of just that short extract, you see that (1) those are the standard containers they use to store ballots when they are not actively working with them, and (2) those particular ballots were ballots they were working with earlier and put in those containers when they stopped. In other words, all the excerpt is actually showing is the normal resumption of processing after a break. Another example is the claims that votes were counted without Republican observers allowed in the room, usually based on Republican observers being turned away. Some observers were in fact turned away--because there were already the maximum number of legally allowed observers from their party in the room. 2. Things that are true, but are not evidence of fraud or error. For example, various statistical measures of a candidate's votes look different between the winner and loser in districts where one candidate receives a lot more votes than the other. They point to these in heavy Biden districts, saying the differences indicate tampering. But if you look at heavy Trump districts, you see the same thing but going the other way. 3. Actual mistakes, such as ballots lost or miscounted. You get some of these in every big election, and no one has found any evidence that these mistakes were more frequent in this election, and even if every single one of this kind of mistake went in Biden's favor, it would not be anywhere near enough to change the outcome in any state.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• badconvincer 6y ago
  This comment section is being brigaded.
• quotemstr 6y ago
  This policy is wicked and wrong. There are no other words for this policy. YouTube is deciding what of true and enforcing its perspective on the rest of the population. And you know it won't stop here. From now on, every time a controversy emerges between the media-tech-academia elite view of the world and the views of regular people, tech will use hard censorship to enforce the elite perspective. There is no natural stopping point or limiting principle. It is not the place of a few Bay Area policy people to decide for the whole world what is true and what is false. They are not God. Nobody voted for them. They have no power except the brute force of a natural monopoly's market share. Infrastructure companies must be part of the neutral background of technological society, not enforcers of a specific worldview.
  • djsumdog 6y ago
    They are the ministry of truth that Orwell warned about. It's not government, it's the combination of government and corporate interests.
    • carapace 6y ago
      Y'all should read "Manufacturing Consent" (to me it seems like a lot of folks in this thread haven't read it): "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky arguing that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.[1] The title refers to consent of the governed, and derives from the phrase "the manufacture of consent" used by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion (1922). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent What we're seeing is the system reasserting itself.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• rayiner 6y ago
  This is an enormous overreach. > Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors. These same claims are being made in ongoing court cases. It's far out of Google's ambit to claim to resolve "the truth" at this juncture. Its also deeply hypocritical to claim that this is "in line with [Google's] approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. It took me 2 seconds to find videos claiming that the "GOP hacked/stole the 2004 election.": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=batAXTWBjMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=batAXTWBjMo
  • mmastrac 6y ago
    > These same claims are being made in ongoing court cases. Of which what % have been tossed? 95%+? And the one (!) that hasn't have had zero impact on the results. The election is over. Biden won. The votes will be certified, but not after Trump's team has done a great deal of damage to the American democracy.
    • rayiner 6y ago
      I think Trump's behavior is abhorrent. But I've been complaining for years about Gore, Kerry, Clinton, and Abrams laying about stolen elections, and nobody listened. It's worse this year than usual, because Trump is worse than usual, but the losing side believing the election was stolen has become a feature of American politics during the last two decades: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiater5pcHtAhVNR60KHQm1BQoQFjAAegQIBhAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fpolitics%2F2020%2F12%2F04%2Fmany-republicans-think-election-was-fixed-thats-what-losing-partisans-often-think%2F&usg=AOvVaw2MDcmHVOiy9_QUCL4H4qHa https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c... After elections, half of people on the losing side now regularly believe the election wasn't free and fair.
      • 6y ago
• BitwiseFool 6y ago
  I abhor this, but what can be done about it? I genuinely don't know how to push back against measures like these and I'm hoping people here have some ideas.
  • slumdev 6y ago
    If your favorite channels are on BitChute or Rumble, support them there instead.
  • gitweb 6y ago
    If you don't like it, you can upload your videos to one of the other 1000's of platforms or sign up for a shared web host and utilize P2P video sharing.
    • BitwiseFool 6y ago
      I have nothing to upload because I'm not a content creator. I think that it's wrong for YouTube to be silencing people this way and I hope there's some way to influence YouTube without abandoning it - because the vast majority of people won't.
    • NDizzle 6y ago
      Yep. You can make your own video uploader. Then build your own hosting provider. Which would use a payment processor that you also built. Which handles transactions from a bank that you created yourself as well. Because if you step out of line on Accepted Thought And Speech, you get cancelled.
      • rantwasp 6y ago
        technically you would also need to build your own payment network. and build your own electrical grid where you put the electricity you generated on your own. of course you would need to invent your own transistor to be able to build your own integrated circuits to be able to build your own computer.
• sleepysysadmin 6y ago
  >Connecting people to authoritative information Top channels from picture. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com https://mediabiasfactcheck.com ABC: Left of Center NBC: Left of Center USA today: Left of Center CNN: Left CBS: Left of Center The "Authoritative Sources" are all Left-wing news agencies. So in other words they have done like Wikipedia. They have determined that Left of Center is authoritative and have limited the reach of alternative viewpoints. Their right to control political speech on their platform.
  • mmastrac 6y ago
    Or alternatively, the center in the US is so far right that media naturally falls to the left of that.
    • rayiner 6y ago
      To the right under what rubric? In Germany, I have a legal right to have my kid given religious education in public schools. Bavaria can put crosses on public buildings. Abortion is only decriminalized, generally illegal after 12 weeks, and is subject to waiting periods and mandatory counseling. The governing center-right party declared accepting Muslim refugees "a mistake" that they would not repeat. The American media demonized Amy Coney Barrett as a "Handmaid" because of the possibility that she could rule that elective abortion is a matter for the legislature, not a constitutional issue of fundamental rights. Which is the law of the land in Canada, France, Italy, Austria, and the EU Human Rights Court. At least on social issues, the American media is significantly to the left of even moderately liberal EU countries.
      • MisterBastahrd 6y ago
        The American media accurately described Barrett's publicly stated opinion on religious issues and abortion.
      • shakezula 6y ago
        You're purposefully diminishing the impact that opinion has, though. It would be a different matter if the legislature was prepared for that, but it's not. Like it or not, the battle for abortion was fought with the Supreme Court. Saying "she just has a different view on where it should be fought" ignores the fact that it would essentially set us back 50 years in terms of reproductive rights.
• flowerlad 6y ago
  20 years ago reputed organizations such as newspapers, radio stations and television informed people the truth. Conspiracy theories were fringe and didn't have a way to spread. Today more than half the population believes in conspiracy theories because they learn the "truth" from disreputable sources on social media. This is dangerous for society. I am glad social media companies are taking action themselves, instead of the government forcing them (which would be a 1st amendment issue).
  • rayiner 6y ago
    20 years ago, and before that, liberals complained that the media, schools, etc., were lying to the public.
    • AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      Liberals? Conservatives complained too!
  • jahewson 6y ago
    Ah yes, the truth of 20 years ago, like all those WMD in Iraq.
    • shakezula 6y ago
      That wasn't the media's fault, though, that was the Bush administration manufacturing an excuse to invade the Middle East.
      • rhino369 6y ago
        Arguably, the media's role is to stress test claims made by the government. They certainly do it for the trump admin. Though I wonder if they'll do it for the Biden admin. I wouldn't say it's their fault. But still in 2020, the media breathlessly reports targeted leaks by intelligence agencies as fact. We didn't learn anything.
        • 6y ago
• nathias 6y ago
  Great, maybe now we can stop considering them a platform and hold them liable for their content, while other p2p video platforms can provide services Youtube used to provide.
  • rat87 6y ago
    So because you don't like them you want the goverment to censor them?
    • ttt0 6y ago
      Censor what exactly? YouTube is a platform, not a person. YouTube is the one censoring other people.
    • nathias 6y ago
      No, they are acting like a curator of content and are enjoying privileges of platforms, don't you think that's an unfair advantage?
• guscost 6y ago
  YouTube staff is a gang of bullies, and they are pushing our country toward civil war. “The First Amendment is first for a reason. Second Amendment is just in case the First one doesn’t work out.” - Dave Chappelle
• zug_zug 6y ago
  I think these should be kept in some form for the simple reason of history. Videos of the behavior of past presidents (e.g "Mission Accomplished") is a powerful reminder. I would like to think youtube could serve as that public digital archive of the past, to do some slight good alongside their mission of profit. The power of being able to find video proof of past behavior in a moment is an essential tool to our collective discussion process.
• swiley 6y ago
  If Google wanted to be responsible they would remove videos covering the election in any way. If there had actually been widespread fraud is this something we would want Google doing? They have said themselves that they intend to manipulate elections in the US and this is exactly how they would do it.
  • mattnewton 6y ago
    >> ... is this something we would want Google doing? They have said themselves that they intend to manipulate elections in the US and this is exactly how they would do it. ??
  • _underfl0w_ 6y ago
    > They have said themselves that they intend to manipulate elections Source please. That's a bold statement.
    • teddyh 6y ago
      I am not the OP, but they might have meant this: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-google-leaderships-dismayed-reaction-to-trump-election/ https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl... Also, as Moway linked to in this thread¹: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRf9UxsM-NE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRf9UxsM-NE 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359710
      • mattnewton 6y ago
        As someone very familiar with the original tgif, I still can't see the leap from having leadership acknowledge the majority of their employees feeling apprehensive about the election results, and being worried about the potential for their products to be used for what amounts to psy ops, to talking about google somehow manipulating elections.
    • swiley 6y ago
      It's a crappy source but I'm busy and noprocrast will run out soon. It's other places too and was all over hackernews when it happened. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7178881/Undercover-video-shows-senior-Google-executive-vowing-prevent-Trump-situation.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7178881/Undercover-...
• SommaRaikkonen 6y ago
  Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• PeterStuer 6y ago
  Regardless of what you believe to be 'The Truth', has suppression or censorship ever worked to quench dissonance or convince skeptical people, again, whether right or wrong, that there really is 'nothing to see here'.
  • asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    Yes, it has, to a degree. C.f. Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, etc. (These voices became much less prominent after their deplatforming.) There's also a deontological argument to be made for banning dangerous falsehoods on one's platform.
    • generalizations 6y ago
      It also worked in China when scientists were trying to get word of the virus out in January. Fooled most of the western media.
      • ehsankia 6y ago
        This analogy is so dishonest. These people are free to talk about all the conspiracies they want on their own websites, blogs and so on. They are not entitled to having their content hosted on other people's websites though. It's like if I complained that the NYT isn't talking about my coolest new invention and called that censorship. That's very different than the government (not a private company) trying to shut you down from speaking anywhere.
        • generalizations 6y ago
          Except I wasn't talking about the entity involved, I was talking about the efficacy of shutting down the 'misinformation'. Entity A shutdown covid info successfully, and Entity B wants to shutdown election info. That's dishonest? What's dishonest is you misreading my comment and then blaming me for it.
      • vkou 6y ago
        You are rewriting history. Western media was not 'fooled'. It's ironic that you are doing so in a thread about spreading misinformation on the internet. January 8th - China identifies new virus causing phenomnia-like illness [1] January 10th - China reports first death from new virus [2] January 21st - The outbreak, which began in December in a seafood and poultry market in Wuhan, a city of 11 million, is spreading: Patients have been identified in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, as well as Taiwan, Japan, Thailand and South Korea. [3] Don't blame our inability to react to the virus on China. The pandemic was raging for months, with news coverage of people being locked in their own apartments, doctors dying, makeshift hospitals getting set up in stadiums, before it exceeded more than a handful of cases in the West. Hell, even after hundreds of thousands dead, we still don't have the political will to do what would have been necessary to stamp it out back in March - massive testing, massive contact tracing, enforced quarantine. If we were to go back in time, and do it again, I think we would arrive at pretty much the same outcome. The 'China hid the facts' [4] narrative has little explanatory power, and its primary purpose is to shift the blame from our own failings. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/health/china-pneumonia-outbreak-virus.html?searchResultPosition=3 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/health/china-pneumonia-ou... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/world/asia/china-virus-wuhan-death.html?searchResultPosition=4 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/world/asia/china-virus-wu... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/health/cdc-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/health/cdc-coronavirus.ht... [4] It[5] did hide the facts, but it hid them so poorly that everyone who was paying any attention, both inside, and outside China was aware of how serious this pandemic is at the start of the year. It's hard to hide the facts about something when you put an entire city under lockdown (But don't cut the telephone and internet lines into it.) [5] China isn't a monolith. To be exact, local government did its best to downplay the pandemic. National government was not very happy with how that went down, and purged their local and regional party branches for their mishandling of the outbreak.
• guscost 6y ago
  YouTube staff is a gang of bullies, and they are pushing our country toward civil war. “The First Amendment is first for a reason. Second Amendment is just in case the First one doesn’t work out.” - Dave Chappelle
  • pjc50 6y ago
    So who's going to start the mass shootings based on lies? Isn't that the conclusion of the Christchurch report the other day?
    • guscost 6y ago
      Actual war is a completely different scenario. It won’t be a lone crazy person, and it won’t happen before all other options are exhausted (thankfully, this means there is still a chance to avoid it).
  • kyle_martin1 6y ago
    Agreed.
  • devrand 6y ago
    How is the First Amendment in any way related to YouTube?
    • hnracer 6y ago
      It's the spirit of the First Amendment that people are concerned about wrt silencing of particular perspectives. Of course YT is privately owned so the First Amendment doesn't literally apply.
      • buu700 6y ago
        I'm not saying I'm necessarily in favor of or opposed to the action described in this post, but I do wonder if beyond a certain scale platforms like YouTube and Twitter should be treated as de facto public forums. Obviously 1A doesn't apply as-is, but maybe some equivalent should be implemented that does. At the same time, I'm not sure that's entirely fair since they aren't publicly funded. Or maybe it is still fair, or maybe there's some reasonable middle ground.
• supergirl 6y ago
  one step closer to an internet blackout, like in those "third-world" countries. should not be a surprise when this happens. social media always engaged in censoring to appease US gov. I don't see the big deal if it's now about the election. they are always promoting some agenda (Assange, Brexit, Syria, other wars)
• Pungsnigel 6y ago
  Will this include all videos talking of the Russia collusion?
  • th0ma5 6y ago
    What? No. Factual videos are not what this is talking about.
    • SkidanovAlex 6y ago
      Who decides that the videos in Russia are factual, while the videos in the US are not?
      • th0ma5 6y ago
        Evidence!
        • rriepe 6y ago
          How do we present evidence for the side that's banned, again?
          • th0ma5 6y ago
            Like normal, and that's a disingenuous rebuttal. The evidence is not being suppressed, the misinformation is.
            • ttt0 6y ago
              GoFundMe deplatformed Matt Braynard when he tried to raise money for the voter fraud research. He didn't even assert that the fraud happened or not and they still kicked him off for what they've said is "disinformation".
              • alwayseasy 6y ago
• theredlion 6y ago
  Cool that's not suspicious at all
• whateveracct 6y ago
  HNers really are clowns - there's a chorus of people acting like this is oppression. When the most powerful people in the United States are constantly spreading lies to destabilize the fundamentals of the country for years to come. Downvote me all you want - it's just proof that SV is full of assclowns. Such a shame that I probably work with some of you idiots.
  • thursday0987 6y ago
    The state of Texas is suing other states in the supreme court and alledging fraud. Youtube's new policy basically is saying that the state of Texas is not allowed to discuss the supreme court case on their platform.
    • whateveracct 6y ago
      If you report on the state of Texas alleging fraud, that's fine I believe. But if your video alleges it, you will be taken down. Big difference. This election fraud nonsense is social contagion.
      • dismantlethesun 6y ago
        Sure, but that's not what they're talking about. This ban the State of Texas, itself from using YouTube to discuss their own belief in election fraud. It bans the sitting president from discussing his own belief in election fraud. It bans the current Senate leadership from discussing their belief in election fraud. Some people criticize YouTube there because they are a private company refusing to carry the messages of publicly elected officials. Now, I personally feel no need to defend any of these entities. They're all powerful figures capable of their own fighting. If I had to decide on the topic, I'd probably support YouTube as they're the piddling multi-billion dollar company that employs my friends, where as their opponents are the leaders of a trillion-dollar nation with military might exceeding any other country in the world. YouTube is most definitely the underdog in this fight.
    • gameswithgo 6y ago
      Supreme Court is going to be in agreement with that really.
• ryaan_anthony 6y ago
  So who decides what is true/accurate? Is this action just related to the current election or will this extend to other "fake news" and elections in other countries? Covid news comes to mind.
  • jpttsn 6y ago
    I bet it will extend to fully cover one side of the aisle, but not cross over to the other.
    • dleslie 6y ago
      It would help if one side of the aisle didn't continue to stand behind a conspiracy theory that has failed in court _many_ dozens of times, now.
      • jpttsn 6y ago
        I doubt that it would help; I don’t think failing in court will be YouTube’s standard. As so many comments remind us, they’re a private company. They don’t have to wait for a court’s opinion. I also think no left-of-center conspiracy theory would be thrown off YouTube, even if it failed in court. Maybe this is great, I don’t make any value judgment. It’s just a bet. Take my money if I’m wrong.
        • dleslie 6y ago
          In 2016 they demonitized The Young Turks at one point, a long with a slew of education and left-wing vlogs. https://www.forbes.com/sites/fruzsinaeordogh/2016/09/02/making-sense-of-youtubes-great-demonetization-controversy-of-2016/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/fruzsinaeordogh/2016/09/02/maki...
          • jpttsn 6y ago
            Was that a conspiracy theory, and had it failed in court?
      • 6y ago
• exabrial 6y ago
  Absolutely nothing about the USA is in danger of falling apart. These conspiracy theories would die by themselves in a month or two. Lets be clear about what's happening here: Google/Facebook and the like are becoming targets of anti-trust regulatory lawsuits (privacy, data-gathering, monopolistic behavior, etc). This is just an attempt to build goodwill with the incoming administration so they can call in a favor later. It's as simple as that.
  • shakezula 6y ago
    This is the result of public pressure, not an attempt to cozy up to an administration. They've been doing this for years, it's not like this is some out of left field attempt to try and get a fruit basket from the Biden admin.
  • anigbrowl 6y ago
    Absolutely nothing about the USA is in danger of falling apart. These conspiracy theories would die by themselves in a month or two. Yes, totally normal to have armed militias running around state capitols, organizing kidnap plots of governors, retired generals calling for suspension of the Constitution etc., happens every election cycle. /sarcasm
    • Zanneth 6y ago
      Those are all extremely biased ways to phrase current events that have comparatively little significance in the real world.
      • anigbrowl 6y ago
        First, I clearly flagged my post as sarcastic. Second, my phrasing was actually pretty neutral, such as describing Flynn as a 'retired general' rather than several less complimentary but wholly factual characterizations I could have made. Thirdly, your assessment of their significance is an speculative opinion about the future rather than a fact. It might turn out to be correct, but if I had suggested such events happening in 2020 a few years back most people would have said I was being absurd. Update: Here's a relevant story that was published after I had written my previous comment. While similar isolated incidents have occured in the past, I stand by my argument that their confluence these days is a political abnormality in the US, out of character with elections over the last several decades. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/dec/09/police-investigate-bomb-threat-at-labor-union-buil/ https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/dec/09/police-investi...
• DaniloDias 6y ago
  Why do we allow the political class to have so much control of what is said and shared?
• misiti3780 6y ago
  Is there any article or video out there that outlines a compelling case of how massive election fraud could have even occurred ? I do believe some election fraud happened, how could it not with 150MM voters in this past election. But I have yet to read a single article that could outline any explanation for how democrats stole 8MM votes so Trump lost, but did not change down-ballot votes so that they also lost house seats and other smaller elections (that matter for re-districting etc).
  • hnracer 6y ago
    This is what someone who believe the election was stolen would say in response to what you've said: (1) It's not 8mm votes (popular vote disparity) that needed to be flipped, it's only the disparity in swing states that needs to be flipped. (2) If election voting systems were hacked, that could explain a large number of votes specifically in swing states. You can check the time series data from Edison Research which is publicly available on the NYT static data page to see the irregularities for yourself. For example you can see the Trump N votes decrement by X000s in MI and PA when it should be monotonically increasing. This might be an API glitch, it might be fraud, or it might have an innocuous explanation. Mainstream news doesn't report on these irregularities. (3) Widespread fraud isn't alleged. Targeted fraud at swing states is the claim. (4) Fraudulent ballots or vote switching by voting machines might have only flipped the POTUS choice. Dr Shiva had allegations on this which he's detailed in a YT video alongside data that he believes supports this hypothesis. Again, the mainstream media has not reported on this. I've personally looked into (2) and (4) in some detail. I find (4) to be meritless and an artefact of the way they've presented the data. I find (2) to be totally real, but an innocuous explanation such as an API error to be much more likely than fraud.
    • misiti3780 6y ago
      Thanks! - I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted for asking a question that is not politically motivated ...I was just generally curious.
      • txmachinery 6y ago
• bradenb 6y ago
  Doesn't this just feed into people's fears about conspiracies? I can't understand why people are signing off on this. Let the Like/Dislike button do its job.
  • maedla 6y ago
    Likes and disklikes are way too easy to game imo
    • akhilcacharya 6y ago
      Right, if you looked at likes/dislikes you'd think Trump won re-election by a landslide and Bernie won the primary easily. Joe Biden, who won the most votes of any candidate in American history with 66% turnout and 51.3% of the vote, still had his announcement video [0] at 50/50 like/dislike. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbOU2fTg6cI&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbOU2fTg6cI&feature=youtu.be
      • polka_haunts_us 6y ago
        If he only won 51.3% of the vote then a 50/50 like/dislike sounds rather representative actually, much more so than likes/dislikes on Youtube usually are.
        • gowld 6y ago
          The point is that Likes are feelings, not truthometers.
  • slg 6y ago
    Youtube's recommendation algorithm means that the people who see these videos are already predisposed to believe what is in them. That overrides the usefulness of the Like and Dislike buttons.
    • tfehring 6y ago
      Also, even if people outside of those bubbles see and dislike those videos, the Dislike button is more likely to feed and reinforce their primary audience's persecution complex than to cause them to reconsider.
• howmayiannoyyou 6y ago
  We are very fortunate to have the algorithms, employees & management of Youtube/Google watching out for us. We're not intelligent enough to view a video and decide for ourselves what is fact v. propaganda v. entertainment. Hopefully some day we will have the same protections the CCP gives its people with even more content moderation. Thank you Google - you're the nanny the American people and the world always hoped for.
  • dylan604 6y ago
    While the sarcasm is dripping, it's also true. There clearly are people that can view a video and realize that it's is 100% BS. Yet, at the same time, there are other people that will watch it and 100% believe it. If it wasn't effective, it wouldn't be used.
    • OliverGilan 6y ago
      Remarkable to see this comment unironically on HN.
      • tjr225 6y ago
        Why? Its true.
      • tfehring 6y ago
        I'm unironically inclined to agree with it, but I'd be interested in reading a more substantial refutation.
        • rriepe 6y ago
          There's no refutation because there's no argument to refute. It's always some form of "There are bad people doing bad things and we need to stop them." Notice how every thread here is about acting against alleged disinformation agents? It's not about any argument at all. It's a generic outgroup argument. Should we expect people to just never question elections? It's completely bizarre.
• ausjke 6y ago
  'do not be evil' was thrown away by google a few years ago. it's a shame high tech now acts as the censorship government. too big to be neutral? time to change the law.
  • chillacy 6y ago
    It was thrown away because apparently everyone disagrees about what “evil” is. Congress brings tech ceos and then subjects them to partisan grilling where every action is alternately praised and condemned depending on party.
• A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  Youtube et al can do what they want, but.. tech has gambled its entire good will on an impossible fight basically guaranteeing further stratification and divide. It is a bad move. It already backfired hard once during Hunter coverage, but this will only make it worse.
  • convery 6y ago
    Careful there comrade, the Hunter leaks never happened. If it did then you'd seen it on Twitter and Youtube, same as for the CIA 'whistleblower' and anything questionable around "the most secure election in history".
• compiler-guy 6y ago
  With apologies to H.L. Mencken [1] "Freedom of video publishing belongs to those who own the platform." The good news is that anyone can own a platform these days. If you want to publish something, you can do it yourself very easily. You don't have to have youtube do it for you. [1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/05/21/free-press/#:~:text=Newspaper%20reporter%20and%20essayist%20H.%20L.,determine%20what%20information%20gets%20published https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/05/21/free-press/#:~:text....
  • boreas 6y ago
    Practically speaking, network effects make it nearly impossible for alternative platforms to achieve the scale of their mainstream ancestors. Right-wing communities exiled from Reddit have much smaller audiences in their new homes. I'm not so concerned with this level of "censorship" in and of itself. But what happens, when, inevitably, the media starts to demand the same out of Google, AWS, ISPs? That's the truly scary prospect. EDIT: scary
  • Veedrac 6y ago
    This is a really dangerous line of argument for an example where one platform has a de-facto monopoly on views, whose censorship is fine-grained enough that people open to these other ideas simply won't be able to find them. It makes a lot of sense for individual publications, or even Reddit banning certain communities, since people looking for alternatives will know to do so. It's a lot more insidious in a case like this, since there's no clear indication that anything is missing.
    • compiler-guy 6y ago
      All of these alternatives are just a search and a click away. If people want to find them, they can.
      • svieira 6y ago
        Until the alternatives are de-listed from search because "they contain disinformation" and the alternative search engines are de-listed and black-holed at the DNS resolver level for the same reasons.
• peternicky 6y ago
  Let’s be real for a moment; why didn’t YouTube do the same for the russian collusion charade? How about the many video clips used out of context to manipulate the public? YouTube, google, facistbook etc are all surrogates for the DNC. the idea of a safe harbor date is also one which we will see shorty, has little relevance. https://hereistheevidence.com/ https://hereistheevidence.com/
  • dleslie 6y ago
    Because it wasn't a charade. The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that collusion occurred between Russian nationals, and possibly Russian intelligence, and the Trump campaign. https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/512487-senate-panel-releases-final-report-on-russian-interference-detailing https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/512487-senate-p...
  • noahtallen 6y ago
    I would argue that the difference lies mostly with evidence: there is hard evidence of Russian propaganda campaigns via social media, and many lengthy (and non-partisan) investigations and reports backing it up. Not so for claims of election fraud this year, which we can tell by the scores of cases which have been lost or thrown out because the claims have no foundation in reality. If there is fraud, I want to get to the bottom of it. Which is why I’ve been watching the court cases (plenty which have come before trump appointees), none of which are making progress. The reality is that the election feels less secure this year because of the efforts by Trump et al to make it seem so. This is not normal and is not at all like the Democratic response in 2016. Hilary Clinton conceded the night of the election. The election is turning out to be significantly less close this year than it was in 2016. Trump’s response to loosing is to make it feel like he lost unfairly, by spouting nonsense and not following the norms of his predecessors. The norm of conceding when the election becomes clear is an important part of the process which helps people trust the results. Trumps refusal to do so and resulting disinformation campaign is the reason the election isn’t trusted by some people this year. It’s disinformation: lies spread with the intent of misleading people. In 2016, Democrats didn’t complain that widespread fraud occurred in the election and that it should be overturned. The general feeling was that it sucked to loose and a few figures even said we should at least give trump a chance. There wasn’t a disinformation campaign. As it became more clear that Russian social media propaganda was fairly influential in polarizing voters in a certain direction, there was a lot of outcry about it. The fact that Trump never did anything about it is partly why it seems like there was collusion. The reason why it may make sense for YouTube to make this move is just given how things have played out. The campaign has had a chance to prove that there was fraud, and it couldn’t provide any proof. These theories have had their day in the courts. Are we really loosing anything specifically by deplatforming it at this point? It’s had a chance to prove itself. At this point in time, the disinformation is very hurtful to our society. All of that said, I’m really not sure we should be ok with YouTube’s deplatforming abilities. It’s a tough situation since large media sites are becoming much more like public places than private. And obviously we have some laws against, e.g., causing unwarranted panic in public places because of the harm it can cause. But I think this is a totally different situation than what you’re comparing it to.
• justinzollars 6y ago
  This just adds to 2020 being a depressing year. If we are going to go down the path of political censorship, we may as well have effective government too. But we have the worst of all worlds. We have the combination of political censorship and ineffective government.
• jl2718 6y ago
  There is almost nothing ‘provable’ or ‘disprovable’ about what is claimed to be ‘accurate’ or ‘misleading’. Therefore, everything comes down to an appeal to authority. I thought surely that we had, with all of our mathematical and technological sophistication, progressed beyond this point in our civilization.
• npmaile 6y ago
  Whether or not you think it's true that Joe Biden won (which I'm pretty sure he did) This sets a bad precedent about wrongthing on the platform. There is literally no way to prove whether or not the election was fraudulent. The only thing you can do is look at the available evidence and draw conclusins. To make it against the rules to look at the evidence and have a wrong opinion on what conclusions can be drawn from it is very dangerous. Think about how a policy like this would have been used in the past or how it can be used now and in the future. "We will remove anything alleging that The President Donald Trump colluded with russia" "We will remove anything alleging that the Chinese government is interning Uyghurs." "We will remove anything alleging that the CIA has conducted experiments on American Citizens" "We will remove anything alleging that President Bill Clinton had sex with anyone other than his wife" "We will remove anything alleging that Jeffery Epstein did not commit suicide"
• duemti 6y ago
  I'm baffled how people support this behavior from big tech. It almost seems like they think of themselves as immune to this somehow, like little sheep unable to comprehend that they themselves once will deviate will get the same treatment (assuming they have spine to stand for what they believe).
  • supergirl 6y ago
    until their google account is terminated for liking a forbidden video
  • djsumdog 6y ago
    I think back to that "First they came for the..." poem.
  • chki 6y ago
    The "slippery slope" argument doesn't work in this case (as for usual). Youtube already removes certain types of content and it already removes certain types of political content. This is necessary to monetize the platform in a meaningful way.
    • gravity13 6y ago
      The year is 2047 and California is half desert, half ocean. Youtube has moved their offices to the hippest, most promising upstart of a community, Beluga, once a suburb of Fairbanks, Alaska. A small collective of cyberpunk hackers have declared independence on an island remainder of Mt. Diablo. They call themselves "Hackerbridge" and base their upcoming government around ideas of universal basic income and their culture is based on pansexualism. Youtube blocks any videos recognizing the independence of Hackerbridge. As Hackerbridge fails to be recognized as a real nation, they cannot trade their wealth of knowledge building outdated UI apps with necessities like food, water, toilet paper, and general plumbing. As their society perishes, their leader, Alexis Ohanian, finally leaves behind a stranded leftover on the island as he pushes away his hovercraft in the direction of Reno. It is thought to be heard him say, "Where were you in 2020 when Youtube caved to corrupt government censorship?" but this quote is contradicted by other accounts.
• rightbyte 6y ago
  This is actually quite bad. It creates bubbles and divide between people if there are no common ground on de facto monopolies like Reddit, Facebook or Youtube. Reddit banned Trumps fanclub on Reddit and they reopened on a their own server with far more relaxed rules concerning incitement to violence. Pushing people out of common ground is not a very good longterm solution ...
  • axaxs 6y ago
    I noticed this too. I am a casual observer in politics, but see what both sides are up to typically via r/politics and thedonald. /r/thedonald was mostly memes and some disillusionment. The new site is a call for absolute civil war.
• dukeofdoom 6y ago
  The election was spammed with illegal ballots, and a tiny rejection rate in key swing states. This is not a conspiracy. This is the product of the rule changes put in last moment in many of the states. Rhe conspiracy is not being able yo check signature to verify the ballots. If this was done to levels approaching the previous elections, Trump would win. Btw, at this point Texas and several other states are bringing suits. So you can not claim its a wacko conspiracy made up by basement dwellers
• yadco 6y ago
  Stalin would be happy.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• muttantt 6y ago
  This is ridiculous. Regardless of your politics, this is just going the wrong direction. Where was this policy when the other side was pushing the Russia collusion narrative for years?
  • ihsw 6y ago
    Get out of here with your facts and analysis, pleb. Didn't you know, orange man bad? ...or are you a Russian bot too??
  • slacka 6y ago
    Nice false equivalence. Judges have ruled that Trump's side has failed to show any evidence of fraud in Court, losing 50/51 court cases, with the "win" having nothing to do with fraud[1]. On the other hand, there are literally thousand of pages from the Senate Committee on Intelligence showing evidence of Russian Interference in 2016. [2] [3], along with the Mueller Report [4]. Russian Interference in 2016 is not comparable to Trump's false claims of fraud in 2020. [1] https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-losing-election-lawsuits-36d113484ac0946fa5f0614deb7de15e https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-losing-election-laws... [2] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume1.pdf https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu... [3] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume1.pdf https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu... [4] https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf
    • muttantt 6y ago
      The other side had hordes of FBI and DOJ professionals digging every nook and cranny for years in an attempt to find evidence. That did not stop anyone from screaming "Russia collusion" all over social media and the 24/7 news cycle.
      • casefields 6y ago
        Agreed. This shit is going to radicalize people, and all these big tech companies better be ready. There will be a backlash.
• lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  This is such an unbelievably bad idea, especially if they are trying to avoid regulation. Even if we agreed, for some reason, that widespread fraud did not possibly happen and no possible evidence could ever be discovered to suggest it might have, they are going to have a ton of collateral damage that will effectively ban legitimate inquiry and discussion of the topic, including any neutral or objective attempts to analyze the data if it even leaves open questions. Previous elections, particularly the Florida debacle, were the subject of a ton of statistical analysis and voting machine security research for years after the election. This is useful. In this election, there were a lot of things that looked odd at first glance. I’m sure many people saw the huge vertical spike in Biden votes. A reasonable person would see that and say it looks suspicious, we should find out why. And as part of that process, an explanation was found, and this served a useful purpose in giving us confidence that this anomaly was nothing nefarious and was not cause for concern. What exactly do you think happens when you suppress our ability to do that? All of this because our youtube nannies want to decide what we should or shouldn’t see? If Trump is being a moron, I have the right to watch him be one first hand. I want to know how dumb my president is. Why would anyone want Youtube deciding this for me? Such an utterly stupid move youtube.
• bmarquez 6y ago
  "YouTube said Wednesday it will start removing any content uploaded to its platform that contains allegations of widespread fraud or errors" So the US election was 100% error free? Got it, YouTube. I still have friends whose votes weren't counted according to their state's Secretary of State website. I'm not even sure what's the point: Supressing misleading info prior to the election is one thing, but the election is over. No amount of censorship will convince skeptics.
  • Trasmatta 6y ago
    They said "widespread fraud or errors", which you've misinterpreted as anything that's not "100% error free". These are two very different goal posts.
  • chrisoverzero 6y ago
    > So the US election was 100% error free? I think you're willfully misreading in order to score some rhetorical point, but just in case: Read that as "widespread (fraud or errors)". No one is alleging that the election was error-free, only that it was free from widespread error.
    • whiddershins 6y ago
      Define widespread.
      • destroyHN 6y ago
        Stop embarrassing yourself.
      • Trasmatta 6y ago
        On the spectrum of "anecdotes about how a few of my friends didn't get their votes counted" to "fraud that swung the results of the election" it's clearly something close to the latter, not the former. And the latter has been repeatedly debunked.
    • bmarquez 6y ago
• dsabanin 6y ago
  Mass censorship never ends well, regardless of the justifications given.
• GhostVII 6y ago
  Imo they should instead put one of those disclaimers on all election related videos, linking out to a set of reputable sources for election results. Removing it just fuels conspiracy theories and directs people to more extreme platforms, downranking and adding proper sources at least has some chance of helping well-intentioned people get to accurate information.
• DanielBMarkham 6y ago
  We've seen this hundreds of times throughout history. The Salem Witch Trials come to mind. Conspiracy theories need to burn their way through the population, reaching a crescendo until saner minds take sway. These are the natural ebbs and flows of popular opinion. It's seldom rational even without conspiracy theories being involved. Trying to control this back-and-forth by shutting down one side of the conversation is just going to increase the pressure until the natural cycle continues. I think _maybe_ YT has some sort of long-game in mind where they come out with a business model, but this doesn't appear to end well for them or any of us. Treating complex and sometimes chaotic systems as if they were simple ones doesn't make for good results. If you think the question is whether or not the claims are true, you're not even close to the critical conversation society needs to have right now.
• trevor-e 6y ago
  I really hope something is done against Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai's content. He's been posting highly misleading/disingenuous election fraud material in order to gain a following, and people are believing it because he touts his PhD from MIT. Honestly at this point between his senate run and "Inventor of Email" scandal I'm surprised MIT hasn't had a response. For example, here's a video that debunks many of his claims: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aokNwKx7gM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aokNwKx7gM8
  • Darmody 6y ago
    If that video debunks his claims it means something has been done against him.
    • trevor-e 6y ago
      Yes, in a perfect world where all of his followers fact-check everything he says, that would be enough to discredit him. Sadly this is not the case.
      • Darmody 6y ago
        Do you think they'll change their minds if Google censors it? It'll make the opposite effect. Cognitive dissonance is a thing, it happens to everybody to some degree but you don't fight it with censorship.
• GoatHerders2 6y ago
  Oh, so it IS TRUE! Wow.
• nathias 6y ago
  People who see other people as incapable of judging for themselves somehow never count themselves into this category. This is a definite turning point towards more and more content curation and away from being a platform, lets just hope other p2p projects fill that void and that Youtube loses its legal protections based on its status as a platform.
• root_axis 6y ago
  Stop worshiping these websites like they are the only things on the internet that matter. It's ok if stuff gets removed from YouTube, it's one website and it's not obligated to host your HD videos for free for any reason. Get over it. Pay for the hosting if you want to project controversial content on the internet that people don't want to host for free.
  • umvi 6y ago
    > Pay for the hosting if you want to project controversial content on the internet that people don't want to host for free. But what's to stop the private company that's hosting me from de-platforming me if a twitter mob pressures them to do so? It's private companies all the way down. Free speech is impossible on the private company controlled internet.
    • root_axis 6y ago
      The financial incentives are completely different, it's all about the money. YouTube is sensitive to public opinion because advertisers are sensitive to public opinion and they are the only way YouTube makes any money. Hosting companies are incentivized NOT to care about the type of content being hosted because this approach makes them more money. Further, paying for a service usually implies some guarantees about services rendered and discourages capricious enforcement of business policies.
      • umvi 6y ago
        I used to think that, but Cloudflare de-platforming Daily Stormer[0] is a counter example to your claim. I still maintain twitter mobs can pressure any private company to de-platform speech they don't like. [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
        • root_axis 6y ago
          This is not a typical situation. If you're a certain type of asshole very few people are going to want to do business with you, this can't be helped, but there is always someone out there willing to do the job if there's money to be made. However, I will add that I don't disagree about your fundamental premise with respect to corporate ownership of the internet and I support the idea of publicly owned or decentralized spaces on the internet.
• haunter 6y ago
  Remember about this when the usual "Google blocked my Gmail" post happens here. Interact with content like this on Youtube and you would risk losing your whole Google account. "They are a private company so they can do whatever they want!"
  • kfarr 6y ago
    Yes thanks for mentioning this, the comments to this post are unusual even for HN. I'm wondering if there are so many comments that they are not actually sorted by most upvotes correctly
    • squeaky-clean 6y ago
      I don't know the algorithm they use, but I don't think HN has ever sorted comments purely by most upvotes, or upvote ratio. There's definitely some sort of recency bonus, newer comments with no votes tend to reach the top above older comments with many votes.
    • sib301 6y ago
      Your way of thinking fascinates and terrifies me. A lot of people are saying things I don’t agree with, so it must be a problem with the “algorithm”. Maybe it’s just that the majority of the people here feel a certain way.
• torresjrjr 6y ago
  https://joinpeertube.org https://joinpeertube.org
• shadowgovt 6y ago
  We've seen instances worldwide in the past of false conspiracies spinning out of hand, resulting in deaths. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-46145986 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-46145986 At some point, it becomes reasonable to ask whether private institutions have a responsibility to intercede when their media is used to spread false information that riles hate mobs to kill people.
  • ehsankia 6y ago
    You don't even need to go that obscure. Just look at the huge rise of Measles in 2019. A 50% increase in deaths compared to 2016. All those extra deaths are directly tied to the antivaxx movement. If social media had banned antivaxx sooner, those people would still be alive. Blocking this content quite literally saves human lives. Same with antimask content.
  • derptron 6y ago
    "Think of the children"? Is that really your argument?
• pcdoodle 6y ago
  This seems evil.
• slothtrop 6y ago
  Youtube suffers from the same pitfalls as FB: they actively promote tinfoil hat content, by design, because it makes money. Removing individual videos is a red herring. They will persist to profit from promoting conspiracy content, and so they will. Cherry-picking a few things will just make this worse. They're going this direction to pay lip service while avoiding changing their algorithms. Fuels the fire.
• cblconfederate 6y ago
  Translation: Youtube employees became jealous of the truth-labeling employees of twitter, and management gave them the same powers. These "truth bureaus" that networks are building will end up becoming truly major disasters
• rcurry 6y ago
  If this were the early 1900s, I wonder if people would be cheering YouTube for blocking kooks who claimed cigarettes weren't good for your health.
• ThrustVectoring 6y ago
  IMO the post should link to YouTube's blog post at https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/supporting-the-2020-us-election/ https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/supporting-the-2020-us-... rather than a news article about a blog post
• rriepe 6y ago
  Does this apply for all countries?
• loxs 6y ago
  Judging mostly from the way the US government and Big Tech is handling this, I am now almost certain that widespread election fraud did occur. It does not differ one bit from the way Russia and Turkey handle their election frauds. I haven't done any actual research on the topic myself, just sharing how it looks from the outside. I live half a world apart and have never been to the US.
• FreakyT 6y ago
  Good. While they're at it, can they please start taking down anti-vax content?
  • togs 6y ago
    I second this, but I guess I'm biased towards replicable experimentation.
• 3131s 6y ago
  I saw this the other day and it's still up... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG2RkKBHX0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG2RkKBHX0M The accounts of these people sound reasonably trustworthy but they're not alleging massive fraud, just problems at the polling place that led to overcounting.
• tyingq 6y ago
  It's interesting to me that YouTube doesn't have any credible broad competitor. The only real competition is very small subsets of what YouTube does, things like Twitch and Vimeo. Is it just that YouTube gets the high-end Google network/bandwidth at rock bottom cost?
• okareaman 6y ago
  This isn't censorship. It's YouTube deciding what it wants to host on it's platform. The information is freely available across the media spectrum but it violates YouTubes Code of Conduct so to speak
• ThrustVectoring 6y ago
  > We also disallow content alleging widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of a historical U.S. Presidential election. I'd be honestly curious if this includes the 1876 presidential election, in which 101% of eligible voters in South Carolina had their ballot counted, and the dispute over the proper way to count disputed electoral college votes was vigorous and deadlocked enough that the Democratic party got the end of Reconstruction as a concession in the Compromise of 1877 as compensation for allowing a Republican president.
  • newacct583 6y ago
    If there was a giant disinformation campaign about that election claiming that the historically attested fraud did not occur, that Tilden was actually the legitimate 19th president, and this was directly weakening the fabric on which we've built our democracy? Sure, I guess. Obviously it isn't, so no one cares. The point here is clearly to combat deliberate spreading of lies about an election. Now, you can argue that it won't work or will backfire, but there's no significant question about the purpose here.
    • benmmurphy 6y ago
      If Trump was appointed President in a similar fashion to Hayes then we would suddenly care if YouTube or any other platform was censoring content that questioned whether this was legitimate or not.
• ve55 6y ago
  Is there any evidence that removal of content one believes to be false actually achieves the remover's goals of changing the opinions of the potential viewers? I would personally be quite upset if I found platforms deleting content that I wanted to read and learn about, I don't think anyone wants someone else to choose what they can and can't learn about, regardless of its veracity. Again, I'm sure Google starts with good intentions here, but I'm not sure they have thought this all the way through. We'll see in the coming years.
  • erichocean 6y ago
    > Is there any evidence that removal of content one believes to be false actually achieves the remover's goals of changing the opinions of the potential viewers? Yes, recently in fact: Rasmussen polled Biden voters about the Hunter Biden laptop story that was suppressed on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (and legacy media), and 9.4% said they would not have voted for Biden if they had known prior to voting (IIRC ~50% of them had not heard about it). That's enough votes to get Trump elected in spite of the changes to how elections were conducted in the four swing states Texas sued earlier this week. Suppression works really, really well. Expect to see more of it in the future.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• zug_zug 6y ago
  Let's talk about the root of the disagreement. There are two "models" of reality, that explain the two viewpoints on this. One, I'd call it the libertarian model, is that people are rational, more information is always good, videos only contain information, and that all information should be available to everybody. The other, let's call it the fascist model, is that people are not rational, people can easily be emotionally manipulated en-masse (e.g. Hitler), masses of emotionally manipulated people are a risk to democracy, and therefore any functional system requires punishing and suppressing misinformation. People in the first came make a bunch of meaningless comments "This is censorship and encroaching on my rights!" and the second camp says "Boy we're lucky, and it's crazy how much of the US didn't understand Trump lost. Yikes." Neither comment convinces anybody. The only way to move people over, would be to present evidence that the libertarian model is true, or the fascist model is true. Everything besides evidence is mere drum-beating.
  • whiddershins 6y ago
    I don’t think the libertarian model requires people to be rational, it rather give people the room to develop their rationality ... to be adults exercising choice, which includes sometimes being biased or just wrong.
• helen___keller 6y ago
  I'm not happy that it's come to this, but I can't say I blame Youtube for doing it. Everything's a mess from everybody's point of view, and Youtube has a big share of responsibility for the way things are, so I guess they chose to do something. Is this the best way forward? Probably not. But atleast it's a firm, consistent, unambiguous stance, and not an entirely arbitrary one. Unless I'm mistaken, we've never had an election reach this point and then be overturned. Youtube is making a bet that this won't be the first, rather than sit around and abide the moving goalposts that will lead us to January 20th (and possibly even further than that). Again, it's weird and awful that we've reached a point in society where a video hosting service feels the need to intervene on matters of "what's true" on behalf of the nation. And it's simultaneously weird and awful that our internet is such a monoculture that it's hard to find a high-quality service that exists in competition to this one. But of the weird and awful things that have happened this year, this is pretty low on my list.
  • gjulianm 6y ago
    > but I can't say I blame Youtube for doing it I do blame them, the same way I blame all social networks. People have always been ready to spread fringe content, but usually that content didn't go too far. What has changed now? Easy: the interest of social networks and platforms in having interactions above all. They have created the algorithms that give relevance to anything that creates activity, no matter what kind of activity (criticism and praise are evaluated the same). They have created the platforms that give a massive reach to anyone, real or not, with a single identity or with a hundred ones. They have created the incentives to favor views above content. They have created the models that will spam you with the "next thing you need to see" no matter what effect that has on you. Now all of this is just a patch. The next conspiracy theory will come along, and the slightest effort at fighting it will just give it more relevance. The problem here is them. If they want to be serious about this, they should start by removing the mechanisms that are being abused. Of course, that would hurt their income and they don't care that much about the issue of misinformation.
• bitcurious 6y ago
  I wonder if Google will apply this same "it's settled per the courts" standard to the Bush v. Gore election. I've encountered a number of videos claiming it was stolen.
• sxyuan 6y ago
  A lot of short, knee-jerk reactions on this thread, not to mention snark and downright flame. Seeing as this is at the top of HN right now, can we try to elevate the level of discourse a little bit? A few questions to consider: 1. Is content moderation necessary in online platforms? I think the answer to this question is self-evident, but others may disagree and so I think it's worth posing. FWIW, HN has moderation, both official (e.g., dang) and unofficial (anyone with enough karma to flag/downvote). There's also built-in protections against flamewars (i.e., algorithmic moderation). I don't think HN would be the same place without these elements. Feel free to disagree. 2. If the answer to #1 is yes, how should content moderation happen? This is a tough problem, and it's a lot to easier to find fault than to propose workable solutions. I definitely would prefer a more democratic moderation scheme for these mega-platforms that dominate online media today. But in some sense, every form of online moderation (HN included) has been top-down. And as we've seen in the US and elsewhere, democracy itself is prone to fracturing. It's almost like we need a constitution for online governance. But could we ever agree on such a constitution in the first place? Does it need to be legislated (and if so, how do we get global consensus)? Can it be bootstrapped from the bottom up? 3. Setting aside the question of who gets to decide, should moderation be based on tone, factuality, importance of the topic, ...? How does one determine factuality? Is there something special about political matters that makes it off-limits for moderation? What if politics intersects with other matters (which probably is the case more often than not) - as in the case of COVID? And of course, it's probably impossible to separate these questions from the question of "who gets to decide". That lies at the heart of all of these "what about X" complaints elsewhere in the thread. Truth often matters less than trust, and trust is in short supply these days. Again, it's easy to criticize, but these are difficult questions. There are few easy choices. And unfortunately for the people who work on these platforms, inaction is also a choice, as I'm sure they're well aware.
  • helen___keller 6y ago
    Just to emphasize something thats generally unstated but I think pretty important: the only reason this is even remotely newsworthy or controversial is due to how large and influential Youtube is. If I could choose between two worlds, in the first there is a single mega-platform that is moderated ultra-fairly so all people can use it, and in the second there is no megaplatform but a lot of small platforms that each moderate with nakedly partisan editorial lean, I would much prefer the latter. It would be more free both for publishers and consumers, in my opinion. Right now we are all stuck trying to act like megaplatforms can house everyone fairly. They can't. Current events prove it. Facebook tried, Reddit tried, Twitter tried, and Youtube tried, and all ended up taking editorial stances that are often construed as partisan. If we had a competitive landscape of smaller platforms, everyone could have a platform that works for them, with editorial decisions that work for them. This could all be decided by the free market instead of everyone collectively wringing their hands about freedom when a tech giant makes a stand on misinformation. I don't know how society can deal with the tech giant's moats, but I think that's the real demon to slay.
• lodovic 6y ago
  There wouldn't be a problem if there were three or four competitors on each social media platform. Instead we have near monopolies on status sharing (facebook), opinion sharing (twitter), video sharing (youtube), photo sharing (instagram), resumee sharing (linkedin), etc. If these platforms would decouple from their brands and allow competition, nobody would ask for censorship.
• biffstallion 6y ago
  The media, hitech, and the Democrats are all preparing you for a gutting of the First Ammendment. That is all this is.
• throwaway1959 6y ago
  Rumble has been positioning themselves as a censorship-free alternative to youtube. Granted, they have a very long way to go, but it's definitely a start.
• Splendor 6y ago
  Cue all the champions of capitalism and small government begging the government step in to force a private business to do something.
• aerovistae 6y ago
  This thread is fascinating. Same type of troll/sarcasm/meme comments (e.g. "orange man bad") as you find on Reddit, which are normally absent from HN. This topic clearly brings out the worst no matter where it's discussed.
  • txmachinery 6y ago
    Or the commentary is largely coming from those normally absent from HN.
    • balozi 6y ago
      It must be the outside agitators?
    • skinkestek 6y ago
      Many of the comments on both sides - although hopefully not most of the worst ones - are from long term contributors. Many of us try to be reasonable even when we go against the grain here: Personally I never liked or voted Trump and I trust the American public and American judges more than HN or YouTube. As an outside observer with contacts on both sides I can see how maddening this must be, so here I am on HN, trying to explain how this feels like for Trump supporters. Meanwhile I see messages waiting for me on Telegram and I think Instagram from some of those people and I will again tryvto explain them that even if they haven't seen a single Biden supporter for miles it just means they haven't looked in the right places. But, historically I think being a reasonable person when American elections are discussed on HN is a losing proposition :-)
  • sergiomattei 6y ago
    I’ve never seen such a cesspool in HN. This (low) level of debate here is novel.
  • blisterpeanuts 6y ago
    Any political topic on Hacker News tends to bring out emotionally charged commentary. Anyone going against the prevailing ideology gets voted down into a light gray shade that is almost impossible to read. I love the technology discussions here, but when it comes to sociology and politics and topics like Big Tech censorship, it's tediously one sided.
• comfyinnernet 6y ago
  Youtube is the problem. Anyone can put whatever shit they want online, which is fine in itself, but put your snake oil on Youtube and Google's Skynet will expertly find rubes to sell for you and show it to them. But on a few occasions, like this one, advertisers get nervous.
• donkeyd 6y ago
  Holy shit, this thread is scary. Sure, there are some implications worth discussing based on this news. However, the number of people directly posting doubts on the election results is way more concerning and shows that Youtube might be doing a good thing in this case.
  • ghthor 6y ago
    If you dont have doubts about this election, you've been thoroughly brainwashed.
    • donkeyd 6y ago
      Oh, I definitely have doubts. I have doubts about the legality of voter suppression tactics like defunding the USPS, doubts about gerrymandering, doubts about influence by foreign actors and much more. They're just not the baseless stuff that Youtube is now removing.
    • Jeema101 6y ago
      You don't have any secret evidence that other people haven't already seen and already debunked. Ask yourself this: is there anything that could convince you that the election was on the up-and-up?
      • ghthor 6y ago
        Re-election. All paper ballots, in person and hand counting with observers.
        • WalterGR 6y ago
          Why wasn't this your requirement in 2016?
          • donkeyd 6y ago
            I'm going to go out on a limb and say their candidate didn't lose that year. Even though margins were razor thin that year too, they didn't care.
• ChuckMcM 6y ago
  An interesting step to be sure, and the responses here reflect similar sentiments elsewhere (some think it's censorship, some think it's stewardship, and still others think it's Google's pool so they get to decide who is allowed into it) I find the meta question fascinating. That question is "If you have a tool that can influence millions any way you choose to influence them, what role should the state play in regulating that tool?" With things like, say, nuclear weapons. It seems really easy to say "I don't want just anyone in the country to be able to go out and buy a nuclear weapon and possibly put their entire city at risk of annihilation if they decide to set it off!" And in many conversations we get to that perspective because the "innocent" bystanders who would be killed by this act have no way to realistically protect themselves from that threat. Thus we accept that the state, which has community support to protect the community, is given the right to say who can and who cannot "own" a nuclear weapon. It isn't even all that controversial in the general public even though there will always be people who take the position that the 2nd amendment "right to bear arms" does not exclude any "arms" it's a blanket right. And yet for most people, keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of just any individual seems a reasonable limitation. But what about media? We have seen first hand the destructive effects of coordinated campaigns of disinformation. In the hands of a skilled operator, millions of individuals can be manipulated into actions that they would not have contemplated. Whether it is for giving power to criminals, or killing themselves and their children by drinking cyanide laced Kool-aid. When it becomes possible for a small group to do great harm to a much larger "innocent" group, what is the right action to take? What consensus does the community come to which supports governance for everyone versus rights for the individual? I believe it to be a much more complex question than simply "censorship" / "no censorship" and letting individuals protect themselves from these sorts of operators. Just as I believe it is unreasonable for individuals to be held responsible for protecting themselves from one of their neighbors possibly setting off a nuclear weapon, or spraying them with a machine gun. From what I have read, in the US the sense of "justice" is tied to the perpetrators of an act of harm being suitably punished for that act. And I certainly feel harmed by the egregious disinformation that has made my relationship with my parents much more difficult. But how do I get justice for that harm? I really don't have a good sense of the right and just answer here.
• singlow 6y ago
  If there is to be toleration in the world, one of the things taught in schools must be the habit of weighing evidence, and the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe true. For example, the art of reading the newspapers should be taught. The schoolmaster should select some incident which happened a good many years ago, and roused political passions in its day. He should then read to the school-children what was said by the newspapers on one side, what was said by those on the other, and some impartial account of what really happened. He should show how, from the biased account of either side, a practised reader could infer what really happened, and he should make them understand that everything in newspapers is more or less untrue. The cynical scepticism which would result from this teaching would make the children in later life immune from those appeals to idealism by which decent people are induced to further the scheme of scoundrels. --Bertrand Russell
  • titzer 6y ago
    "I love the poorly educated." - Donald J. Trump[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpdt7omPoa0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpdt7omPoa0
    • mike00632 6y ago
      "I didn't say that." - also Donald J. Trump
  • Nacdor 6y ago
    It's depressing to read this quote and then realize it was delivered in 1922, meaning our media has been suffering from this problem of extreme political bias for likely more than a century now. A lot of my friends spend all day "Liking" Facebook posts that mocking Trump supporters as ignorant simpletons, then they repeat blatant falsehoods like "Trump told people to drink bleach" or "Trump called Nazis 'very fine people'". The irony is completely lost on them because they're so deep in their own disinformation bubbles.
    • singlow 6y ago
      It's been a lot longer than a century. This is the natural order of things. Bertrand was not criticizing the media as much as he was pointing out its natural tendencies, which originate in the natural tendencies of humans. His solution was not to fix the media, it is to learn how to interpret it.
• SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
  Does no-one else notice that the argument to "allow them all to speak" is completely isomorphic to the Creationist vs argument to "teach the controversy" (1) in their bid to suppress the long settled science of Evolution? Does anyone think that "teach the controversy" is a good idea and was done in good faith? (hint: no and no) 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teach_the_Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teach_the_Controversy
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• biffstallion 6y ago
  Reading some of these holier-than-thou comments from the left it is obvious that they would buy a bridge if someone sold it to them with a 30 day guarantee...
• bbg24 6y ago
  > We also disallow content alleging widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of a historical U.S. Presidential election. How can any honest person accept this state of affairs? What would be the reaction of the gleefully censorious US big tech employees, many here on HN, if non-US social media giant enacted such measures in their locality? I don't see evidence that the 2020 election stolen from the Republican candidate, but this is a huge red flag that something might be going on. It would absolutely be consdiered as such were this happening elsewhere.
  • MGGJFU 6y ago
    > but this is a huge red flag that something might be going on On the contrary. This is an indicator of the Republican claims being based on no evidence. The fact that these lies happen to be incredibly damaging to the perception of US democracy is a good enough reason for a private company to decide not to host it. It's not part of an even larger coverup, as you seem to believe. Do you know how many people would need to be involved on a coverup of this scale? How is that even remotely close to being the right explanation.
    • bbg24 6y ago
      To be clear, I did not say this is part of a larger coverup, as you seem to believe. I stated, quite clearly, I see no evidence that anything particularly strange has happened. I suggested that a major tech firm banning content which challenges election results, not only this most recent election, would be considered a red flag if it were to happen anywhere else.
    • Proziam 6y ago
      The majority of big tech people live in D+∞ areas. Given that, and the likely bias that comes as a result, it isn't unreasonable to not want their influence on what political opinions are or are not able to be said aloud.
    • sneak 6y ago
      > The fact that these lies happen to be incredibly damaging to the perception of US democracy is a good enough reason for a private company to decide not to host it. This is the narrative, yes. Where is the evidence that Trump and his followers screaming about election fraud has damaged the perception of US democracy? So far, it appears that the system did the thing it was supposed to do: Trump is being removed from his office. If people telling lies about a system is sufficient to destroy that system, then perhaps the system needs to die and be replaced with something less refutable. Is democracy really so fragile? A free society increasingly appears to be, as censorship ramps up.
• thegrim33 6y ago
  You know your viewpoints are correct when you gleefully engage in literal book burning to erase opposing ideas. Where one political party controls nearly all mass media and chooses what history is, memory holes any opposing ideas, where anyone with an opposing idea is dehumanized and branded as evil, de-platformed, banned, censored, fired, (and eventually, worse). It's straight out of 1984 and the playbook of every evil regime. And just like every evil regime in the past, it has wide support and the citizens cheer it on and support it and ignore the evil, because they're told it's evil for a good cause. They cheer it on because they've been brainwashed to hate the other half of the population and believe it's OK to do evil to "bad" people. For a party so concerned about stopping the next "Hitler" and how Nazi Germany could have ever happened, they sure love following in the same exact footsteps.
• Aunche 6y ago
  For the free speech absolutists out there, how can that ideology be sustainable in the long run? Lack of moderation gets blamed a lot of lack of moderation. Even if it's untrue, this will drive people to demand additional moderation or censorship. Unconditional free speech is entirely self-defeating.
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  Why should "alleging" anything be policed? I concur that painting widespread fraud as "definite" seems like a false claim (at least with current evidence), but let's leave that aside for now. Exploration of election fraud would have to begin with speculation ("alleging"), just like challenging any prevailing thought begins with speculation. For example, imagine if no one was permitted to challenge the WHO's claim earlier this year that there was no human to human transmission of the coronavirus. Furthermore, if there WERE fraud happening, there aren't any great avenues by which outsiders could detect it to offer up evidence. The system is too opaque, proprietary in its implementation, and varied across jurisdictions to allow gathering of evidence. So the notion that there must be hard proof before people can talk about a problem doesn't make sense to me in this instance. Some thoughts on content curation and censorship by big tech platforms: YouTube is not a small backwaters website. It is one of the most influential and popular websites, with reach greater than most countries' governments, and it is therefore a digital public square. YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook should not be allowed to implement restrictions on content beyond what the law minimally requires, since doing so effectively curtails practical access to the right to free speech. And I am not talking about legal technicalities of free speech as enshrined in current US law, but rather the fundamental principle of free speech - something worthy of aspiring to regardless of what the law allows right now. Lastly, a word on elections: elections need to implement the law strictly and be tightly controlled. There should be nothing left to chance. This means there needs to be multiple cross-checked counts by default, with a variety of organizations involved (observers and counters from parties, media outlets, etc.). There should be random sampling of ballots where citizens are asked to vote a second time to validate their initial ballot. There should be strong voter verification to disallow any illegal voting. All machines and software must be open source and audited by third parties. People should be able to verify their ballot's choices were recorded as expected online. And so on. I realize some of this may run into limitations of secret ballots, but we can perhaps come up with technical solutions to allay those fears (like issuing one-time use logins for each election that have no PII tying a ballot back to a specific individual).
• jude- 6y ago
  Youtube has no more obligation to host these videos than your local coffee shop has an obligation to host an oral reading of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book. This lack of obligation is not censorship -- it's private property rights and the free market in action. If you want to hear a recitation of the Little Red Book while you sip coffee, you are free to patronize a coffee shop that will do so, or even start your own coffee shop. Likewise, you're free to use a different video platform, or start your own.
• mvanga 6y ago
  The cynic in me sees this, which is just the latest move in a series of overreaching actions being taken by the big social media giants, as an effort to get Section 230 repealed. The more blatant they are in their partisan actions, the more they rile up the opposition and the more the pressure on lawmakers to repeal Section 230. Once that happens, they get to have full control over the content on their platforms "because the law makes them liable", and they never have to worry about competition ever rising up against them ever again. They basically got to ride the coattails of Section 230 to the point of a monopoly; repealing it just gives them everything they want. Ah whatever, censorship is not the answer in a free democracy. Freedom of speech has to be more than just a law written on some paper somewhere for it to mean something; it has to be something the people believe in their day-to-day interactions with their fellow countrymen. I suppose that's gone at this point...
  • GordonS 6y ago
    Can you really call these "partisan actions"? They are removing videos containing provable, obvious lies. An unabated, huge volume of lies and deceit, that altogether is potentially dangerous. Those lies happen to favour a political party, and are even instigated by the leader of that party, but I don't agree that the action of removing them is "partisan"; these actions would be taken regardless of which party was benefiting.
• titzer 6y ago
  Yet another sign that Google has too much power.
  • cromwellian 6y ago
    Only 1/4 of Republicans surveyed believe the election wasn't fraudulent according to a poll today. Clearly, not objective reality. Do you think that this is a) the result of Google or b) the result of FoxNews, and other Mercer/Koch/Murdoch owned media/radio continuously amplifying and echoing these claims? If Google has so much power, why can't they convince 3/4s of Republicans that water is wet? Like literally, 42 lost court cases, court dockets where the Republican governors and secretaries of states conducted investigations and debunked all of the specious "evidence" (e.g. the "suitcases from under the table" video), and yet this gaslighting continues. The Trump administration has undermined the credibility of all of our institutions, the latest being the scientific / medical community and democratic institutions. He does this by spreading baseless lies on social media with made up facts, some of them so preposterous that they've essentially 8chan/8kun posts. This then gets spread far and wide on social media and conservative TV and Radio as a mind virus. And yet, the problem is Google has too much power to fact check this motherlode of bullshit. Well clearly, this power sucks, because for all of its scary capability, it clearly can't burst the bubble of people who have been gaslit into a shitgibbon's cult.
    • titzer 6y ago
      I don't disagree about Republicans. I am just stating a fact. Google has too much power. But you have to realize something about how conservatives get their news. They are extremely loyal to a small number of sources and rely heavily on peer-to-peer amplification of right-wing memes. Google has nothing on the Facebook and good-ole-boy networks. They inherently distrust Google and the internet and any "mainstream" media. All Trump has to do is say "The left-wing Google" and it sticks in their heads like a thorn. They trust people they know in real life, and as soon as their friends are repeating they catchphrases, they believe it.
• mesozoic 6y ago
  This is the same platform that is the backbone of the information for flat earth and every other conspiracy theory based on ignorance that becomes widespread. But when they decide they don't like people to know about some some legitimate ongoing litigation they take it down.
• _bax 6y ago
  Trump related only or every election fraud?
  • ghthor 6y ago
    Its a slippery slope. There will always be the "bad" guy that the establishment needs to put the heel of their boot to.
• originalvichy 6y ago
  America has such a secure and strong democracy, that an internet video platform has to take steps just so it will not unwillingly help incite a civil war in the country they operate out of. Internet blackouts are literally "developing world unstable democracy" tier measures. I feel sorry for you guys out there. I wish you had a political system that was immune to events like this so online video companies wouldn't have to stand up. An online video site is literally doing the job of politicians.
• a_brawling_boo 6y ago
  As a person trying to deal with parents already on the ledge, I can’t tell you how detrimental this is to an already fragile situation.
• condomhacker 6y ago
  Since when is youtube the gatekeeper of truth? Why is it upon Youtube to intentionally choose to do this? Moral obligation? Road to hell is paved with good intentions.
• worik 6y ago
  This has nothing to do with "Free Speech", that would be a very lazy characterisation. Thi sis no threat to democracy. Youtube is not the Internet, not even the Web. Any nutter is still free to put up a website - or some other new machine behind a IP address and carry on exercising their free speech. Google has no obligation to let its platform be used by any idiot who wants to, and in hopefully less frequent cases, by experienced psy ops crews waging low level information warfare.
  • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    Where is this kind of comment in threads about Google randomly banning someone’s Gmail or randomly suspending someone’s developer account?
• adamredwoods 6y ago
  I feel that since Citizens United case was upheld, all companies can be politically motivated, and YouTube is no exception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• dang 6y ago
  There are multiple pages of comments, accessible via the 'More' link at the bottom of the page, or click here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003&p=5 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003&p=5 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003&p=6 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003&p=6 Corporate press releases tend to be an exception to HN's rule about original sources (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=corporate%20press%20release%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) because they are invariably self-serving and usually obscure. This one seems ok, but I think I'll pilfer the title from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25361291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25361291, which gets to the point more directly.
• Causality1 6y ago
  Disgusting. YouTube has profiteered via ad revenue on these videos for over a month and now that it's dying down they want to be the last ones through the door and say "hey we're against this stuff we're the good guys." They stand for free speech as long as it suits them and they stand against misinformation when it doesn't, the fucking sociopaths.
  • syndacks 6y ago
    Nope, not how it works. Free speech is not applicable to private companies.
    • Causality1 6y ago
      That's not my point at all. YouTube stands for the principle of free speech when it suits them and then pretends to stand against misinformation when it doesn't.
• ve55 6y ago
  "We recognize there's always more to do. For example, while problematic misinformation represents a fraction of 1% of what's watched on YouTube in the U.S., we know we can bring that number down even more." Is this really the best phrasing Youtube could come up with? I'm betting this will not work out well long-term.
• Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  Unpopular opinion: it is much better to have a leader hated by the media and who's every move is scrutinized by the press than to have a leader cowtowed by the press and given a free pass on anything. How do I know? I'm from Russia. Authoritatism begins with tight control of news sources.
  • dalbasal 6y ago
    I think this comment is underrated. Even using the term "censorship" is somewhat dubious when/if the "censor" is acting against the interests/wishes of government. That said, I think google are making a bad mistake here. They've crossed a line that they've been toeing. Social media isn't just a mass media. Media is always edited. Editing isn't censorship. But social media is also a communication channel. Haphazard interference in a communication channel sits wrong. We have no frame of reference for it. Meanwhile, there are credible claims that social media fallacies have caused horrible things (including possibly genocide in Myanmar) in other countries/languages. FB (in that case) has no knowledge of the language or interest in getting involved in that. How can you justify one without the other?
  • lalaland1125 6y ago
    This comment is really weird. There is a good reason why the media publishes more negative articles about some presidents and fewer on others; some presidents are legitimately better or worse than others.
    • Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
      By this metric, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un are greatest leaders the world has ever seen.
      • knowaveragejoe 6y ago
        No serious person with an interest in politics respects the state-sponsored news outlets of Russia or DPRK, but okay.
• flowerlad 6y ago
  On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. Sacha Baron Cohen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM Excerpts: Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims. Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.
  • buisi 6y ago
    What views are these pedophiles espousing? How common is this? I see many people who would be considered bigots, but I have yet to encounter truly pedophilic views on any mainstream media. What I see, rather are experts being accused of being pedophiles, for pushing controversial ideas about how to prevent pedophiles from committing crimes, and being censored accordingly.
• andrewla 6y ago
  The wikipedia article for the 1876 presidential election should probably be removed from google search as well [1], since it alleges widespread fraud that changed the result of the election, and we are past the safe harbor deadline. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_United_States_presidentia...
  • dkobran 6y ago
    Except this is fact-based article. The issue at hand is that there are widespread claims being made that are completely baseless. They are not substantiated by facts. Videos that are making claims without any evidence are not equivalent to an actual scandal/controversy that is backed by evidence. In other words, the claims being made in this election will not be presented in the same format of the article you shared because no one can point to any actual widespread election meddling or vote tampering. I really am blown away why this fundamental distinction is so hard for people to grasp. I can make any false claims about anyone or anything. This does not inherently make something controversial and give it credence. If on the other hand my claims were not fabricated and have merit, then they may result in a scandal/controversy. It seems like you believe because this is being said over and over again that it somehow deserves attention or is credible. That's a really unfortunate position. You cannot will facts into into existence. "Wrong is wrong, even if everyone is doing it. Right is right even if no one else is doing it." ― Saint Augustine
    • Lammy 6y ago
      We can write a fact-based article about the 2020 election too. A better 1876 comparison to Youtube's place in 2020 probably can't be had, since I doubt there are many records of the conversations and arguments had about it by regular people in public spaces.
• GordonS 6y ago
  I don't like what YouTube is doing. But... What is going on in the US just now is unprecedented in modern Western democracies - we've reached "peak fake news" in the USA. Mainstream news networks like Fox have talking heads spouting venomous lies that are demonstrably and trivially proven as such. The POTUS is lying on an hourly basis (many of those lies just brazenly, ridiculously false), and has millions of people believing his every word - he's personally profiting hugely, while brainwashing them and whipping them up into frenzy. It's fucking dangerous, especially with the US' lax gun laws. I don't like private companies getting to decide what's truthful and what's not, but it's not like the US government is doing a better job, and is it safe to allow mad conspiracies and obvious lies to become "truth" for so many millions? I don't think there are any good outcomes here regardless - it's one of those "least worst" choices.
  • CamperBob2 6y ago
    The POTUS is lying on an hourly basis (many of those lies just brazenly, ridiculously false), and has millions of people believing his every word - he's personally profiting hugely, while brainwashing them and whipping them up into frenzy. Also, I believe his forces should have all the best guns. Is that a reasonable rephrasing of your point?
    • metalliqaz 6y ago
      the armed forces don't belong to POTUS as much as the current occupant of the office would like them to have loyalty to him personally, they don't still, Congress has given up too much control and needs to take it back
      • CamperBob2 6y ago
        the armed forces don't belong to POTUS * blinks * Yes, they do. He's their commander in chief, authorized by Congress to attack anyone or anything in the name of "fighting terrorism" with zero immediate accountability to anyone. (And yes, as you suggest, this is a problem Congress created for itself.) POTUS also has the ability to invoke something called the "Insurrection Act," which effectively deploys the military on domestic soil for law-enforcement purposes. Oh, and speaking of Federal law enforcement, that's an executive branch function as well. as much as the current occupant of the office would like them to have loyalty to him personally, they don't An idealistic perspective that isn't always borne out by reality. [1] still, Congress has given up too much control and needs to take it back That's for darned sure. Of course, a complicit Congress is arguably worse than an impotent one, because it opens the door to a captive judicial branch as well. [1]: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/dod-report-reveals-details-seals-punished-flying-trump-flag/ https://taskandpurpose.com/news/dod-report-reveals-details-s... : “[The convoy commander] was also aware of the rules precluding Department of Defense (DoD) endorsement of political candidates during an election,” the documents stated. “However, he believed that flying the flag was not inappropriate since the election was over and since the candidate was now the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.”
• owlbynight 6y ago
  This is Orwellian bullshit. And I'll take it because I think the alternative is leading to a few greedy assholes using analytical data to successfully weaponize millions upon millions of uninformed people against logic and common sense. Do we add restrictions to voting to weed out people who habitually vote anti-facts? No. Disenfranchisement. Do we make fake news illegal? No. Censorship leading to state run media. Do we have a civil war because it's so bad that people are being evicted and dying of starvation because their neighbors are being convinced by propaganda that they're less than? Hopefully not. So we're kind of left with this option. We're stuck with speaking with our wallets through corporations because our voices in government have been corrupted. It sucks.
  • ghthor 6y ago
    If you think the ones weaponizing disinformation are unable to also weaponize centralized unelected censors, you're a fucking moron. These centralized censors will be weaponized by the same actors weaponizing the information.
  • its_simple 6y ago
    I don't need some pythonistas doing sprints telling me which videos I should or shouldn't watch when I'm getting high, yes or yes?
    • bofadeez 6y ago
      Shout out Tim Dillon?
  • wwright 6y ago
    Agreed 100%. YouTube’s massively outsized impact is obviously the problem here. This wouldn’t be Orwellian if they didn’t have so much power. We wouldn’t need it if YouTube didn’t allow for such insane manipulation of people. But if we’re going to have YouTube, by god do I prefer people NOT proliferating this madness freely.
    • cmdshiftf4 6y ago
• dukeofdoom 6y ago
  If we don't have a meaningful signature match, than we don't have a meaningful way to prevent fraud with mail in ballots. Period. Bad ballot Rejection rate of 6% in previous election to now 0.02%, with mail in ballots. Mismatched signatures resulted in a rejection for only 0.02% of all absentee ballots cast. How is that even possible. They counted almost everything. For those of you that think its unfair to reject ballots. Well how do you verify that the person cast the ballot is the one that sent it in?
  • jaccarmac 6y ago
    > If we don't have a meaningful signature match, than we don't have a meaningful way to prevent fraud with mail in ballots. Period. We can check for duplicate votes. Submitting fraudulent ballots in quantities necessary to change the results while avoiding submitting duplicate ballots (which would be caught, as we saw with the Jill Stokke) would require either: 1. Extremely good data about who had voted and who had not. OR 2. Some faction in the ballot-processing chain with the ability to secretly discard the legitimate ballots. Is there evidence that either of these things happened?
    • dilap 6y ago
      I don't think it's that hard if you harvest ballots from places unlikely to vote, e.g., nursing homes. My understanding is the following two facts are true - Georgia has a historically low mail-in ballot rejection rate - Georgia is not allowing an independent review of the signatures on the envelopes That alone in my mind is an extremely strong reason to be suspicious of the results. Not to even mention the very-strange goings-on in the State Farm Arena in Atlanta...
      • VikingCoder 6y ago
        There were 22,894 nursing facility residents in Georgia in 2019. [1] How many of them do you think had their ballots harvested? I think it's far harder to harvest ballots without getting caught than you seem to think it is. [1] : https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/number-of-nursing-facility-residents/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/number-of-nursing-...
• yenwodyah 6y ago
  It's heartening to see Google finally taking steps towards curbing the spread of disinformation on their platforms recently. Now if only Facebook would do the same.
• rurban 6y ago
  Time for a new nickname: The truth. "Pravda" in russian.
• arminiusreturns 6y ago
  So many people making capitulations for censorship, including calling fake news of Fox but ignoring how CNN and all the mainstream is full of the same bullshit for "the other side". It seems to be a theme of "I don't like it but $insertjustification." Shame on anybody making justifications for this. It's something you agree with now, but next time it won't be. First they came for the youtubers...
• txmachinery 6y ago
  Where is the evidence? Https://hereistheevidence.com
  • bob33212 6y ago
    these are minor problems and more importantly they don't have any proof that they would have changed the outcome. For example, 9500 people were dead. What was the breakdown of Trump/Biden in those votes? I don't understand how we can fix that. Do you have a crystal ball we can all look into to find out if we will die between the day we mail in our ballot and the day of the election?
    • mardifoufs 6y ago
      I totally agree with you, but the thing is even these small, isolated cases that are backed by some evidence won't be allowed on YouTube.
      • bob33212 6y ago
        That is not what YouTube said. They will not take down a video where you say that some people died between the time that they mailed in their vote and the time that the votes were counted, so those votes shouldn't and didn't count. They will take down a video that says that foreign countries stole the election for Biden, because all of the evidence points to that not being true at all.
        • txmachinery 6y ago
          So, we are left to wonder why YT suddenly cares so very much about foreign countries being accused of meddling in the US election.
          • bob33212 6y ago
            We are also left to wonder why people think Trump gives a single fuck about this country or the republican party.
• duxup 6y ago
  I think for a host the question is. Do I host content in the name of freedom of speech ... that could conceivably lead to anti democratic type content / action that ... inherently restricts speech / worse. I don't find such a scenario easy to answer at all.
• systemvoltage 6y ago
  The algorithms that optimize the shareholder value are against the idea of having a healthy debate on social media. Echo chambers deliberately implemented by Big Tech has led us here. It is a permanent damage. If consumers of social media were shown both sides, perhaps we wouldn't be here in the first place. Truth vs. Falsehood are like a special place on the nyquist plot and its stability criterion is like of an inverted pendulum. Truth is in an unstable equilibrium that requires constant vigilance, maintenance and upkeep. Falsehood thrives and the laws of nature (information theory) are on its side to spread faster, more vigorously and with ever increasing force. As shitty as it sounds, we need some temporary dampers. Ultimately, we're here because we wanted to sell the right scent of soap to the right echo chamber.
  • esja 6y ago
    One day it will be commonly accepted that these ML recommenders have played the same role in this social crisis as the Gaussian copula did in the financial crisis.
• 3princip 6y ago
  I live in a country that the US has sanctioned in the past for undemocratic election processes. Also, I'm familiar with our voting procedures and have worked on election oversight, data gathering etc. If we had an election that had a fraction of the irregularities that are surfacing in some of these problematic states, I'm pretty sure we would have been invaded by now. Jokes aside, those states are a similar population size to my country so it's not apples and oranges. Censorship is also something the US is quick to call out others for.
  • dillondoyle 6y ago
    ?? show actual factual sources if you're going to make a claim like that on a platform like HN
    • notassigned 6y ago
      Sorry, no factual sources can exist since this has been declared false by Alphabet, Inc
  • sobellian 6y ago
    The POTUS has been telegraphing this litigation for months or even years before the election. Let's not pretend that his campaign is actually reacting to sincere revelations of fraud. They were always going to dispute the election if they lost it. So many people claim evidence of massive fraud and yet every case I can find gets laughed out of court, often by Trump appointed judges, despite massive incentives to show that evidence in court. It has gotten to the point where conspiracy theorists are literally referring to nonexistent state counties in their court filings. Frankly, it is a conspiracy theory.
  • knowaveragejoe 6y ago
    > If we had an election that had a fraction of the irregularities that are surfacing in some of these problematic states, I'm pretty sure we would have been invaded by now. This should probably clue you in that there are, in fact, no real irregularities(beyond what normally occurs). Surely you must stop at some point and ask yourself - why are you carrying water for Trump?
• beefee 6y ago
  YouTube is not serving its users very well. It's becoming an unreliable service. Creators walk on eggshells to avoid political or copyright censorship. Users have a hard time finding interesting content since so much of it is being deleted and replaced with corporate media.
• content_sesh 6y ago
  So what exactly is the problem here? Youtube (and capital in general) don't like the idea of a contested election leading to political uncertainty and they're using their platforms to advocate for that position. DoorDash and Uber did effectively the same thing with Prop 22 in California; if that's OK then so is this.
• 205g0 6y ago
  “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” ― George Orwell, Animal Farm
• Splendor 6y ago
  YouTube removes content from their platform every single hour of every single day. Those of you who are upset by this action should reflect on why this is different than any other content policy or removal they perform. Just like those of you who are upset with private businesses requiring you to wear a mask have never been upset with a "no shoes, no shirt" policy. Stop hiding behind some supposed principles here. Just admit what is really bothering you here.
• yters 6y ago
  I have looked into a couple datasets purporting evidence of fraud, but they are fallacious. This is much more effective at disabusing me of election fraud conspiracies than censorship. YouTube's latest move has raised my skepticism all over again. Furthermore, YouTube must know this so there must be some really damning material they are censoring to make this risky move, which ultimately leads me to conclude there is widespread fraud.
• kiawe_fire 6y ago
  In a free and fair society, it is not dangerous to ask questions. It is very dangerous to be told that you are not allowed to ask questions. In a marketplace of ideas, with free sharing of information, bogus claims will eventually (usually quickly) collapse on themselves, and true claims will bear themselves out. Attempting to silence ideas, even potentially false and harmful ideas, is the greatest way to build a society that is not free, fair, and based on fact, but only one that is based on the opinions of the gatekeepers of the ideas.
  • kiawe_fire 6y ago
    You can downvote me, but first indulge me... Imagine, for a second, that you saw something concerning. For argument’s sake, say you saw your boss doing something you perceived to be illegal. Imagine, then, that you were told that asking about those things was dangerous, because it would cause everyone to lose faith in who they work for. Now imagine that HR or a PR firm comes, only after trying hard to convince you that you shouldn’t ask any questions at all, and then tells you that they investigated and found nothing wrong. Then imagine that, while some of the explanation given made sense, some of it did not, and maybe led to more questions. Finally, imagine then being told that not only should you no longer question, but that anyone caught talking about it would be removed. Now, we don’t know that something illegal did or did not occur. But be honest... would that scenario convince you that nothing illegal happened, and that you should move on as instructed?
    • cgrealy 6y ago
      > say you saw your boss doing something you perceived to be illegal. Keyword being "perceived". But let's examine the premise. Do I have any evidence of this act? Do I have sufficent expertise to determine if what I saw was actually illegal? Where are my biases? Can I argue my case in a coherent and believable manner? and most importantly in this particular case, are there literally thousands of other people who contradict my position?
      • kiawe_fire 6y ago
        All of those are very important points, and exactly why I chose the word "perceived". Let's say multiple people observed a pattern of suspicious acts over a period of time from this boss. Maybe it's a big company, and you have hundreds of accusers, and hundreds of defenders of the accused. So, you naturally have some people with flimsy testimony and inherent bias, and others who clearly don't know the law or policy. Then you have a few with valid testimony that the defenders of the accused are able to convincingly refute. But you're still left with a core group of people with legit questions, hopefully trying to determine wrongdoing in honest, good faith, and they received flimsy evidence and inaccurate testimony in response from the defense. This core group still has questions unanswered... muddied, by the obviously false testimonies from those with bias, but still their core questions remain. Deciding, at that point, that all discussion is to be silenced, does nothing to prove either side. My point, though, really was not to draw a direct analogy, but to try, perhaps unsuccessfully, to get you to put yourself in the shoes of someone who, in good faith, has genuine questions. And to then imagine being told that your questions are so fundamentally offensive on their face, that you shouldn't even be allowed to further ask or discuss them, and that any explanation, regardless of how thorough or how flimsy, should be accepted without further scrutiny. I think anyone who is being honest would admit that this would do nothing to satisfy you of no wrongdoing, but instead would probably convince you there was wrongdoing. Which, frankly, is a terrible way for cases of illegality to be decided, no matter which side you're on.
• dstola 6y ago
  Regardless of where you stand, this is _blatant_ political bias (democrats) towards an equally valid opposing viewpoint (republican) This is literally definition of a slippery slope where Google is going and would have caused an absolute outrage had it happened with the whole Russian election meddling 4 years ago. Let the freedom of expression take course, trying to control the narrative is exact opposite of democracy that Google screams they are trying to protect.
  • balozi 6y ago
    Bet you thought that the slippery slop would stop at the "deniers" and the "anti-vaxers".
    • dstola 6y ago
      It will only stop at 1984 levels when the only opinions you can have are the government mandated ones You think that would never fly, but I bet people thought censorship on the internet on this scale would never work 20 years ago
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• ralph84 6y ago
  It's been sad watching Silicon Valley evolve from Apple's 1984 Super Bowl commercial to this.
• Thorentis 6y ago
  Corporations with monetary incentives (i.e. all corporations) should not be the entities responsible for deciding what information can and cannot spread within a democracy. I don't care what side of the fence you're on when it comes to censorship - allowing corporations to wield power previously solely held by the government is a step in a dangerous direction. What to do about it? This is very tricky. The best solution I have been able to think of, is inline with "anti-discrimination" laws that exist with hiring. Corporations should not be able to discriminate in terms of what information is spread via their platform. If the government can enforce that law when it comes to hiring (even if that restricts a private company's "freedom") then they can certainly do it for information.
• throwawaay73h 6y ago
  The United States has been geopolitically blessed. No country has seriously threatened the American heartland since 1812. Bringing up foreign interference (in elections, Covid-denial and elsewhere) upsets certain factions, but the fact is that Facebook, Twitter, various commenting platforms and YouTube have allowed the enemies of the United States a direct route into the heartland of the US. Coupled with free speech absolutism and low touch regulation, it makes a tempting vector to disrupt a previously impregnable foe. If I were a strategist for a rival power, it would be almost criminally negligent to not exploit this conduit into the American heartland, and spread disinformation and generally sow chaos. It looks like the geek gods have finally realized this and are pushing back. It wouldn’t surprise me if US companies started severely curtailing anonymous/unverified speech for foreign accounts at least.
• manuelabeledo 6y ago
  I have no issues with this. Cable networks have been spouting false information for several years now, hurting the very foundations of democracy. Banning obvious and pernicious lies from a platform is, in fact, a step forward.
• iphorde 6y ago
  There has been election fraud. To the extent it was organized has yet to be determined, I'm very skeptical of conspiracy. The fact YouTube will delete complaints, and evidence is very scary. This should scare everyone. How do we know it isn't true if they decided what the truth is? You might agree with Google, on this issue, but wait until they have interest in something that kills people, and Google decides to take down evidence to persuade the public. Apple does this crap all of the time.
  • togs 6y ago
    > There has been election fraud. Has there been election fraud? What evidence supports this claim?
    • iphorde 6y ago
      Video evidence (which is being taken down), eye witness testimont (affadavits), statistical anomilies. The video evidence might be wrong, the witnesses might by lying, the statistical evidence might be able to be explained, but I don't need Google hiding the information from me. This just makes it look like there is something to hide.
      • knowaveragejoe 6y ago
        > Video evidence (which is being taken down) Bullshit. > eye witness testimont Literally the lowest rung of evidence that is, in studies, increasingly shown to be unreliable. > statistical anomilies Already thoroughly debunked: https://twitter.com/chadmbol/status/1325874395978616839 https://twitter.com/chadmbol/status/1325874395978616839 > but I don't need Google hiding the information from me. Google is in fact making it easier to arrive at this conclusion rather than allowing SEO trickery to run the show here.
        • iphorde 6y ago
          Bullshit? You apparently don't understand, or haven't read the definition of evidence. Who has debunked what? Show your evidence.
• mechnesium 6y ago
  "Don't be evil" - Google, 1999 - Present [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil
• jinpa_zangpo 6y ago
  The conclusion o draw from this is not YouTube / Google are bad for censoring, but near monopolies are bad, especially in the field of news and information delivery. And the solution is to use existing antitrust law to break up the monopolies and require them to support a common api, like Open Social.
• benmmurphy 6y ago
  It is interesting that YouTube refers to historical charges of voter fraud. In 1876 we had a similar situation where there were charges by Republican's against Democrats of electoral irregularities. This was resolved by a 15 member committee from the house, senate and supreme court who effectively appointed the Republican candidate the winner after an 8-7 vote. If this was to happen again and Trump was appointed President would YouTube remove any content that questioned whether this was a legal practice or whether the result of the election was fair. If I was a Democrat and this happened I would certainly be concerned that I was wronged and I think it would be entirely inappropriate for content questioning whether this was the correct decision to be removed.
• merpnderp 6y ago
  How stupid is Youtube to think this will do anything but make people believe all the lies they're hearing? "Would Youtube do this unprecedented thing unless it was true?" Why not just let the marketplace of ideas shake things out? They can't magic away people's beliefs, they aren't the CCP. So they might as well let people hash it out.
• togs 6y ago
  I don't think that platforms can be neutral, or unbiased.
• kr99x 6y ago
  No! God, I don't understand why people keep falling into this mindset. Do not hide/remove/censor/block/stop speech because of its content, ever, for any reason! Let all speak their piece, and let all hear what they choose to hear. There are a zillion and one reasons this is the right way to do things that people in first-world countries are forgetting. Here's the easiest one to grasp: if you create the tools to suppress an idea and willingly let some party make use of them, then you have fulfilled all the preconditions for suppressing good ideas and true ideas except for "who holds the button" - but guess what? You can never guarantee button-holding status in the future! It is dangerous to enable, allow, or normalize speech suppression because you are doing the future bad guys' job for them in the process and making it easier to enact horrifying human rights abuses in the future.
• mlazos 6y ago
  The posts about censorship on hn continue to baffle me. Any large media provider (YouTube, Netflix) is already censoring literally everything you see on their sites. There is simply too much content on their sites, that being truly unbiased (chronological order) would be unusable from the perspective of a single user. Given I don’t agree that a blanket ban on certain content (lies) is acceptable, I think what the issue is here is letting this content disseminate virally to millions. This absolutely can be controlled and maybe the ability of posts to go viral should be the middle ground between censorship and total free speech anarchy. I don’t think corporations will ever do this though because viral content is what makes money.
• graycat 6y ago
  The OP has: "Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect. Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections." I've paid fairly close attention to the claims of fraud, and nowhere have I seen claims of "widespread fraud". It is simply that, just from some simple arithmetic, "widespread fraud" was not necessary to have "changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election". Instead it was quite sufficient to have fraud in one or two cities in just the six swing states PA, MI, WI, AZ, NV, and GA. Just 10 cities is enough, and that is not "widespread". For "Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect." That statement is not the most important possible: Instead, what the states do to "certify" is not the last word. Instead there is in the Constitution: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, ..." So, in each state, the legislature STILL has the final authority. Supposedly this point was tested in the SCOTUS in 1892 and 2000 or some such. Mayor Giuliani claims to have lots of solid evidence of fraud in the form of hundreds of signed affidavits in each of several of the six states and with enough fraud to have converted a Trump win to an apparent Biden win. By now legislatures in several of the six states have seen at least an overview of Giuliani's evidence. Still, AFAIK, no legislature has taken the Constitutional power to "direct" and "appoint" their state's electors. Some of those legislatures still could "direct" and "appoint". It appears that going directly to the state legislatures, that is, just f'getting about all the courts except possibly the SCOTUS, could be sufficient. The way I read the Constitution, each state legislature can take the power to "direct" and "appoint" without regard for the state constitution, the state laws, the state governor, secretary of state, AG, or board of elections and without need for the governor to *call the legislature into session". Net, anytime before the Electoral College votes, some states legislatures could still "appoint" electors that could cause Trump to win. If there was fraud that threw the election, then as citizens we darned better well get to the bottom of it before 1/20/2021. Some of the alleged fraud is just old fashioned ballot box stuffing. We really SHOULD be able to settle such claims solidly, for or against. Fraud that changes an election for POTUS is a threat to our rule of law, Constitution, democracy, and country. We need a solid answer. IMHO, Youtube should encourage full debate of these points. As it is, it appears that Youtube doesn't want videos of Trump, Giuliani, or Justices of the SCOTUS -- not so good.
• chillwaves 6y ago
  Can only real comment is two part: 1) Good. 2) can other sites follow suit? Tired of all this unending nonsense without evidence about voter fraud.
• BestCatalonia 6y ago
  This shows once again how wise China has been not letting Google in. Google controls what contents should or should not be seen by the people. How scary is that?
• its_simple 6y ago
  I don't see anyone talking about the gap in the market and the millions of dollars youtube is putting on the table for some other company (or companies for that matter).
• einpoklum 6y ago
  I wonder if they would remove content from 2003 claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Or - the endless repetition in some media channels in recent years that Trump was colluding with Russia. This kind of censorship is bad. Yes, YouTube is privately owned, but that in itself is problematic, seeing how it effectively has a public function. More and more, we live by the rules and internal judicial systems of the large corporations, especially tech companies.
• sakopov 6y ago
  So, maybe I'm not understanding something, but there are numerous reports from what appear to be reputable sources -- a few listed below -- claiming that there were uncovered missing votes during recounts in Georgia. However, there isn't a word said about this on CNN, MSNBC or any other heavily left-leaning media sources. The only sources that I hear talking about this are on YouTube. I don't give a shit if I get downvoted for saying this, but when the damn Atlanta news channel says there are uncounted votes how the hell does the left not take an issue with this? My goodness, this is the beginnings of a banana republic. [1] https://www.ajc.com/politics/recount-finds-thousands-of-georgia-votes-missing-from-initial-counts/ERDRNXPH3REQTM4SOINPSEP72M/ https://www.ajc.com/politics/recount-finds-thousands-of-geor... [2] https://www.wsbtv.com/news/politics/another-georgia-county-has-uncovered-2700-missing-votes-secretary-states-office-says/5W734FA755CK3NCR4P7A27DXVM/ https://www.wsbtv.com/news/politics/another-georgia-county-h...
  • daftdoki 6y ago
    The "missing votes" were found during the recount, and added t the eventually certified totals. So yeah, the system works. Whats the issue again?
    • bananabiscuit 6y ago
      The issue is that the media is selectively ignoring things like this in order to push the narrative that “there is no fraud”. Now it might be true that there isn’t enough fraud to change the apparent results. But as you pointed out, what is wrong with making sure they system works? The media should not try to sweep anything that threatens their agenda under the rug.
      • glenstein 6y ago
        >selectively ignoring things like this Oops. There's failure point. You're using an article about a really narrow set of facts with limited implications to try and support a profound generalization that is totally out of proportion to what's described in the article. That is a completely out-of-control leap to be making. And as others have pointed out "the media ignores..." is a subjective reaction, not something established by the articles, and those votes have been covered by mainstream outlets. And the articles don't show any fraud, and they don't show anything that would change the outcome in Georgia, and they don't show anything that warrants systemic skepticism of the election writ large.
• jefe_ 6y ago
  This leaky bucket approach seems ineffective, ignores the root cause, and likely emboldens people adhering to these ideas. As bizarre as it sounds, I think the root cause for the rise in supply and demand for misinformation is the decline of the church/religion. Couple that with technology and it's uncharted territory. Many people need something to believe in, whether it's luck, god, nature, whatever, beliefs are complex frameworks that order a chaotic world. They help people handle a number of difficult circumstances from inequality and injustice to fear and uncertainty, to loss and sadness, to dealing with difficult people, finding motivation, the list goes on. Like religion, conspiracy theories fill many of those voids, but they are much better equipped to thrive in the 21st century. Where churches build communities in buildings, conspiracy theories form communities on social media and internet forums. Where churches hold the carrot of an afterlife or ultimate application of fairness, the conspiracy theory holds the carrot of a future leak or whistleblower leading to your team's ultimate victory and subsequent righting of wrongs. Where church uses god as the reason for everything, conspiracy theories use mini-gods arising from issues, responsible for all sorts of machinations and plots. Where churches use imperfect human leaders capable of hypocrisy and moral shortcomings, conspiracy theories often lack formal leaders, and when they are present, the bar for morality is low compared to the alleged crimes of the conspirators. Churches ask for money, conspiracy theories ask for time. Churches offer boring lectures on people who lived thousands of years ago, conspiracy theories are engaging and tie directly to real world events. Whack-a-mole with ideas that keep popping up does nothing to solve the underlying issues: there are many people out there who feel empty in some way and they are desperate to fill that void with just about anything. Containment of misinformation has failed and will continue to fail, just like prohibition of drugs fails, and abstinence only sex education fails, and religious persecution fails. I think the best approach is to ignore, minimize, monitor real-world impact, and organically counter. With that approach you avoid creating martyrs, and you can exploit a major weakness conspiracy theories possess compared to formal religion: Conspiracy theories operate in the realm of the living, there is no promise of truth in death as with many religions. Because of this, very few conspiracy theories truly stand the test of time, eventually they're either disproven, evolve to become too outlandish, or simply become boring and fizzle out.
  • chrisrhoden 6y ago
• wwwwwwwww 6y ago
  So, after 4 years of constant unfounded public "Russia gate" allegations, now it is too much to look into hundreds of sworn wittness statements, video footage, statistical anomalies, and whatnot, for even a few weeks? That type of behaviour is what is fishy.
• codelord 6y ago
  I have mixed feelings about this subject. On the one hand I would like Google/FB to remove antivax content on all of their platforms as it's immediately dangerous to people and unanimously debunked by scientists. On the other hand I know once the big tech gets comfortable with the idea of censorship they gradually start expanding their editorial reach and start censoring things left and right with double standards as I believe applies in this case. You can find a ton of videos on YouTube claiming Russians made Trump president, one could argue this is equal to claiming voter fraud got Biden elected. I happen to think both are completely false conspiracy theories. There's so much fabricated information on internet and YouTube that the idea of censorship based on truthfulness seems crazy to me. Google, FB, and other big tech should come up with clear red lines for what's acceptable and apply it consistently across the board. Immediately dangerous information and unanimously debunked could be a good red line.
• swayvil 6y ago
  Well that certainly brings any of their other recent acts of censorship under greater suspicion. This validates what they censored somewhat.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• throwaway122378 6y ago
  If a company is so big that taking advantage of their algos to spread “false information” can manipulate large numbers of people then they need to be broken up.
• grawprog 6y ago
  https://www.engadget.com/youtube-election-misinformation-democrat-senators-letter-203619141.html https://www.engadget.com/youtube-election-misinformation-dem... So, i'm kind of curious how it's reasonable a political party can ask for partisan censorship. >YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki received a letter on Tuesday from four Democratic senators expressing “deep concern” over the spread of election misinformation on Google’s video platform. In the letter, senators Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Gary Peters of Michigan and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota ask YouTube to commit to removing content with false or misleading information about the 2020 US presidential election and future political races, including the coming, pivotal Senate runoffs in Georgia. >“We urge you to immediately remove all election outcome misinformation and take aggressive steps to implement prohibitions, as other social media companies have done, regarding outcomes in future elections,” the letter reads. This isn't a company deciding, this is censorship urged by the government. I thought that kind of thing was illegal down there. Not saying anything either way about the politics of the election, but isn't this blatant government censorship?
  • StanislavPetrov 6y ago
    Unfortunately this is far too common, whether its Youtube in this instance, or Facebook touting its cooperation with the FBI and the Atlantic Council. Once a company starts taking government funds and/or government directives the debate ceases to be about free speech and censorship and becomes an issue of illegality and violations of the 1st Amendment.
  • mountainboy 6y ago
    yes, it is. Government pressured censorship at least. One can make a reasonable argument that YouTube is making the decision voluntarily. And the letter is just giving them some cover for what they wanted to do, based on their own biases, anyway. But private censorship is still censorship. And when a platform is so large that it has effectively become "the public square", well I do not go so far as to say that they cannot legally engage in censorship, but I do believe they are morally obliged not to, and should be publically called out when they do. I hope people will begin moving to other platforms in droves so that some real competition emerges.
  • 6y ago
• sebow 6y ago
  Sad day not only for americans, youtubers & it's common users but for the flow of information worldwide. If there's a good part about this is that youtube hasn't achieve the dystopian corporate monopoly status yet, and there are still chances for the world to pick up alternatives. Yes most of them are scrappy because they try to implement decentralization to circumvent shitty censorship & cancel-culture practices.But they exist and it's the duty of tech-literate individuals to let others know that they exist.
• alexpc201 6y ago
  But if the deleted content turns out to be true after SCOTUS ruling, it would be Google who undermined the 2020 US Election Results. Its a double-edged sword.
• stickyricky 6y ago
  There's a lot of interesting take-aways in this post. 1. YouTube "prominently surfaces authoritative information" (i.e. promotes their corporate partners' content). 2. YouTube "limits the reach of borderline content" (i.e. suppresses content which does not violate its rules). 3. YouTube is trying to prevent third party content aggregators from linking to "borderline" content. YouTube clearly has a preferred content source. I still remember the days when videos from Fox News or CNN would have 500 views. Those days are long gone now. Can't help but see them recommended on any political video. All in all, a good day for some keen entrepreneurs. People joined "You"Tube not "Video"Tube. I hope this encourages disruption in the space.
• hartator 6y ago
  From the article II of the constitution: > Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector. Governors have outstepped their authority by allowing mail-in ballots which changes election rules. Which led us into the mess we're currently are.
  • wtallis 6y ago
    > Governors have outstepped their authority by allowing mail-in ballots which changes election rules. Don't most states have laws on the books that delegate much of the authority of administering elections to their respective executive branches?
• autocorr 6y ago
  HN user's have an interesting mix of free-speech absolutism and progressive/liberal lean. It's unfortunate that partisan invective seems to have overwhelmed more nuanced arguments of platform moderation... I think it will be interesting to see how higher degrees of intervention and moderation break some of the assumptions of the network effect. Services may not be winner take all if there are big ideological wedges that companies can serve. And just as a personal note on US politics, I would encourage more GOP-leaning folks to consider one important difference between a 2016-Russia and 2020-Fraud comparison. For 2016, Hillary conceded after two days, Obama welcomed Trump, there was no widespread opinion of a stolen election by the Democratic Executive or voiced by Dem US House/Senate members. The smoke focusing on "personal collusion with Russia by Trump" was by the media after the fact. The Mueller investigation was appointed by the DoJ from a bipartisan committee to investigate specifically Russian interference. For 2020, the sitting President is loudly pushing a narrative of voter fraud and deep-state conspiracy from views he has always held. Paraphrasing: "I would have won the 2016 popular vote if 5 million people didn't vote illegally". He called the 2020 election rigged multiple times before it even happened! Like the word slippery slope gets tossed around a lot, but this really is an instance of a slope that's very slippery.
• subsaharancoder 6y ago
  Will Youtube also remove all videos claiming that there was Russian Collusion, Obstruction of Justice which were investigated and proved as being false?
• cycomanic 6y ago
  I would really like to hear from someone, who thinks this is censorship and freedom of speech trumps everything. Why were you not shouting when ISIS accounts were being banned by twitter? Why now?
• tw600040 6y ago
  So, if China censors something that's censorship and if Youtube and Twitter does it (with the blessing of the Govt) , it's to protect the people from conspiracies..Got it..
  • cmdshiftf4 6y ago
    The people passively or actively supporting this stuff because it suits their ideological aims are mentally more aligned with the guards over at China's Uyghur concentration camps than they are to the freedom orientated people who founded the country they're currently occupying. Shoulder shrugs and "ugh, fuck, well at least it's the people we disagree with" at best.
    • sharatvir 6y ago
      Ah yes the slave owning freedom orientated people who founded the country would know best about freedom.
      • cmdshiftf4 6y ago
        If you give that a little thought you'll realize that their first hand experience in the above matter would probably better qualify them on the topic of freedom and slavery than anything you can personally speak to. And regardless, the point stands. The people who are cheering the silencing of the "other" are morally aligned with those championing the "re-education" of the other over in China. In fact, the former even broached the topic of how to "re-educate" their opponents on social media recently.
  • rantwasp 6y ago
    nope. if youtube was the only way to post/watch video online AND it would be owned by the government this argument would maybe make sense. but youtube is not owned by the govt. vote with your wallet and make them irrelevant if you disagree with what they are doing.
    • mas3god 6y ago
• anonytrary 6y ago
  I just don't get this. Why does Google have to be the censorship police here? Just let people post what they want (minus graphic and illegal content) and make their own mistakes and their own learnings. Google is going down a rabbit hole full of worms. Posting conspiracy theories about election fraud is just people exercising their free speech. Google is a private platform, so they can censor whatever they want, but it's not like Google is going to get in trouble for allowing people to post about conspiracy theories. What's the goal here?
  • syndacks 6y ago
    You're conflating free speech (government) with a business's decision to monitor their platform (private). These two things are very different. >What's the goal here? To make their platform not full of bullshit. YouTube isn't the government, there is no such thing as the 1st amendment to them, so they cull that which is bad for business.
    • convery 6y ago
      The concept of 'free speech' is not limited to the first amendment. Whether or not the government is involved (which could be argued given that it was requested by politicians while anti-trust issues with Google is a hot topic); is less relevant.
    • mrmckizzle 6y ago
      I would say yes... but these companies have Section 230 protection. At what point can the public have a say in their business? Specifically when these protections were originally given to protect companies from lawsuits due to what people were posting on their platforms?
      • polishTar 6y ago
        Corporations also have the first amendment right to include or exclude whatever they want on their own websites. Section 230 just stops people from suing services for the speech of their users, ie you can't sue twitter for anything donald trump tweets even if it's illegal/defamatory/etc. If section 230 didn't exist, then services would become liable for every action their users take on their platforms. I don't understand why people think this would reduce censorship, it'd be the exact opposite. If section 230 wasn't a thing, services would mitigate legal risk by censoring to an unprecedented degree.
• cynoclast 6y ago
  If the content is wrong, why do they need to remove it? They don't remover flat earther content, or anti-vaxx content. Or especially notably russiagate content. This is why platforms shouldn't be allowed editorial rights. Just look at who Youtube's employees donate too and you can see why they cannot be trusted: https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?employ=youtube&page=2 https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?employ=yout... Their factual bias is a matter of public record.
• syndacks 6y ago
  For as smart as many of the people on this site are, I'm shocked how many don't understand the fundamental principal that YouTube is a private company and can do whatever they please with speech. This isn't the government, this isn't first amendment.
  • nickysielicki 6y ago
    You're mischaracterizing the outrage. Virtually everyone is making a normative argument against this censorship, not a technical one. Google is perfectly within their rights to host what they want, everyone can agree with that. Whether they should engage in censorship (beyond what is required by law) is what everyone is debating.
    • habeebtc 6y ago
      This thread starts out with the assumption that this was the result of a partisan request for censorship.
      • nickysielicki 6y ago
        That is concerning, surely, but there's a big difference between a handful of government partisans asking a private corporation to censor content -- versus the Government forcing a private corporation to censor content. The former is not a violation of the first amendment.
    • mike00632 6y ago
      I disagree. There are many here (including you) that conflate the idea of 1st Amendment "freedom of speech" and the general idea of censorship. You even use the word "censorship" to provoke a knee-jerk reaction as if censorship is automatically evil and we ought to have some inherent right to not be censored. We do have such a right, from the 1st Amendment, and it doesn't apply to YouTube. Companies censor, as they often should. They should censor against violence, exploitation, DDOS attacks, and much more. They should censor to protect their viewers and their brands. If you want to spew hate speech, exploit some vulnerable people, build a devoted following of uneducated people then do it on your own dime.
• every 6y ago
  I was opposed to removing Confederate statues. I felt they should be left in place but the plaques should be replaced to merely mention their birth and death dates and that they had committed treason against the United States but were forgiven after the Civil War. I would suggest the same for these videos. Place an non-editable and non-removable preface that states none of the assertions in this video are verifiably factual and the video should be considered as a work of fiction...
  • syndacks 6y ago
    Wildly different comparison you're trying to make there my friend. Statues on public land very different than a private business doing whatever it wants.
    • every 6y ago
      I think the idea is the same. Instead of censorship, simply attach an indelible warning. Free speech but not without informed comment...
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• bvanderveen 6y ago
  As someone who is multilingual and often watches political commentary about US issues by non-US creators, for non-US audiences, in non-English languages—I wonder if this new policy will extend to material that is not primarily for US audiences.
• Covzire 6y ago
  Silicon valley is lost. They're all-in on chinese style censorship, and the DNC is cheering them on.
• xfitm3 6y ago
  What a piece of shit decision. For all of you who don't run ublock please do so, take away their revenue and cost them bandwidth.
• RedComet 6y ago
  Is there anyone that doesn't see what's going on at this point?
• mercurialshark 6y ago
  Disfavored and inaccurate dissenting views are to be censored? What could possible go wrong with suppressing diverse - even if entirely refutable - speech?
• AzzieElbab 6y ago
  Please don’t sue me like you are doing with Facebook. Pretty please!
• beepboopbeep 6y ago
  There's nothing wrong with this. I'm glad they're doing it. I've seen too many people go feral and insane over misinformation. Good riddance.
• lukev 6y ago
  I'm glad that the HN consensus is against government censorship. I also really wish we collectively put more effort into solving the underlying problem of mass disinformation in the internet age. It's a real problem, and while ham-fisted censorship isn't the right solution, clearly _some_ solution is necessary. Working on how to solve the problem without censorship is more likely to lead to a successful outcome, and is also more suited to technologist's capabilities than just yelling "censorship!" as if the disinformation problem is just going to go away on it's own. It's not.
  • RyanShook 6y ago
    Some solution is a slippery slope... justifying censorship or some form of it due to “unique circumstances” is so dangerous because there will always be a unique circumstance. The internet was built on the idea that information should be open and ever since then we’ve been coming up with new ways to suppress that defining characteristic.
  • kunfuu 6y ago
    I have an amusing idea: an independent amateur journalist network, composed of people doing the field work, in their free time. I'm not confident it will ever come true, but it's good to fantasize, at the minimum.
• AHappyCamper 6y ago
  This is a gross violation of the right to free speech. Youtube is no longer just a private company. They're more of a public square where masses of people from all over the world communicate ideas. Now Youtube is stating that many of those ideas are not allowed. This is a fascist action by nature. Big Tech needs to be regulated if they are going to be so blatantly political and partisan.
  • cgrealy 6y ago
    > Youtube is stating that many of those ideas are not allowed Not really, no. People can post all the ideas they want, you just can't make claims without evidence to back them up. Personally, I'd love to see this extended. Forget politics, we could extend this to obvious nonsense like homeopathy, creationism, holocaust denial or Nickelback fans. > Big Tech needs to be regulated if they are going to be so blatantly political and partisan. So your solution to politics and partisanship is regulation by partisan politicians?
• mrmckizzle 6y ago
  Makes me think of this quote (not sure where it came from): "There is no principled argument for censorship only argument from power" Comes to my mind after reading the latest blog post.
• blhack 6y ago
  To highlight to you how absolutely insane this move is by google: When the Hunter Biden story broke, it seemed as though every social media company, nearly in tandem, worked to censor it in the name of "stopping the spread of misinformation". Today: it was announced that there is a federal criminal investigation into Hunter Biden's business dealings in China. (https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/09/politics/hunter-biden-tax-investigtation/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/09/politics/hunter-biden-tax-inv...) These people are not, and should NEVER be the arbiters of truth. They are ideologically driven, obviously, since they are human.
  • nl 6y ago
    > When the Hunter Biden story broke, it seemed as though every social media company, nearly in tandem, worked to censor it in the name of "stopping the spread of misinformation". That (fake) story was the Hunter Biden got Joe Biden to intervene in a Ukrainian commercial deal. This is a completely different story, and no one had censored the lead up to it. Here's a fact check on it from October with plenty of links: https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/oct/19/fact-checking-claims-about-hunter-biden-joe-biden-/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/oct/19/fact-checking... Notably this investigation is a tax investigation into Hunter, not a "selling political influence" investigation.
    • blhack 6y ago
      >That (fake) story was the Hunter Biden got Joe Biden to intervene in a Ukrainian commercial deal. No it wasn't. https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/elections/2020/10/30/tony-bobulinski-hunter-biden-and-china-a-politifact-explainer/ https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/elections/202... https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/joe-biden-must-clear-air-hunter-biden-his-china-business-ncna1245836 https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/joe-biden-must-clear-a...
      • nl 6y ago
        Sorry, you are right - too many allegations. The clarify, the fake story was that Hunter Biden tried to get Joe Biden to intervene in a Chinese commercial deal. To quote your link: Bobulinski’s overarching claim is that Joe Biden was involved in, and may have profited from, his son and brother’s business dealings in China. To also quote your link: The Wall Street Journal reviewed his documents and found no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden — or that he was active in his family’s foreign business endeavors, as Bobulinski claimed. This new investigation is about Hunter's tax affairs in China. No one has ever disputed or censored the idea that Hunter Biden has business affairs in China (or in Ukraine, hence my original confusion).
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• reddog 6y ago
  Thanks YouTube! Trying to figure out what’s true and what’s not all on my own has been pretty damn hard. Frankly I may not be smart enough to sort it all out. Thankfully you, being at the center of truth in this universe, can help us all out. No election fraud. Got it. Did you know that there are a bunch of videos that are critical of Apple products and a bunch more that praise Apple? They can’t both be right! Could you pick a side there and let me know before I buy my next laptop? Thanks!
  • mountainboy 6y ago
    Yeah, and then can you let us know what happened with JFK and also if the UFOs are aliens or what? Also, Coke or Pepsi? thanks in advance YouTube!
• newbie789 6y ago
  I think it's interesting that some folks are calling this government censorship. Obviously, companies can decide what they want to spend money/computing resources/ storage/bandwidth on. I'm not sure why that appears to be contentious. As for senators sending "a strongly worded request" that this material be removed, I'm also puzzled by why people would conflate that with actual governmental censorship. From where I'm sitting, I'd guess that Google's algorithm has decided that the whole "stolen election" narrative produces fewer ad dollars than its counter argument. Maybe "the election wasn't stolen" is more widely accepted as consensus and therefore, there's less risk of companies reducing their YouTube ad buys. I genuinely don't understand people's outrage when in order to accept this move by YouTube as either being ideological ("they're doing what they think is right! And they're wrong!") or motivated by being afraid of Congress ("those handful of senators in a party that doesn't control the majority are strongarming a multibillion dollar corporation. They couldn't possibly pour an unimaginable amount of money into lobbying for policies and candidates that are favorable to them. They're helpless!") I genuinely do not care what editorial decisions YouTube makes. I do not rely on YouTube for my worldview, and I don't rely on it shaping other people's worldviews. It seems that some of the people that are mad about this aren't mad that YouTube holds so much sway over so many people, but rather some are angry that that power isn't being used to further their interests.
  • convery 6y ago
    > As for senators sending "a strongly worded request" that this material be removed, I'm also puzzled by why people would conflate that with actual governmental censorship. Because Google is under heavy scrutiny and many Republicans want to push for anti-trust and monopoly investigations: a group of Dem politicians saying that they should strongly consider doing what the Dems want sounds similar to when the mob says a business should strongly consider buying their fire-insurance.
    • newbie789 6y ago
      I could understand that if in this case the situation resembled the power imbalance inherent between an organized mafia and a small shop owner, but I find this situation to be materially different. In the scenario you've referenced, the shop owner has no recourse and in theory acquiescence could be a rational course of action for survival. However if the shop owner had lucrative infrastructure-nontrivial contracts with the mafia that would be mutually harmful if dissolved, and the resources and information necessary to apply real pressure to the policies and personnel of mafia leadership, then the new picture we've painted barely resembles its original form as you depicted in any meaningful way.
• AndrewBissell 6y ago
  "We also disallow content alleging widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of a historical U.S. Presidential election." I guess it's a good thing there could never possibly be fraud or errors in a U.S. election.
• eaandkw 6y ago
  Well, after reading thru the comments I am clearly not the target audience. It was fun while it lasted. Anyone know how I can delete my account? I need to add it to all the other accounts that I have deleted. Good luck to you all. I thought this was a tech news site but apparently most people here seem to be actively working in the investigation process. I don't know WTF has gotten in to everyone but I don't want any part of it anymore. Like, for real, let me know if there is a way to delete my account.
  • skinkestek 6y ago
    Contact information on the bottom of the page. Usually they don't delete content, but if there's personally identifiable information in your username or any of your post I think it might be possible to have them rewrite it.
    • eaandkw 6y ago
      Cool thanks.
      • skinkestek 6y ago
        That said I just read through your comments and I'd prefer if you stuck around :-)
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• trollski 6y ago
  will they be taking all evidence of fraud shared on their platform or only that with commentary siggesting that it was widespread?
• Drunk_Engineer 6y ago
  Over the past 4 years, MSNBC spread conspiracy theories that the Russians "hacked" the 2016 election. Will their content also be taken down?
• coldtea 6y ago
  Here's a better title: "Private company where a large chunk of public discussion happens get to push a certain political agenda and decide what's true and what's not".
  • Deestan 6y ago
    "Not hosting baseless nutjob conspiracy allegations" is easy to differentiate from your regular "political opinion". Your equivalence is false.
    • coldtea 6y ago
      >These stable packages just postpone the inevitable technological debt and when you have to pay the debt, it's too late. Easy or not [1], it's not the business of a video to do the differentation in behalf of the citizenry. Not to mention that it being "easy" is a naive assumption, by people who feel that it's only the "other bad side" that's affected, which even if it was true, is something that can turn around on a dime based on the political climate, changing corpoate interests, etc)
• Lucadg 6y ago
  This is the same platform that runs obviously scammy ads of Vitalik Butherin Ethereum giveaways for months at the time. Ads, not even content. I wonder how they plan to monitor elections claims.
• graycat 6y ago
  Mod: In trying to be a good contributor to this HN thread, I've been attacked by the trolls and lost 8 points of karma. I will give the thread to the trolls. Please delete all my posts to this thread.
• Lucadg 6y ago
  Many comments about whether there was fraud or not, the Democrats did the same or not etc...whole the while point here is: is it YouTube's role to decide what content has merit and what has not? I don't think so. It opens the door to even more abuse. If we had several competing platforms we wouldn't be in this mess.
• shadowgovt 6y ago
  YouTube's justification here is actually kind of fascinating. They note that since there is no longer a legal path to modifying the results of the election, they're taking the outcome of the US legal structure as a factual indicator of the status of the election results and justifying the takedowns on the basis that they lie about the historical outcome of the election. In essence, they are saying that the federal government is a primary source and they are deferring to the federal government. I think it's obviously bending the spirit of their policy, but not technically wrong.
  • SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
    > They note that since there is no longer a legal path to modifying the results of the election Isn’t there a Supreme Court case that Texas filed and 18 states added on with amici curiae? It won’t be heard, and it wouldn’t be positively ruled, but it “is” a possibly isn’t it? Also, isn’t it possible if there was fraud that it was discovered later? Shouldn’t that be “allowed”? (I’m not in any way facetiously asking, I really don’t know)
    • garmaine 6y ago
      The court has already unanimously declined to interfere in the election in the PA case. The TX case isn’t going to be suddenly different.
      • SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
        The court decided not to approve an injunction to stop certification in the PA case. They have not dismissed the case, they have not indicated they will not hear the case. Also, don’t mistake the lack of an opinion or dissent as unanimous. Court vote was not disclosed. No one dissented, which is interesting given Alito’s push in PA for them to segregate ballots prior to this. The Texas case is not asking for any injunction. Now with 18-20 additional states added on it (amici curiae) is making a 14th amendment argument that the four defendants changed election laws without going through their legislatures, a direct and indisputable violation of Article 2. That this damages Texans, that if the states aren’t held to the constitution, then what is the point? But I don’t think the cases will be heard, I have no idea, my point isn’t what the percentage chance is, it’s that it is not zero.... as I understand it.
• initaccount 6y ago
  So... that whole Russia thing for the past 4 years--are we scrubbing YouTube of those too?
• deevolution 6y ago
  Its unfortunate we can't independently verify the results of the election... imagine being able to run an election node and run the numbers yourself.
• blargmaster42_8 6y ago
  The left taking another step towards civil war.
• ravila4 6y ago
  This is not a black and white issue. Although I am not a supporter of censorship on the internet, I do agree with others here that misinformation on social media is a present threat democracy. There are tree pillars to our democracy: government, the media and voters. The role of media is to stay independent neutral and to inform the people, the role of voters is to seek information, and actively participate in the democracy. Nowadays, social media has largely taken over the role of the media, and self-feeding recommendation algorithms have only exacerbated the problem. Nevertheless, the greater problem and the true cause of our current division is the failure of our education system. People are simply not trained to think critically, and seek out arguments that oppose their own. Unfortunately, fixing our education system will take many years, or even a generation. It may be putting the horse before the cart, but for now I think the simpler fix is at the level of social media. Have any of you noticed how greedy the YouTube algorithm is? I watch one video on conspiracy theories, just out of curiosity, and suddenly I have like half a dozen similar recommendations on my homepage. This can only have the effect of boxing people into their own belief system...
• dukeofdoom 6y ago
  Dominion Voting Machine Flaws -- 2020 Election Coffee County, Georgia Video 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46CAKyyObls&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46CAKyyObls&feature=emb_titl...
• russianbandit 6y ago
  I don’t see how this is a sensible decision for YouTube. Nearly half the voters voted for Trump. YouTube is gambling with those folks boycotting leaving the platform (BitChute?). It’s just not sensible and quite risky from business perspective.
• j0ba 6y ago
  If you read a comment in here, and you see the words "obviously" or "clearly", and that's the whole argument... That person is likely experiencing cognitive dissonance.
• jfoster 6y ago
  It seems like a poor business decision to be so heavy handed on this. They have made it black and white where a shade of gray would've been much better. For instance, they could leave the videos accessible but exclude them from their recommendations engine or apply a "misinformation" ranking factor that will be in effect for those videos. Now that they're disallowing videos containing this information, why wouldn't broader Google exclude from web search webpages containing the same misinformation? What is the principle that applies to videos about this topic that doesn't apply to webpages about this topic? I don't agree at all that the US election was rigged, but removing this content entirely still feels heavy handed when they could continue to be a platform for it, but without pushing/recommending it.
• remarkEon 6y ago
  It's kind of amazing to me that a bunch of people who work in tech, and are ostensibly very smart, seem to think that elections in the United States are somehow uniquely immune to fraud. We believe this despite the fact that on any given day there's an article (several, sometimes) about some event driven by fraud in basically any other human endeavor that goes on in this country or the world that gets upvoted to the front page. Elections in this country are basically based on the honor system. We don't enforce any nation-wide robust protocols to verify anything. We just trust that everything that happens is on the up-and-up at the local level. That's fine, in my book, but it's also fine to be suspicious that there should be more scrutiny. Is claiming the election was "stolen" part of that scrutiny? Well, I don't know. And neither does YouTube. Tech has made it super easy to amplify claims of scrutiny, but it's really uncomfortable to me that Google gets to decide what kind of scrutiny is okay. This is the company that has a business model that is literally based constant and universal surveillance of its users. Whey the hell should I trust them? Feels like we should all take a break from the internet for a while after reading this thread.
  • logicchains 6y ago
    It's particularly amazing given those same people come out in droves to complain about voting machines being insecure on any article about electronic voting, yet the Dominion electronic voting system was used in all the disputed states.
• trickbird 6y ago
  Freedom requires to lockup and shut-down bad things. Very bad things. Very very bad.
• bigbluedots 6y ago
  This is ridiculous, both sides should be left up so people can make up their own minds - even if one side happens to be total bullshit.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• rosmax_1337 6y ago
  I for one am not comfortable with Youtube and the likes of people like that controlling what is allowed to spread on the internet. I also seriously doubt any competitor will ever outdo them, due to the nature of their monopoly. I did not vote for the people at Youtube to control anyones election. Even if what they are doing now is good, this kind of control over media and information will be used for catastrophic consquences in the future. When the political climate swings from it's current position to another, the people in control at Youtube are going to have a very hard case to make in court at what they are doing right now.
• wfbarks 6y ago
  I find this action very alarming and ominous.
• nix23 6y ago
  He YouTube since you start "cleaning" up your platform can you do the same for: -Flatearth -Moon-landing denier -Gate's chip vaccines -Everything false advertisement like NordVPN -Hillary etc is a reptile -Nearly every Trump video when he lies -All the fake UFO sightings and so on...it will save you petabytes :)
  • mippenhappen 6y ago
    Imagine how much space they could save if they just deleted all videos.
    • nix23 6y ago
      No sure if that's in youtube's interests, but would be a interesting question.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• stevespang 6y ago
  CENSORSHIP, Gov't needs to step in and force Google to split off YouTube.
• vfc1 6y ago
  So there goes OANN and Newsmax alternative reality business model. Freedom of speech does NOT mean freedom of misinformation. These companies (Fox is an example) get sued in court and admit they were lying, and claim freedom of speech as the right to say anything including spreading damaging lies, and get away with it and are not condemned. I'm all for freedom of speech, but seriously this is getting to Nazi Germany "we lost the war because of the jews" lunacy level. Freedom of speech does not mean being able to say anything at anytime, independently of the consequences, including lies and be guaranteed to get away with it. No, some things that people say can get them into legal trouble, and rightfully so. Our freedom ends where another person's freedom begins. For example, people can get sued and convicted for defamation, for saying something that negatively affected someone else. The US might not be a democracy in 10 years if this goes on, it has to stop.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• CivBase 6y ago
  Let me tell you a story. There once was a company that made a social media platform for sharing video content. The platform was monetized by ads. The company noticed that its users watched more ads so long as they were being shown content which appealed to their personal preferences and opinions. The company dubbed this phenomena "engagement" and quickly introduced an algorithm to maximize engagement by constantly suggesting content which appealed to each individual user. People loved the company's social media platform and it quickly grew larger than any of its alternatives. Luckily, the company already controlled the world's most popular search engine, web browser, and mobile operating system, so it was easy to make their platform and its addicting algorithm as accessible as possible. A few competitors still existed, but none came anywhere close to the scale and accessibility of the company's platform. But something happened. The algorithm which helped the platform grow and made so much money was having an adverse affect on the platform's users. The users were only being exposed to content they liked, which helped establish echo chambers. People were coddled by content which helped reinforce their existing opinions - never challenge them. As people became more and more established in their echo chambers, misinformation began to spread like wild fire. Users were desperate and the algorithm rewarded creators who provided content to help them avoid challenging their own opinions - regardless of whether it was true or not. What was the company to do? The algorithm was too profitable for them to simply turn it off - especially when it came to political content. They tried demonetizing content about particular subjects and adding "fact check" bubbles to combat the spread of misinformation but it wasn't enough. They eventually started trying to identify and remove the content with misinformation altogether, but even that wasn't enough. But then something amazing happens and th- oh my look at the time! I need to go now. Maybe we can finish this story some other day.
  • esja 6y ago
    One day it will be commonly accepted that these ML recommenders have played the same role in this social crisis as the Gaussian copula did in the financial crisis.
• visarga 6y ago
  YouTube should create a plurality of filters/rankings and empower people to select their poison. Controversial issues could have a disclaimer.
• lbrito 6y ago
  I'm confused by some of the more inflamed reactions here. YouTube is a private company. They should be able to cater to their customers as they wish. Anything else would be evil government meddling. In a nutshell: freedoms!
• SmokeyHamster 6y ago
  It's actions like that that give me reason to doubt the results of the 2020 election. People weilding the truth don't need to censor people. They let the facts speak for themselves, and they let free discussion sort things out. Youtube doesn't censor Holocaust denial videos, Chinese propaganda, people claiming Hillary is still the rightful winner of the 2016 election, and a host of horrible things. Nor should they. People should be free to discuss what they want, not what a Youtube CEO things they should want. But people complaining about 2020 election fraud is where they draw the line? This really smacks of Orwellianism. "Say Biden is the President, or we'll ban you." What the hell is happening at Youtube?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• DenisM 6y ago
  The tighter they squeeze, the more likely is the mergence of a platform that cannot be controlled by anyone for any purpose.
• jokethrowaway 6y ago
  Will they remove also allegations of Russia tampering 2016 elections? When Trump got elected the idea of an election being rigged was acceptable. Thank you Google for telling us what to think.
• BartekG 6y ago
  Freedom of speech is not a right to other people's property: you have no right to force any one to publish what you want but you have the right to start your own newspaper,tv station or a web site and publish whatever you want. YouTube is private. It's owners have the right to decide what is on it and they did. This is not a violation of free speech as some comments suggest.
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  This is now the first thing the conspiracy folks I know mention. In their mind, this action by YouTube has verified the validity of their claims. If this event makes it easier to spread misinformation, then YouTube’s actions were counterproductive.
• thomastjeffery 6y ago
  If you scroll through the comments here, you will undoubtedly come across some that simply say, "[flagged]". You probably won't see many claims that Hacker News is censoring anything. That's because what is happening is not "censorship", but "moderation". That is also the case with YouTube removing content. It is not "censorship", but "moderation". It doesn't feel like moderation though, does it? YouTube is not like a forum where a short public list of users make the decision to remove a comment. We're talking about a private list of employees removing videos, probably even indirectly via algorithms; and very few alternative places to post videos. Those who are worried about YouTube "censoring" political discourse should already be worried about YouTube "moderating" discourse in general. What we really need are alternative platforms, each with different moderation goals.
• dukeofdoom 6y ago
  Texas Lawsuit In the Supreme Court of the United States STATE OF TEXAS, Plaintiff, v. COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA, STATE OF STATE OF GEORGIA, STATE OF MICHIGAN, AND STATE OF WISCONSIN https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163493/20201211095822921_TX-v-State-LeaveReply-2020-12-11.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163493/2020...
• adamsea 6y ago
  I think that anyone who doesn't believe that the election was legitimate - i.e. that no meaningful fraud occurred - should be banned from the HN community. Their "arguments" are full of shit and are a bunch of pseudo-philosophical, pseudo-analytical, pseudo-objective cant. Their "evidence" is literally disinformation / propaganda. They act exactly like those crypto-racists who knows that their true belief would be deemed unpalatable or unacceptable by the community so they'll blow as much smoke around as possible without ever stepping out to say what they're actually driving towards. Enough is enough. It's clearly dangerous to allow these views the shroud of legitimacy by giving them space in the public square. Otherwise HN is just enabling them.