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The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

• swiley 6y ago
  If you reject the idea that people are intelligent enough to think about politics for themselves then you reject the idea that they're intelligent enough to govern themselves. Democracy and free speech are intrinsically linked.
  • euske 6y ago
    This kind of dogmatic statement is good for soliciting a response, but I think it's intellectual degradation. There are infinitely many interpretations of "democracy" and "free speech" and it's hardly a simple yes/no question. We should be free/democratic society as much as possible, and it's an ongoing (while not always successful) effort. We should discuss concrete steps.
    • int_19h 6y ago
      On the contrary, I think this goes to the root of the matter. Can you trust people or not? That's a fundamental question that decides whether you can have real democracy, or only a sham. Because any kind of democracy where people are only allowed to make "safe" choices, decided on by someone else (e.g. the censors), is a sham. And that's true even if the censors themselves are directly or indirectly democratically appointed. Iran is a good example of such system taken to its logical conclusion.
      • Daishiman 6y ago
        I'm sorry but trust isn't a binary value. I trust people in my life to be reliable and trustworthy to a certain extent and in certain areas. I don't trust my party-animal buddies to be on time for breakfast a 8 AM, and I don't trust my stressed out workaholic friend to just chill on a Friday afternoon. You cannot simplify trust to a single variable; you have to go case by case. And trust in the masses is partial; finding where it is and where it is not is critical.
        • int_19h 6y ago
          How would you manifest that partial trust when it comes to political power, though? The problem with that power is that splitting it up is a zero-sum game - you can give less to "the masses", but then somebody else is getting more. Who would that be, and why would you trust them?
        • inglor_cz 6y ago
          But at the end of the day either you give everyone a vote or you don't. A system where the most trusted people had 10 votes and least trusted people had 0.1 vote might make sense in a society of nerds voting on a software project, but not in general political application.
          • 8note 6y ago
            Given that that's how the us elections work, it seems like plots of people have considered a good approach
  • gabereiser 6y ago
    YouTube can choose to keep or delete any content on their platform regardless of truth/free speech/or not. It's in the EULA. You want free speech, go outside and yell. No one is stopping anyone from free speech. What Google is doing is cleaning up content on their service according to their EULA. If you disagree with the EULA, you can gladly go use another service. I will add, targeting a specific genre of videos looks bad, sure. It's only that we are talking about that genre and not all the others of topics YouTube has removed.
    • swiley 6y ago
      Just because it's legal doesn't mean it makes sense. Monarchs used to make the same argument defending what they did.
    • pyronik19 6y ago
      Fine, time for some trustbusting.
    • bendbro 6y ago
      If corporations can't discriminate in hiring due to an American principle of anti-racism, then we can also prevent corporations from discriminating in speech on an American principle of free speech.
    • JPKab 6y ago
      They have the right to do it, and it will make the world worse off. Taibbi always has had a great guy instinct for normal Americans and how they react to elite condescension, and he's right here. My idiot brother got twice as radicalized when they kicked Alex Jones's crazy ass off YouTube. It made people feel better and more morally superior, especially employees. It hurt my brother. Now when he watches that asshole, he's on a website where he is guaranteed to never get the other side. If you support this, then you don't know anything about how humans react to censorship.
      • Jtsummers 6y ago
        Even before Jones was kicked off, people went to YouTube for insane conspiracy theories and ended up, due to the video recommendation system, still only seeing one side. It really didn't matter whether Jones was on there or his own platform, people watching his videos still only see his (and related) videos.
  • Daishiman 6y ago
    We in fact already do that and nobody bats an eye. People are not intimate with the details of most government bureaucracies, they are not expected to be, and they're no expected to grasp such details in a way that they can make informed decisions. And frankly that is absolutely correct. We believe in democracy to be the best system despite its flaws, and one of its flaws is that it's evident that most people have no freaking clue about how government works. If you believe in speech for the purpose of government then you have to reject outright lies design with the intent of deligitimizing democracy.
    • JPKab 6y ago
      Authoritarians always justify silencing speech for the greater good. You can reject lies with counters to those lies, or do it your way, and end democracy.
      • AnimalMuppet 6y ago
        Eloquent, but... YouTube isn't an authoritarian (over anything except their own platform), and their policy, whatever it is, isn't going to "end democracy".
        • JPKab 6y ago
          Obviously, YouTube has the right to do whatever they want with their servers. My point wasn't that YouTube's policy was the end of democracy, but that the ethos espoused by the parent commenter, if shared by a majority of the electorate and leaders, results in the end of democracy. Democracy requires trusting people to not be complete morons. Unfortunately, the polarized nature of political discourse in the US has caused people to think that the 50% of the country that doesn't think like them is too stupid to be trusted with speech and videos. Despite the fact that my brother has been sucked into the world of Alex Jones, I don't think most Americans are too stupid to resist dumb conspiracy theories. In decades past, this brother was a radical leftist, regularly arrested for trespassing in the late 80's at nuclear power plant protests, and later a radical in Greenpeace in the early 90's. This was long before the internet. He didn't believe the moon landing was real, and always believed in dumb ass conspiracy theories. (He's 11 years older than me, and by the time I was 11, I knew he was a moron.) My other 4 siblings aren't like him. His new shift was, honestly, not that weird. He happened to shift to the right, but it's a horseshoe as you know, and crazy is crazy. There have been, and always will be, highly illogical people looking to indulge their desperate desire to have symmetrical, orderly views of the universe that aren't real. The big, disastrous outcomes must always have been carefully plotted, large, grand plans (like 9/11 being a false flag operation, which my brother also believed then). My brother is one of these people, but most people aren't like that. This huge drive for censorship didn't occur when a large portion of the American left thought that 9/11 was an inside job, because the normal people on the left knew that it was a large, but still fringe, group within their own sphere. The problem is that the same normal people on the left don't know normal people on the right. Why? Because they don't know ANY people on the right. They are in bubbles now. So they are unable to draw the same conclusion that people like my brother are a fringe on the right. To them, voting for Donald Trump is evidence of a massively delusional person, rather than the grim reality that the vast majority of Trump's voters don't like him, and simply chose a lesser of two evils in their worldview, due to a corrupt, oligarchical class at the top of both major political parties resulting in highly polarized policy positions that force them to do this.
  • anotherman554 6y ago
    Since you've defined free speech as being published by Youtube, a private publisher, I guess you think democracy didn't exist before Youtube and free speech didn't before Youtube?
  • Thaxll 6y ago
    I thought people were intelligent enough, until we found out that some 75M voted for x. Now x is saying that it's a global conspiracy and bringing 75M believing that lie.
  • dmix 6y ago
    That what I find most amusing about the “everyone should vote”. Then they complain about the stupid people and policies that get voted in. I might be okay with “every informed person should vote”. But that “informed” part can be heavily politically interpreted. People have largely missed the fact that politics used to be the domain of informed groups fighting for power blocs. Now it’s been “decentralized” and radicalized on Twitter and Reddit and made into glorified reality Tv entertainment by the mass media (who are clearly serving a market with high demand who treat politics like sports teams). I’d rather have way less people voting and it go back to being mostly boring educated people topic than it’s below common denominator mess it is today. But I’m unabashedly elitist and understand that there are plenty of well funded groups who want dumb malleable voters and as many as possible.
    • loopz 6y ago
      Better parties sounds like they could end stalemate between billionaires. Both voting blocs have legitimate concerns that need better addressing.
  • jasode 6y ago
    >Democracy and free speech are intrinsically linked. Yes but the only "free speech" that's realistically able to be implemented is freedom of speech without fear of the government putting you jail for criticizing the government. The other idealism of free speech implemented by commercial businesses is not possible because we (the collective "we") won't allow it to happen. There is no broadcasting medium (including websites) in any country that doesn't have interference and pressure to remove/ban content via consumer boycotts, advertiser influence, subscribers, business' self-discretion, or decrees from government officials. The above list of actors in society is the collective "we" that makes absolute free speech an unattainable goal. There is no business with an infinite bank account that can withstand all outside pressures to censor information. Apple has $200 billion in the bank and yet they bowed to China pressure to remove podcasts that supported Hong Kong. If a successful/influential giant like Apple can't implement absolute free speech, what's the proposed alternative corporate structure that can do it? Nobody ever lays out a concrete plan that makes free speech possible. [I don't mind the downvotes but I would really appreciate some replies with constructive comments explaining how commercial businesses can realistically implement free speech.]
    • swiley 6y ago
      Apple specifically designed their platform for censorship. That's why so many people hate it.
      • jasode 6y ago
        >Apple specifically designed their platform for censorship. That's why so many people hate it. Which business with UGC is censorship proof? Isn't that the issue? Nobody has come up with a way to accomplish that. Does anyone have any constructive ideas on this?
  • tbatchelli 6y ago
    People are rational most of the times, and act based on the well of knowledge they have at the time. When you choose to promote certain content because of its high engagement benefits you given its controversial nature, then you are poisoning the well of knowledge for each individual. If you do so in a feedback loop, considering what they were interested in before, you accelerate your earnings as well as the poisoning. Human brains are hackable, more so if you can control their inputs. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, they all found the attack vector. So democracy and truth are more related to each other than democracy and speech. We tend to think that speech is truth, but it is not, and people over time have voted themselves out into dictatorships over and over. (edit: typos, many)
    • nonbirithm 6y ago
      There has to be a good reason why psychological warfare is used, including by the United States in periods like the Vietnam War. The expectation is that statements written on paper or recited through loudspeakers or similar influence people's thoughts, which influences what actions they will take. Those actions are supposed to be beneficial to the forces scattering them from a helicopter or posting them on walls. They're trying to get you to do something regardless of what your preexisting thoughts are beforehand. Now tear down the pieces of propaganda and burn them. Is this censorship? I think human brains are sufficiently able to be hacked by the right information. With certain kinds of information, those people could end up causing material harm to someone who is completely uninvolved. That is the ultimate danger that I believe YouTube and the like are trying to avoid, and if true it would be an admittance of a sort that some kinds of information are dangerous to some kinds of people. The name "psychological warfare" implies that communication can be weaponized, in a sense. Certain people do not change their ways regardless of what you try to tell them. I think the issue is centered not around people trying to have a reasoned debate, but those who have been lost to debate more or less permanently. Previously, you couldn't scatter this kind of information about on the scale were seeing today, and also recommend similar content using very effective algorithms. The more millions of people the content reaches, the more latent believers it will reach and end up converting, even if the conversion rate is a fraction of a percent. And many of these people are very vocal. In a sense, the content takedown seems like an attempt to counteract the fact that the algorithms are too effective of a medium for misinformation. I don't think we would have seen this kind of scale with books or flyers.
  • ardy42 6y ago
    > If you reject the idea that people are intelligent enough to think about politics for themselves then you reject the idea that they're intelligent enough to govern themselves. I mean, the American founders already rejected a lot of ideas about the people governing themselves, because they knew from history that the people often can't check their worst impulses. > Democracy and free speech are intrinsically linked. Yeah, but what kinds of free speech work and what kinds don't? I used to be a free speech fundamentalist, but now I'm getting more skeptical of that position. Sort of like how radical Athenian-style direct democracy doesn't work, maybe radically giving everyone near-unchecked access to nationwide broadcasting doesn't work, either. Now, I'm not advocating for some kind of universal censorship apparatus, but maybe it's would be best if broadcast speech at least passed through some kind of editor (and I mean editor, making editorial decisions, not a censor) to build more judgement into the system. As software engineers, we understand the value of code reviews. That kind of thing shouldn't be anathema.
    • gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
      This is literally the foundation of American govt structure namely the respect for unalienable rights of individuals to express themselves. It’s the first line in our enumerated rights. This isn’t “oh we should rethink things” this is a matter of natural rights and precedes anything we’ve constructed.
      • ardy42 6y ago
        > This is literally the foundation of American govt structure namely the respect for unalienable rights of individuals to express themselves. > It’s the first line in our enumerated rights. > This isn’t “oh we should rethink things” this is a matter of natural rights and precedes anything we’ve constructed. I never said anyone shouldn't have the right to express themselves. Do you think it's in the Constitution that you have the unalienable right post any lie you want to YouTube? I don't remember that being in there. IMHO, lies are toxic to free speech, and it's in everyone's interest (and moral obligation) to do their best to limit their spread.
        • 6y ago
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • tzs 6y ago
    It's not a question of whether they are intelligent enough to do so. It is whether or not they can get the information that allows them to do so. With the vast amount of information on social media, which is where more and more people are getting most of their information nowadays, and the way social media algorithms are designed to maximize engagement, and the way human cognitive biases work, the result is you almost never get a balanced view presenting arguments for all sides even if all sides offering information are acting in good faith. Then add in all those who are not acting in good faith, who have a much easier time generating vast quantities of low quality information than the people arguing in good faith have for generating high quality information, and it is even worse. There was a recent article in Scientific American that covered research into this. Here was the HN discussion of it [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25153716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25153716
    • rightbyte 6y ago
      > you almost never get a balanced view presenting arguments for all sides By banning allegations of election fraud you could change "almost never" to "never".
      • twentydollars 6y ago
        They're not banning all allegations of fraud. They're blocking a specific set of claims that have been shown to be false, for instance that Donald Trump won the 2020 US election.
    • bordercases 6y ago
      You need expertise to interpret information and you need the right kind of expertise and even the right combinations of expertise, and even knowing what the right combination of expertise is. It is a question of intelligence, information, expertise and meta-expertise, all of those things. Privileging any of those components of sense-making is myopia of different sorts depending on what claims people are actually wanting to forward. For instance if you want to look like a centrist while avoiding calling people dumb you say they're low-information voters, change the news, make them listen to these experts, give person X more control or say, when the news and those experts and that person all have problems of different sorts. Not one-dimensional.
  • ignoramous 6y ago
    FTFY: If you reject the idea that a majority are intelligent enough to think about politics for themselves then you reject the idea that they're intelligent enough to elect a capable government.
  • rmrfstar 6y ago
    I think this is a push-not-pull situation. Here is a vision of the future articulated by a promising In-Q-Tel funded startup: [1,2] "[We need] a set of guiding principles to inform the types of speech that should be permitted in digital town squares" [1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/15/forget-counterterrorism-the-united-states-needs-a-counter-disinformation-strategy/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/15/forget-counterterrorism... [2] https://primer.ai/ https://primer.ai/
  • handoflixue 6y ago
    Question: Why is this a threat to democracy, but previous censorship wasn't? There's always been an expectation of truthfulness in communication: We don't allow people to go around claiming that Pepsi causes AIDS, or cures cancer. You're not allowed to claim you're collecting for a charity, and then keep all the money for yourself. I doubt you'd be terribly okay with me claiming that you're a murderer and asking how much that biases your stance. (Genuinely trying to understand if there is something that makes this different from any other sort of fraudulent communication - I don't see people defending the other stuff under the guise of "Free Speech", and I'm not clear why this would be different)
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • NeutronStar 6y ago
      If you can prove the lies did damages then you have to pay for the damages. But you still have the right to say it. Having the right to speak doesn't mean there's no consequences to it.
    • chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      > (Genuinely trying to understand if there is something that makes this different from any other sort of fraudulent communication - I don't see people defending the other stuff under the guise of "Free Speech", and I'm not clear why this would be different) People are not defending fraudulent communication. They are observing that the same factors that make audiences vulnerable to misinformation affect the censors and the process by which censors determine which information is harmful. If we had a test for truth or sincerity we could use it to determine which information was false or put forth in bad faith. We don't, so any person who acts as an information gatekeeper could be one of those people who is lying or deceived and they would then be able to corrupt the discourse by censoring the information that exposes their lies or misunderstandings.
      • pnw_hazor 6y ago
        Fraud is a very specific (and hard to prove) term of art in US law. There is no US law that would stop someone from making expressions that are later determined to be fraudulent. Note, commercial speech (e.g., advertisement) is considered a less protected species of speech and may be subject to prior restraint in limited viewpoint neutral circumstances.
  • ethn 6y ago
    Further, even if the citizen ostensibly advocates the wrong belief, or say are persuaded by an adversary, that belief becomes the legitimate value of the population regardless of the reason—-as democracy is purposed to obligate government to pursue the values of its citizens. I’ve been to a country with a dictatorship with a faux democracy and no free speech. I asked the minister of journalism & communications whether he believes that free speech is possible in a democracy. He unabashedly said no, as there is no guarantee the “consensus” will be “correct”, especially given the influence of its adversaries.
  • deeviant 6y ago
    > Democracy and free speech are intrinsically linked. Not really. UK has far more limits on speech than the US but is just as much of a Democracy as the US. "Free" speech has be weaponized in the internet age. It is a cancer that is actively destroying democracy.
    • rsync 6y ago
      "Not really. UK has far more limits on speech than the US but is just as much of a Democracy as the US." They have a literal "House of Lords" which is "... by appointment or by heredity or official function."[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords
      • deeviant 6y ago
        So you are attempting to make the point that the UK is not an equivalent democracy? The house of lords can not create bills nor stop them. They can look over the elected parliament's shoulders and whine, that's it. It is a vestigial leaving of the monarchy system that, like the Monarchs themselves, the UK keeps because it's cute. While in the US, un-elected corporations do very much the same thing, except when they whine, they get their way.
        • cambalache 6y ago
          > While in the US, un-elected corporations do very much the same thing, except when they whine, they get their way. Thanks god that never happens in Britain.
          • deeviant 6y ago
            I'm sure it does but in the UK, there is no Citizens United, where the Supreme Corporate Court of America (LLC) decided $$$ = speech, more $$$ = more speech, thus infinite $$$ to political campaigns = ALL GOOD HOMIES (This isn't even satire, this is actually their logic here). Let's get real, it isn't the fact that corps lobby goverments that is the problem, there problem is when they can give unlimited cash bribes, like that can in the US. But they can not in the UK. When you really start examining it, the US democrazy(sic) doesn't seem all that exceptional.
  • charonn0 6y ago
    Free speech isn't implicated here.
  • ThoreauBred 6y ago
    Seems you are still plenty capable of speaking your mind. I cannot help but wonder if anyone has considered Taibbi is just Trump; cashing in on rage he induces. No way to comment unless you pay. Hrmmm
  • tootie 6y ago
    I feel like have unequivocal evidence that they can't.
  • ipython 6y ago
    Why is it that we have to ignore nuances in these arguments? We never had unrestricted free speech in this country. There is a whole Wikipedia article about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_ex... In addition other democratic states have strict limits on free speech such as Singapore: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_14_of_the_Constitution_of_Singapore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_14_of_the_Constituti... After all even “democracy” is nuanced here in the states. Obvious examples from our past include the wholesale disenfranchisement of women until 100 years ago, Jim Crow era laws, poll taxes, and more. Did we have democracy then? Do we have democracy now? Did we have free speech when broadcasters in the USA had to abide by the Fairness Doctrine? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine. Our system has it’s faults. But one can’t say that we ever had unfettered democracy or free speech, ever. At what point is speech considered abuse? If you make the analogy between speech and network traffic, we intentionally censor “abusive” traffic to save our networks from collapse. Could one make the argument that entities with an interest in destabilizing our democracy should not be able to inject propaganda into our discourse because “free speech”? I think it’s a valid argument to have and a nuance that we have to contend with. There are no absolutes. Trivializing this with a snappy trope of “democracy can’t survive without free speech” is disingenuous IMO.
    • wkjenjkwenf 6y ago
      What a stupid argument. "Child pornography and obscenity are banned, therefore democracy does not rely on free speech, therefore we don't need free speech at all." Obviously "free speech" comes with the colloquially-understood fact that it doesn't include child pornography.
      • ipython 6y ago
        Be careful. Your hot air may just blow over the straw man you’re arguing with.
      • m3at 6y ago
        You're new so you might wonder why you're downvoted. Hackernews has some guidelines, and while they're far from being perfect they do help to maintain above average online conversation. Please have a read (it's pretty short!): https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Key point related to your comment: > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
  • modriano 6y ago
    An individual's understanding of the world is shaped exclusively by the signals produced by their 5 senses. Intelligence governs an individual's ability to interpret those signals and draw further conclusions from those interpreted signals, but if that individual is fed a constant stream of bad yet internally-consistent data, correct application of logic and reason will lead that individual to objectively incorrect conclusions. Further, human beings aren't perfectly rational machines capable of processing the utterly overwhelming amount of signals we are exposed to at any given instant, rather we develop blinders to focus in on specific signals and we develop heuristics to reach decisions without processing all possible signals. I haven't read every whitepaper put out by every politician I've ever supported, nor has 99.9999+% of others, but we still support politicians because of our heuristics and blinders. I prefer forming my opinions from whitepapers, source documents, and a rigorous analysis of a candidate's behavior, but ultimately a heuristic I rely on is the opinion of other people or institutions that I trust, like the New York Times, the Economist, Ezra Klien, Matt Yglesias, Raj Chetty, etc. I've decided that I don't like believing incorrect things, so I've thought a lot about epistemology and embraced a mixture of pragmatism and empiricism (where possible). I try to independently verify suspicious claims, but it took me a long time to become a competent data scientist, I'm willing to spend far more time searching for good data/signals and analyzing them than most other people, and I still can't be informed on everything which necessitates reliance on sub-optimal heuristics. Most people don't even attempt the rigor I aspire to, preferring a tribal epistemology, where they outsource opinion-forming to the thought-leaders of their tribe. If those tribal thought-leaders are telling people things like * "Hillary Clinton is running a pedophilia ring out of the basement of this pizza restaurant" or * "COVID-19 is a librul hoax so don't wear a mask or embrace any hard-won public health advice" or * "Joe Biden's landslide victory isn't real, and even though we can't prove it, despite the fact that electoral systems are designed so that malfeasance would be easily detectable, you should ignore reject the result of a DEMOCRATIC ELECTION, EVEN IN STATES WHERE THE OUTCOME WAS CONFIRMED BY A HAND RECOUNT" you'll see behavior from individuals in that tribe that's consistent with the signals those individuals perceive, but the behavior won't produce the expected outcome, because the signals don't reflect reality. Instead, it will produce mayhem, death, destruction, pain, and loss. This is empirically undeniable. TL,DR: Democracy depends on the votes of people. People form opinions only from the information that passes through their senses and into their mind. Garbage in, garbage out. It's possible to solve problems through rational analysis of sufficiently accurate models of reality, but models that don't reflect reality can be extremely, devastatingly destructive. If the signal "Donald Trump actually won the election and it is being stolen from him" was an accurate description of reality, it would rational to use violence to repel the usurpers trying to steal your country. But that signal is false, and spreading that signal both is eroding belief in democracy among the communities where enough members embrace that false signal, and it will in lead to unjustified murders.
  • AndrewKemendo 6y ago
    What does "Govern themselves" practically mean in this context? Lets say that I'm an intelligent person that firmly believes in "rugged individualism" to the point where I'm an anarcho-georgist [1] and do not recognize the state as an authority for real property allocation based on a well reasoned moral philosophy. Given the fact that there is no unclaimed territory for which I could live without falling under the purview of a state's thumb, and hence would not be allowed to "govern myself", how would I then govern myself consistent with my political philosophy? This is obviously a hyperbolic example, but it's IMO an important exercise to explicate how a large group of people with heterogeneous values, is supposed to act/behave when a prime mover state system is (in effect) demanding no values be higher than it. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism
  • Der_Einzige 6y ago
    Well, we do reject this idea. That's why we have a republic rather than a direct democracy. The same allegory of the cave justifications for why the average individual is too stupid to rule and shouldn't be allowed to are made today. Oh, you aren't well enough educated or experienced enough? You should not govern, and move aside for those who are educated or experienced...
    • int_19h 6y ago
      We have a republic, because that's how it was organized more than two centuries ago, and changing it from within the system is extremely difficult. But many states have elements of direct democracy in form of public initiatives, and they generally tend to be the states that were settled and organized later (e.g. West Coast), and did so with benefit of hindsight, after seeing many decades of how the original system works. So I'm not sure if it's even meaningful to say that we do reject the idea. The original designers did (mostly; they weren't a hivemind, either), but we aren't them; and they weren't really representative of their entire society, either.
  • zionic 6y ago
    If people are too stupid to reject false information that wasn’t curated for them why are they smart enough to vote. Any argument advocating censorship is ultimately arguing for dictatorship.
    • staticman2 6y ago
      If you think people are so smart, why should you care if people get banned from Youtube? Clearly smart people will discover smart videos on any web site they are located on, and there's no reason for anyone to need Youtube to find an audience.
    • weavejester 6y ago
      How would one determine whether information is false or not? It's easier to publish disinformation than it is to disprove it, and while some people are clearly better at sifting truth from fiction than others, I suspect everyone has beliefs that are based upon false information. Moreover, this isn't censorship by the government, but by Google. Why should a private company be made to disseminate disinformation when it doesn't want to? A key part of freedom of speech is the freedom not to speak, and mandating that a company publish information it doesn't want to is surely just as bad as forcing it to censor information it does want to publish.
  • froh 6y ago
    The possibilities of targeting messaging via fb, youtube, twitter ad budgets go far beyond the freedom of speech the authors of the constitution had in mind, no? The ability to address a snug fit tailored messaging to specific audiences is a completely new level of "talking". It subverts the traditional democratic communication, where all participants realistically had a comparable and diverse data/information set. In contrast, given sufficient targeting advertisement budget, you can very deliberately dissimimate messages which shift the electorates decisions just enough that you get the political climate and outcome you want. That's no longer the free speech of the constitution. That's mass manipulation. Brain hacking it was called elsewhere in the discussion. What can yt, twitter, fb do? Banning certain content feels bad, but how can they nudge us with the tweets, videos and posts that challenge us a little, like the old news stand always carried the paper we normally wouldn't read. Until we did, once in a while. And of course the paper was not 95% letters to the editor, unredacted. How can the fb, google ai help us to structure the flood of information in a more nuanced way? Instead of a plump ban? Until then, I reluctantly take the ban.
  • ronaldj 6y ago
    This country's government is based on the idea that people aren't intelligent (or interested) enough to think about politics for themselves. That's what a representative democracy is.
    • colordrops 6y ago
      That's not why it's a representative democracy. The reason is that direct democracy was not logistically possible at the time, and also for support if states' rights.
  • scoot_718 6y ago
    It is not contradictory to be intolerant of the intolerant. To allow free speech for those who call for such repugnant lies is to tacitly accept them. Likewise, no government should allow for parties that would destroy itself - yet here America is, falling apart.
    • greenflame7 6y ago
      By that logic its not contradictory to be intolerant of people intolerant of intolerance. Or is it only valid logic with an even number of intolerances?
      • visarga 6y ago
        This logic doesn't work in the abstract, you got to apply it to a concrete situation. Each situation is different, they are not all the same to be judged in one swoop.
        • WhyDoesDangSuck 6y ago
          Each situation is morally relative and ineffective at resolving conflict, instead only deepening the divide. You cannot fight hate with hate and achieve love. We all must be more tolerant of people and their fallibility in order to reach common ground and discover that we are all much more alike than we are different. Don't love the sinner, hate the sin. MLK nailed it when he said that the means are the seeds from which the ends grow. You cannot hope to bear fruit when starting from a rotten seed. It's so easy to retaliate but true power is the confidence to de-escalate.
        • My8thAccount 6y ago
          Each situation is morally relative and animosity is ineffective at resolving conflict, instead only deepening the divide. You cannot fight hate with hate and achieve love. We all must be more tolerant of people and their fallibility in order to reach common ground and discover that we are all much more alike than we are different. Love the sinner, hate the sin, but teach and forgive. MLK nailed it when he said that the means are the seeds from which the ends grow. You cannot hope to bear fruit when starting from a rotten seed. It's so easy to retaliate but true power is the confidence to de-escalate.
  • dleslie 6y ago
    Democracy is also intrinsically linked to freedom of association. YouTube has chosen to deny associating itself with certain views, as is their right. It is no different than how Fox, CNN and others may choose what to broadcast. Don't like that? Use BitChute or PeerTube or similar.
    • waheoo 6y ago
      YouTube isn't a broadcaster. Don't confuse them.
      • dleslie 6y ago
        For sure, it's subject to even less regulation than broadcasters.
  • cutitout 6y ago
    > Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid. -- Erich Fromm He said that 1958, in an interview with Mike Wallace. Since then the gap between rich and poor (and between rich and mega-rich) kept exploding, media have been consolidated further, people have been uprooted even more, have been shit on and lied to even more, and have even less stakes in the outcome. Just doing more of the same will never lead to different results, yet by now many use current the state of things to argue for exactly that.
  • abandonliberty 6y ago
    There's no such thing as free speech. Speech is bought through marketing. The wealthier and more get more of it. This is inherently undemocratic, as constituents don't have equal political influence. Dogmatic arguments suck. Is Android/Apple better? We don't live in a democratic utopia. Instead, belief in democracy and associated values has provided maximal value creation and competitiveness generated by knowledge economies when compared to other current operating models. That half the country is willing to dismantle what's responsible for their quality of life would be funny, if it wasn't the joy of dictators everywhere. They can point to the absurdity of mob rule as half of us bite the hand that feeds. Clearly, something is already broken.
  • cmdshiftf4 6y ago
    >If you reject the idea that people are intelligent enough to think about politics for themselves then you reject the idea that they're intelligent enough to govern themselves. Elegantly put. It seems you've triggered an avalanche of replies looking to stick asterisks or [#] footnotes and caveats to this statement to suit their biases of the day. Bang some caveats in there and you put universal suffrage as a concept in question.
• tomohawk 6y ago
  It's crazy what's getting banned. If you believe in science, then you believe that experts and authorities can be wrong, and likely are wrong about some things. You believe that it is important to question those beliefs. What youtube is doing is against science. If you believe in liberty, then you know that more than one thing can be right at the same time. That there is more than one way to do things. What youtube is doing is against liberty.
  • raverbashing 6y ago
    "question those beliefs" pray, what kind of honest discussion can be had with people that make long videos about how the Earth is flat? There's healthy questioning and there's people with the intellectual honesty of a used car salesman
    • swiley 6y ago
      Sometimes I wonder if flat earthers are fake news themselves. You can stand on the shore of a body of water larger than 3 miles and watch boats sail over the horizon. No need for tools, geometry, or privilege, you can stand there and see it. And even if they are real, their numbers are small even with the amount of propaganda they create.
  • hobs 6y ago
    If you believe in science, you also believe that things can be proven wrong, and that repeating wrong things can influence people especially if you have the power to amplify your voice with money. If you believe in liberty, you believe in the liberty of a set of an individuals (a company) to do what they damn well please with their platform.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • waterheater 6y ago
      >repeating wrong things But how can one know what is wrong and right without examining all information first? Liars and True Believers will get you every time, unless you are provided the opportunity to discover truth for yourself. YouTube is now determining what content should be present on their platform using editorial criteria, which makes them a de facto publisher. >If you believe in liberty, you believe in the liberty of a set of an individuals (a company) to do what they damn well please with their platform. Not absolutely. Murder is technically an expression of liberty, but to kill is to remove the person's faculties to express liberty and therefore a wrong usage.
• jiofih 6y ago
  Then what? Allowing false information to fester is wrong, censorship is wrong. The way forward is to ban recommendation algorithms and go back to personal (as in, from other humans you know) recommendation systems.
  • worker767424 6y ago
    People want Youtube to be free and open...and remove things that aren't true. They want Facebook to open its social graph so other social networks can compete...and take privacy seriously so there isn't another Cambridge Analytica.
  • InitialLastName 6y ago
    But then you take away social networks' god-given right to manipulate their users into doom-scrolling through more of their customers' ads!
  • walleeee 6y ago
    I'm inclined to agree, but that is not the direction things seem to be headed. Dorsey called for increasingly personalized algorithms before congress a few weeks ago, while Zuckerberg basically implied FB would continue to acquiesce to congressional requests for censorship.
  • vorpalhex 6y ago
    The algorithm here really is the perpetrator. The insane things I've had recommended to me by Youtube after watching rather boring philosophy videos or a bit of history is amazing. One of their recommendations was literally full on nutter ranting at a camera - and it came up on a video of a guy who builds and tests medieval longbows! I much prefer recommendations from people.
    • abacadaba 6y ago
      Sort of a paradox personally. I think the algorithm has gotten better, not perfect, about recommending me less batshit insane videos. And I appreciate it. But things like the Hunter censorship absolutely cross a line and are enraging. Banning (even loosely defined) hate speech is not the same thing as being the arbiter of truth.
• mudil 6y ago
  “Cutting down the public’s ability to flip out removes one of the only real checks on the most dangerous kind of fake news, the official lie." Perfect summary of the article.
• Daishiman 6y ago
  It seems that there's a strong component to this argument that such moves inflame Trump supporters. The problem with this is that it has been established that a substantial part of Trump supporters will be inflamed no matter whether the subject at hand corresponds to a real issue, or a completely fabricated one. Thus the people who should be concerned here are the ones who try to take reality into consideration when judging news, in which case the issue here is really no worse than the coverage and editorial lines that most need media currently hold. Looking from that perspective, YouTube's policy allows by far the broadest expression of opinions in an online property without having to go with less mainstream forums. For Taibbis argument to be taken seriously, he should address the problems that stem from a section of society to be completely dissociated from reality.
• keepper 6y ago
  "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -Isaac Asimov or more to the point "Reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Colbert You're not entitled to be heard. That isn't a tenement of Democracy or Liberty. You're entitled to be able to speak (as long as you don't hurt others rights). So what is un-american thinking that Youtube needs to allow conspiracies and crazy un-proven, and way out there content.
  • Vomzor 6y ago
    > Reality has a well-known liberal bias Except when it comes to nuclear, GMO, gender science, nature vs nurture, I'm sure there are other things I'm not remembering right now.
    • mudil 6y ago
      Actually, reality is quite conservative, as in evolutionary theory. Our wishes have a liberal bias.
    • keepper 6y ago
      Thank you for making my point. Not sure why I'm replying, as its wholely offtopic - Nuclear, i think you should read up why people are against it. ( spoiler, it isn't the science... but maybe you should think about who can do it effectively vs the potential risks of doing it wrong... or you know, the imbalance of global power when only a few countries could generate.. well, power ) - GMO, again, same point above. "Sure you can have this great crop, no seeds". Again, GMO per say isn't bad, its the implementation that's bad. - Gender science. Stop worrying about what other people do with their life, worry about your life my fellow human. - Nature vs nurture. Sure, an argument that goes back B.C., and now you think this is a conservative vs liberal? Wait, is this Paleo conservatism? lol Again, not even relating to the argument at hand. There's no "true" side in any of these, as two of them are well, not science. And the other two, will continue to evolve with science. But nice try :) Oh... and thank you for taking the quote of a comedian ( and my quip, so seriously). Any arguments about the first one?
• Spartan-S63 6y ago
  These types of articles are always insane to me. YouTube is a private company. They're pretty much allowed to moderate the content on their platform in an arbitrary way. I would argue that this is a good thing. We can't have it both ways, but we want it both ways. We want a non-government controlled way to communicate, but we want to mandate that they're liable to uphold the same First Amendment protections that the government has to provide. That's insane, that's not a good standard to pursue, and we should rather focus on the cost-benefit and pros and cons of either reinstating the Fairness Doctrine or creating a government-run social media website where information can be freely shared and subjected uniformly to First Amendment protections.
  • nprz 6y ago
    Do you think payment processors and ISPs should be able to deny service to customers for any arbitrary reason as well?
    • Spartan-S63 6y ago
      Isn't that part of what's critical to have a free market? Sure, there are market inefficiencies when you get to the level that trusts and monopolies exist, don't get me wrong. Rather than patch the symptoms of the problem, attack the root cause: If companies are acting anticompetitively, stimulate competition in the marketplace. If companies are allowed to make arbitrary decisions (which they should in a free-enough market), seek alternatives, such as government enterprises. If folks don't like payment processors denying payment or ISPs denying service, seek forming a government enterprise that _can't_ deny service to any citizen.
      • nprz 6y ago
        In a theoretical world, sure. In reality it is government actors that are twisting the arms' of tech companies to remove unapproved speech. So I'm not so sure a government controlled ISP/payment processor/video platform (something like China?) would really fix the situation.
• r0s 6y ago
  Spreading these lies about voting is much worse and more dangerous than the classic example of yelling FIRE in a crowded theater. YouTube has every right, and a deep responsibility to cut this kind of bullshit off at every turn.
  • david927 6y ago
    Strict banning of speech about the electoral controversy is more dangerous than the classic example of yelling FIRE in a crowded theater.
    • r0s 6y ago
      One company moderating their own private platform isn't "strict banning" of anything at all.
      • Nuzzerino 6y ago
        Sounds like something a censorship advocate would say (or someone who dislikes the actual things being censored as of the current climate). Will you still believe the same way when the pendulum swings and it's the left that is being censored?
        • r0s 6y ago
          What makes you think this kind of political baiting is suitable for this platform? Did you read the terms of posting here?
• Vomzor 6y ago
  https://hereistheevidence.com/ https://hereistheevidence.com/
  • appleflaxen 6y ago
    was this presented in court? what were the courts' findings?
    • Vomzor 6y ago
      So far it has not. The courts have shot down the the lawsuits on procedural grounds without looking at the evidence. Several states have held hearings were a lot of these allegations are discussed in detail. The hour long hearings are on youtube. Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkqFTUEvMoU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkqFTUEvMoU Wisconsin State Legislature Election Hearing is still live streaming when I post this. Second edit: Why is my first comment flagged?
      • prucomaclu2 6y ago
        Generally speaking the affidavits that have been presented to the judges have been casually dismissed as wild conspiracy theories and never really been taken seriously. Vast majority of affidavits are not addressed at all in their findings. E.g. the PA lawsuits, I wouldn't really classify it as dismissing it on procedural grounds. It was moreso that the case was dismissed on overwhelmingly partisan bias grounds. I am happy to reference posts where I go into greater detail on the facts of these judgements on which my opinion is based, if anyone is legitimately interested.
        • DonHopkins 6y ago
          Did you just create the new accounts "prucomaclu2" and "prucomaclu3" because your original account "prucomaclu" had too much negative karma? https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=prucomaclu https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=prucomaclu https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=prucomaclu2 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=prucomaclu2 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=prucomaclu3 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=prucomaclu3 Are you trying to fraudulently overturn the results of the free and fair election that your comments should be downvoted because they don't contribute to the discussion and violate the guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html >Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to. Are you going to keep creating new accounts every time you get so much negative karma you can't post any more, as many times as Trump and the GOP have lost lawsuits trying to overturn the election, until you're at "prucomaclu50"? https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/12/08/trump-and-the-gop-have-now-lost-50-post-election-lawsuits https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/12/08/trump-a... >Trump And The GOP Have Now Lost More Than 50 Post-Election Lawsuits >The Trump campaign and its Republican allies have officially lost or withdrawn more 50 post-election lawsuits, and emerged victorious in only one, according to a tally kept by Democratic Party attorney Marc Elias, underscoring the extent to which President Donald Trump and the GOP’s efforts to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the courts has overwhelmingly failed to affect the election results. >The 50-case milestone was reached Tuesday as a state court in Georgia dismissed a Republican-led lawsuit, and the count includes both cases that courts have struck down and that the GOP plaintiffs have chosen to withdraw, such as an Arizona lawsuit that the Trump campaign backed down from because it would not affect enough ballots to change the election outcome. >The Trump campaign and GOP’s only win struck down an extended deadline the Pennsylvania secretary of state set for voters to cure mail-in ballots that were missing proof of identification, and likely only affected a small number of mail-in ballots. >Among the Trump campaign’s more notable losses in court thus far are the campaign’s failed lawsuit attempting to overturn Pennsylvania’s election results, which a Trump-appointed appeals court judge said was “light on facts” and “[had] no merit,” and a Nevada court that found the campaign had “no credible or reliable evidence” proving voter fraud. >Courts have also repeatedly struck down the campaign’s allegations claiming their election observers were not able to properly observe the vote counting process, and while one Pennsylvania court did grant the campaign a win by ordering that poll watchers can move closer to election workers, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court later overturned the ruling. >In addition to the Trump campaign, GOP allies including state lawmakers, Republican Party officials and former Trump legal advisor Sidney Powell have also brought dozens of entirely unsuccessful lawsuits, and a lawsuit brought by Pennsylvania GOP lawmakers was rejected Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court. >The legal campaign is expected to continue until the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14—or potentially until January—but a “safe harbor” deadline midnight Tuesday, which ensures certified results submitted by that date can’t be challenged by Congress, will make it harder for outstanding cases to succeed.
• bpmayer 6y ago
  Youtube is a private company and can therefore do what it wants with its property - the Youtube platform. However, it may be a bad decision to act as a Ministry of Truth while a number of court cases are still ongoing. Especially since the evidence presented in court proves electoral fraud - even if it is not entirely clear whether it is relevant enough to impact the outcome of the election.
• ayroblu 6y ago
  I never understood why American conservatives want more government oversight over private companies that offer services for free
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • will4274 6y ago
    Did you read the article? There is nothing in the article in support of government oversight of private companies. Rather, the article argues that private companies should choose to do the right thing, and that consumers should take their business to companies who choose to do the right thing.
• thegreyone 6y ago
  It is wrong. It IS un-american. And no, it will not "radicalize" us. Radicalize? To what? Being free speech? Being pro-debate? Allowing discussion so people are free to choose for themselves? And youtube is not just allowing for content. They aren't a "content allowing" platform. They are creating it, curating it, producing it, etc... No, the ftc needs to regulate them (and all social media, frankly) as a public utility, and then GUARANTEE constitutional rights. The only way to combat "bad" speech is with MORE speech. You don't "win the argument" by censoring it. If you're censoring content, you're a freaking bolshevik, and have no place in a democratic-based constitutional republic. Pure and simple.
• SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I really don't agree that this is "the latest salvo in the fight against 'domestic anti-democracy information'". Youtube's generally had a very permissive stance on information they don't think is accurate; they're taking this one, targeted action against a uniquely dangerous threat.
• mudil 6y ago
  Taibbi and Greenwald are two people on the left that still have a healthy attitude to question things, and not to follow the left echo chamber.
• Helloworldboy 6y ago
  When did hackers go from celebrating the freedom of information on the internet to acting as apologists for authoritarian censorship by near-monopolistic corporations? When they all started working for them?
• siliconc0w 6y ago
  It is amazing to me that there are so many people, smart people even, that are adamant that we shouldn't have free speech in society.
  • titanomachy 6y ago
    You have a right to say whatever you want to whomever you want without fear of government retaliation, as long as it isn't "hate speech" in a fairly narrow legal sense. This is what "having free speech in society" has always meant. The government will also punish people who commit crimes against you merely because they dislike your words, which frees you to say things you might otherwise keep to yourself. What you don't have a right to do is amplify your message using the massively powerful social-media megaphones which are created and owned by tech companies. If you want to amplify a message that these companies find strongly objectionable, you'll have to build your own megaphone, or find one owned by someone with different views from Google/Facebook/Twitter. That said, I wonder if it's sufficient to reduce the amount of amplification rather than outright censoring things the company disagrees with. For example, YouTube could let conspiracy videos be hosted but leave it up to viewers to discover them rather than recommending them in search or "related videos". It seems likely that censoring will have unintended consequences.
    • Vomzor 6y ago
      It used to be that the tech companies where champions of free speech, the ideal. It changed when generation woke entered their workforce. There has been a generational change brought on by changed values in American universities. That's what really is happening. > We asked whether people believe that citizens should be able to make public statements that are offensive to minority groups, or whether the government should be able to prevent people from saying these things. Four-in-ten Millennials say the government should be able to prevent people publicly making statements that are offensive to minority groups, while 58% said such speech is OK. Even though a larger share of Millennials favor allowing offensive speech against minorities, the 40% who oppose it is striking given that only around a quarter of Gen Xers (27%) and Boomers (24%) and roughly one-in-ten Silents (12%) say the government should be able to prevent such speech. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-millennials-ok-with-limiting-speech-offensive-to-minorities/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-mille...
• mudil 6y ago
  A phrase that comes to mind: Make Orwell Fiction Again
• grawprog 6y ago
  >One of the most critical to-do items for the American democracy movement over the next four years will be to more effectively counter domestic anti-democracy disinformation. If possible, it should be done on both the supply and demand sides. We can't ignore this issue any longer. Hmmm... I can think of some historical examples where governments used rhetoric oddly reminiscent of that rhetoric spoken by the ex-cia officer that tried to run for president the quote's taken from. Germany during the 1930's The Soviet Union during the 1920's...well...most of time existing I guess Cambodia in the 1970's China....currently
• tibbydudeza 6y ago
  Democracy will eventually die. “In sum, the majority of Americans are generally unable to understand or value democratic culture, institutions, practices or citizenship in the manner required”. “To the degree to which they are required to do so, they will interpret what is demanded of them in distorting and inadequate ways. As a result they will interact and communicate in ways that undermine the functioning of democratic institutions and the meaning of democratic practices and values.” https://escholarship.org/content/qt8806z01m/qt8806z01m_noSplash_eef039c0e7aa9b1263a0d0b757d3d886.pdf https://escholarship.org/content/qt8806z01m/qt8806z01m_noSpl...
  • miohtama 6y ago
    A very interesting paper. It would nice to see more on the topic as quantative studies how the change happens.
  • souprock 6y ago
    Amusingly, the author is clearly one of those who are "generally unable to understand or value democratic culture, institutions, practices or citizenship in the manner required". The one-sided blame makes it clear that he can't graciously accept defeat.
  • forest_dweller 6y ago
    You make that sound like a bad thing? There are some that believe (as I do) that democracy will leads to oligarchy. But then again I've been reading a lot of Rothbard recently. https://www.britannica.com/topic/iron-law-of-oligarchy https://www.britannica.com/topic/iron-law-of-oligarchy As for populism in a democratic system is a symptom of politicians/political parties not being seen by their citizens to be taking actions in regards to thorny subjects such as immigration, globalisation and law enforcement.
    • int_19h 6y ago
      Rothbard ended up as extreme paleocon, and his adherents such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe developed his line of thinking to its logical conclusion: "In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one's own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They – the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism – will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order." (Then neo-reactionaries took it from there, ditching all the excuses to present this state of affairs as "libertarian", and correctly calling it the new feudalism.)
• renewiltord 6y ago
  Well, the problem is that there are all these intertwined concepts so that for the most part we have:¹ * We want individuals to be able to express themselves so long as they are not explicitly deceiving people or hurting them * We believe groups of individuals should have the freedoms individuals do * We believe that individuals whose sole purpose is to act to provide a service to individuals expressing shouldn't be liable for the expression under some conditions. e.g. if I let you rent my sound equipment, I shouldn't be liable because you use it to call for violence against some dude and likewise for online platforms provided they take some reasonable measures * We believe that picking and choosing what people can use your platform to express is expression in itself, but sometimes you are obligated to suppress some expression So YouTube is one of these platforms. They should be allowed to pick and choose what people can use them to express because that's a freedom one person has, and therefore that they have as a group of people who individually have it. So the defence rests on it being expression. However, the defence for them not being liable for expression on their platform is that they're "just the platform". By choosing not to enforce on other things and choosing to enforce on these things they're not "just the platform" - the expression they permit is their expression. It's a bit hazy, but it feels to me like you forfeit some of your "just a platform" defence when you exercise your "it's my right to expression" defence. Morally, of course, not legally. IANAL and this isn't a court so who gives a damn about the law on its own. ¹ If you don't hold these beliefs, then you're not in the audience for the comment. Skip safely.
  • chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    This is an excellent summary of the dilemma. Thank you for summarizing it so clearly and succinctly.
• underseacables 6y ago
  This might seem extreme, but I think we should allow people to make up their own minds about what is truth and what is not. They are very clear cases for censorship (direct threats of violence for example) but Questioning the outcome of an election should not be one of them. Somehow we’ve allowed corporations to be the arbiters of truth in this nation, enter control the reins of communication.
  • stonogo 6y ago
    Questioning the outcome of an election is universally agreed to be perfectly acceptable. This is why we have a wide variety of opportunities for public participation and observation. Filing dozens outlandish lawsuits is certainly a way to demonstrate fealty to the administration, but as we're seeing, it's not particularly productive. Funding propaganda efforts to exploit people's ignorance in pursuit of undermining public confidence in the electoral process is shitty behavior at best and sedition at worst. Conflating all of these and describing them all as 'questioning the outcome' is unlikely to change anyone's mind about any of it, but it does serve to highlight a profound lack of understanding about how elections work. In my youth we had the FCC fairness doctrine to prevent corporate media from descending into polemics, but that rule was removed in the 80's, and then the FCC abdicated oversight of internet content in general, so I'm not sure how any of this is supposed to be fixed at this point.
  • charonn0 6y ago
    Allowing people to make up their own minds doesn't mean you have to provide a platform for views you don't share.
    • thorough 6y ago
      How would you suggest a company like YT can "allow people to make up their own minds" about an issue if they do not "provide a platform for views" of that issue that they "don't share"? Unless you are just making the point that YT censorship is more acceptable than government censorship (which I think everyone agrees with), then I'm not sure how you can have your cake and eat it to here.
• pmcollins 6y ago
  for folks with a strong opinion on this, how do you square your opinion on youtube censorship with your opinion on net neutrality? youtube censorship is okay but isp censorship is bad? i have multiple isps available to me without any change to the quality of my life, but no comparable alternative to youtube.
  • charonn0 6y ago
    Net neutrality isn't about censoring ISPs, though.
    • mensetmanusman 6y ago
      It is from the point of view of ISPs. E.g. they are being censored from using their bandwidth as they desire.
      • charonn0 6y ago
        They'd be wrong. "Censored from using their bandwidth" is a nonsensical phrase.
  • csnover 6y ago
    What does it mean to be a “comparable” alternative to YouTube? There are dozens of online video platforms[0], plus other places like Patreon and OnlyFans, and decentralised systems like PeerTube. If none of them work for you, you can get a VPS and start hosting videos on your own web site. The difference between YouTube censorship and ISP censorship is the amount of capital you need to circumvent it. If ISPs start filtering traffic, you need tens-to-hundreds of millions of dollars to build hardware infrastructure to run a competing ISP. If YouTube starts filtering videos, you need $5 to rent a server to host those videos instead. Boy, technologists. We used to see a gap in the market and fill it with superior products. Now we see a gap in the market and complain that the market leader isn’t owning that space any more. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_video_platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_video_platforms
• deleted 6y ago
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• thisiszilff 6y ago
  First off, I don't think I will ever be convinced by someone calling something "un-American" or "American." That is almost always lazy thinking that tries to wrap up an emotional sentiment into some kind of conclusion. America and what it is to be American has changed and it will continue to change. We'd better hope that change is guided by reasoning about what is good or bad for this country instead of appeals to what is "American" or not. Second, I'm rather disappointed by the defenses of free speech we see these days. They are flimsy, lack substance, and at times seem unwilling to actually argue for free speech. Is free speech actually good for anything? Is the only reason we attack attempts by people to encroach on it because it is "American"? I, for one, would like an argument for its value. This piece is flimsy. The discussion is about youtube getting removing election misinformation. Ok, controversial. I get it. It brings up Hunter Biden's laptop as a case where > That news was denounced as Russian disinformation by virtually everyone in “reputable” media, who often dismissed the story with an aristocratic snort, a la Christiane Amanpour with those lovely scare quotes around "reputable". I'm not sure what to say here. Is it better for the media to run around screaming after every single lead? Even the ones that look flimsy to them? Is it better for the US media to be so willing to report and investigate on anything and everything these days when the media making a hubub about anything is enough to have an effect? Taibbi proceeds to ask us to indulge in a hypothetical, one where > what would have happened if Facebook and Google had banned 9/11 Truth on the advice of intelligence officials in the Bush years and the natural result of this is that > it will start to make sense that Trump voters in Guy Fawkes masks are now roaming the continent like buffalo. I'm sorry but this is incredibly lazy thinking. I'm going to stop quoting the piece because I'm tired and I have things to say. Things have changed. We've had Trump in office and he was most assuredly different than other presidents -- in good ways and bad. We've had the rise of the internet, of smartphones, of digital technology, and social media. Information flows freely. Nowadays we don't risk not having access to information, we risk being drowned in it. The "echos" in our echo chambers aren't some soft faint whispers we can't see beyond, they are roaring deluges that drown out everything else. I'm sorry for the longer post, but the truth is that I hate these kinds of articles. They seem to just gawk at the problems we face today and do little to inform or provide perspective or argue. Taibbi in this case seems to think it's enough to post a tweet or some headlines; the reader will draw the right conclusions for themselves. It's obvious after all. Isn't it? But then that's exactly the problem we face, where everything is obvious but somehow the other guy's come to a different conclusion and but it's all wrong! Offer some damn arguments. Try to convince people. If free speech is worth fighting for it isn't because it's some kind of "American" ideal, it's because its a good thing, a worthwhile ideal to practice, a civic habit that improves our democracy and secures it for the future. People deal with information differently these days; that landscape has most assuredly changed. Is it any surprise that free speech will need to fought for again?
• jstgord 6y ago
  This is a solved problem : don't BAN, but FLAG conspiracy theories and dangerous memes with a notice citing links to facts. I've enjoyed the somewhat balanced weekly covid discussions of youtuber Dr Chris Martenson / PeakProsperity. He generally backs up his opinions with links to science studies and data, but has been censored by youtube for mentioning controversially that "HCQ has some efficacy as a prophylactic before exposure to Covid". ( He has also covered topics such as less severe Covid outcome for those taking Vitamin-D, for which there now seems to be a lot of evidence... yet why are we not seeing governments recommend and supply it more widely ? ) Are we still able to rationally discuss on youtube topics such as : Did SARS-CoV2/Covid originate elsewhere than at the seafood market in Wuhan [ there are a handful of data with earlier cases in distant locales ] ? Are we allowed to make videos discussing the cause of collapse of WTC building 7 on 911 ? Engineering Professor Leroy Hulseys structural study at Fairbanks University argues that the canonical explanation of fire damage leading to failure of a weak point followed by cascading collapse is 'unlikely'. Will we be able to share videos that say fracking for oil produces so much extra methane as to render the proponents criminally liable for the acceleration of global warming ? Will we be able to discuss on youtube.com whether google.com should pay more tax than they currently do ? What body decides this ?
  • krapp 6y ago
    That doesn't solve the problem. The very same people complaining about this also complained when platforms did exactly what you suggested. Even attempting to "fact check" is considered censorship.
    • Ancapistani 6y ago
      Is your goal to ensure people have access to reliable information or to eliminate the opposition?
  • vladTheInhaler 6y ago
    This is very, very, very far from a solved problem. It is not at all clear that flagging posts does anything to limit the spread of false information. Even when we know that the information we are reading is false, we can still end up believing it, especially if we are distracted or under time pressure [1]. Yesterday, the Lawfare podcast did an interview with a researcher studying misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information which I suggest people check out if they want to learn more about the issue [2]. [1] "You Can't Not Believe Everything You Read" : https://wjh-www.harvard.edu/~dtg/Gilbert%20et%20al%20%28EVERYTHING%20YOU%20READ%29.pdf https://wjh-www.harvard.edu/~dtg/Gilbert%20et%20al%20%28EVER... [2] "The Lawfare Podcast: The Vaccine Misinformation Cometh" : https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-vaccine-misinformation-cometh https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-vaccine-misinfor...
• williamsmj 6y ago
  If this is your introduction to Matt Taibbi, it's worth knowing he has a dog in the race when it comes to "cancel culture": https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-two-expat-bros-who-terrorized-women-correspondents-in-moscow/2017/12/15/91ff338c-ca3c-11e7-8321-481fd63f174d_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-two-expat-bros-wh....
  • dj_gitmo 6y ago
    Taibbi's partner at the time posted a response to these allegations. https://exiledonline.com/about-those-exile-smears/ https://exiledonline.com/about-those-exile-smears/ A brief excerpt from Ames' piece: "How do you respond to something so blatantly dishonest? A number of media contacts have told me that Lally shopped this hit piece around to multiple publications, but it was rejected for this very reason." It's worth noting that the women who worked for the Exiled are still around, and when this came out they confirmed that the events depicted in the Exiled book were satirical. This was an attempt to hijack the #metoo movement without anyone actually making an accusation.
• prucomaclu2 6y ago
  What's really sad about what Youtube is doing, is that Trump's lawsuits do have some legitimacy. Potentially enough legitimacy to win. I'm not saying there is enough to win, but the potential is there and it should be given a fair hearing by the media & judges. From day 1 of this election, the media has 50% of this country convinced that everything Trump's lawsuits are nothing except outlandish lies & conspiracies. Judges included. But it started many years ago. The media lies, spins, and omits. They do not report. Yet this is the information most people rely on. There is an incredible amount of bias in the media against Trump. People who say otherwise are likely enured to it because its been this way for many years. The media has always been biased but it's been taken to a whole new level over the past 4 years. When people dismiss Trump's lawsuits, it's done with absolute prejudice. Judges included. "Conspiracy theory". "Baseless accusations". Such words can be found in mainstream media all over the place. Say what you want about Trump as a person, but many of the legal complaints are legitimate (not all). .The only claims that the media airs are the clearly outlandish ones (of which there are a few.) Many of the claims are valid and are significant. Election laws have been ignored - on a large scale. One can speculate that the laws were broken with the intent to elect Biden, but its very difficult to prove intent. But it's not very difficult to prove that election laws were broken. There is quite a lot of evidence. Hundreds of affidavits/testimonies of evidence. Is it enough to turn the election? It's a legitimate question with a legitimate basis. Most judges have elected to casually dismiss these affidavits. Many of their judgements are loaded with clearly biased partisan editorialization. Noone calls them on their partisan BS. Yes, Republican appointed judges have dismissed cases. This does not make it OK for partisan judges to dismiss cases for partisan reasons. And Trump hasn't lost 50 lawsuits. It's closer to 5-6. I'm sure random people have filed lawsuits and lost their cases, but these are not cases that Trump's campaign filed, promoted, or even discussed. When I have tried to very specifically point out in great detail how the judges have effectively ignored dozens of affidavits, I have been called names, dismissed, and downvoted. When I have tried to very specifically point out the legitimacy of some of the claims that Trump's legal team have made, I have been called names, dismissed, and downvoted. I expect I will be downvoted and ridiculed on this post as well. But this is what's wrong with America. It's impossible to have a substantive discussion on any topic related to Trump, and it's been that way for 4 years. In recent years the media has focused their weapons of censor against Trump. Tomorrow it could be Bernie Sanders. And I would be defending his right to be heard as vigorously as I am now. I understand a lot of people do not want Trump to win. But to dismiss his claims as baseless and wild speculation is doing a disservice to the truth. Regardless of what you think of him as a person, the truth should still be important. Ok, I am done ranting. You can start the ridicule/downvoting. If anyone is legitimately interested in hearing the facts I base my opinions on, look at any of my previous posts. Reply constructively and I will return the courtesy. My posts are available here: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=prucomaclu https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=prucomaclu I am posting under a new account as the old one is effectively bricked due to negative karma rate-limits. ("Good! Because you deserve it!" I expect I will hear). If I have broken HN rules by doing so please accept my apologies.
• prepend 6y ago
  I remember how insufferable friends were after the 2016 election claiming that Trump was a Russian agent, that voting machines were hacked, that electoral college voters would revolt, etc etc. And their basis seems as similarly based as this round of butthurt conspiracy theories (eg, people making claims, no actual evidence). I hope that Youtube makes some statement that wish they had blocked all that crap back then. It seems like if the goal is to stop stupid stuff from YouTube, they everyone should just turn it off. Because while I think conspiracy theories of people yelling stupid stuff that is unsubstantiated about voting machines, then I think that’s as dangerous as videos of kids cyber bullying, or blowing people’s heads off in video games, etc. I don’t think any of that stuff is truly dangerous and adults should be trusted to watch the right things. But if Youtube is saying they are trying to help democracy or whatnot, then they need to ban coke ads. Because sugar does way more harm to America than dipshits masturbatorily posting about election conspiracies.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• jfrunyon 6y ago
  That's a lot of words to say that politicians should be able to lie, cheat, and scheme their way to our highest elected office with the help of foreign powers.
• olefoo 6y ago
  This is all the result of confusing 1st amendment rights with the right to access the audience that gathers at a particular URL. What Taibbi is asking for is that the guy who tells you that drinking rat poison is good for you should be allowed an audience and that even putting a warning alongside the video would be an infringement on his rights. Looking at the comments here I have to conclude that HN is no longer on board critical thinking much less common sense.
  • CharlesW 6y ago
    Yes. I'm heartened to see that someone in this thread understands what rights the First Amendment actually guarantees.
    • falcrist 6y ago
      People constantly conflate "freedom of speech" with the protection granted by the first amendment. That's right up to and including Randal Munroe, who said "The right to free speech means the government can't arrest you for what you say" That's not freedom of speech, that's the first amendment protections of freedom of speech... and it doesn't even adequately describe the protections. There are other things the government isn't allowed to do besides arrest you. They can't force you to say something, either. They can't prohibit certain opinions from being expressed in government owned or regulated channels. And freedom of speech can be infringed on or limited by other entities than the government. A better description would be "principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or sanction." This means that if you're forced into silence by threat of retaliation from, say, a religious sect or political group in your area, it's still infringing on your freedom of speech even if they aren't part of the government.
      • amanaplanacanal 6y ago
        Where is the line though? If I disagree with what you say am I allowed to call you an idiot? Am I allowed to no longer associate with you? Those could both be considered retaliation or sanction. And am I required to publish your words even though I disagree with them? That would seem to infringe my freedom of speech.
• motohagiography 6y ago
  I have a few past comments on HN about how electronic voting was a recipe for civil unrest for the precise reasons that are playing out right now and that Taibbi gives examples of. Google, Facebook and Apple are becoming less American companies as they are a kind of post-national versions of the British East India Company where they operate mainly as the arms of an empire, and instead of opium, they traffic in attention. Their interests are inseparable from those of the permanent state, and this year has been the moment when they have taken on that role in earnest. The recent bans are tripling down on the wrong side of the issue, and what's most frustrating to me is that in over 100 years never have there been so many who were at once so wealthy and so wrong, and I can't see what the trade is.
  • makomk 6y ago
    I have a few past comments pointing out that whether electronic voting is seen as a valid reason to distrust American election results by the mainstream depends entirely on which party has the presidency. The most vivid demonstration of this was Wired running two articles within months of each other, one before Trump won insisting that rigging an election that way was impossible and there were endless safeguards protecting against it, and one after he won claiming there were no safeguard and electronic voting machine hacks could easily rig an election, each backed by copious expert opinions, despite no new evidence appearing between the two. More subtly, remember how before Trump the last time electronic voting security was a major mainstream issue with Defcon events etc was when Bush won in 2004, it suddenly returned to prominence with Trump's 2016 victory, and now it looks like it's becoming a non-issue again.
    • motohagiography 6y ago
      The Youtube issue seems analogous in that it's ok if "our guys" prevail. My bias is it's hard to interpret things without empirically predictive power as meaningful. It's strange for me because I can see the rift between people as a tangible thing, where micro-classes have used the internet to become alien to one another, to where neighbours have developed completely different ontologies that are irreconcilably foreign. I think the problem is even those of us looking to bridge it keep looking for ways to repair it instead of forward to the ways in which it eventually heals. Youtube is doing this because they think they're going to win. I'd just like to take the other side of that bet.
• ThoreauBred 6y ago
  “Only paid subscribers can post.” That certainly is American.
  • ThoreauBred 6y ago
    Downvoted! Censorship! I demand you upvote to extend my reach!
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• osdoorp 6y ago
  Noam Chomsky on Anti-Americanism: "In Soviet Union, people calling out crimes of the state against it's own people were called anti-russian: Sakharov, Solzhanitsin. That's a sign of totalitarianism. America is the only other country that does that. Imagine someone calling someone anti-italian -- they would be laughed at." (paraphrasing) Every time I hear "anti-American", I'm reminded of this Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnVVxN3FPEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnVVxN3FPEg
  • alisonatwork 6y ago
    I don't think that saying anti-American is the same as saying un-American. Plenty of people say un-Australian, and I imagine other English-speaking countries say the same thing (e.g. un-Canadian). It's a way of trying to portray a certain set of values as intrinsic to a particular national identity. In the context of free speech, it makes sense to frame something which some might consider to be a restriction on free speech to be un-American, given that the American constitution explicitly protects free speech. Calling it anti-American would be a different sentiment.
• phailhaus 6y ago
  Though I too am surprised that YouTube is setting such a precedent for fine-grained moderation, we cannot pretend as if this is an "infringement of our rights." YouTube is running a for-profit website, you don't have the "right" to a spot on their platform. YouTube has made the careful calculation that the people who are turned off by this ban are far outweighed by public support, and will reduce their contribution to toxic behavior and instability in the country.
  • daveidol 6y ago
    You don't have a "right" to a spot on their platform but you sure as hell have a right to complain about it and speak up against it when appropriate - which is what this piece is attempting to do.
    • phailhaus 6y ago
      Yes, but there seems to be a lot of "first amendment" talk in the comments.
      • wkjenjkwenf 6y ago
        There seems to be a lot of "there seems to be" talk in the comments. I have yet to see one comment actually calling this move a violation of the first amendment.
  • zionic 6y ago
    For the record: please post “I support YouTube banning all BLM content because it is not profitable” I’m just asking you to be ideologically consistent
    • phailhaus 6y ago
      I don't have to support it, I'm acknowledging that YouTube is allowed to do it. Framing it as being "against our rights" is fruitless. The article author claims that this will inflame tensions, but that's unlikely.
• travisoneill1 6y ago
  Thank god for all of the people at Youtube working on censoring misinformation. They are so much smarter than me and obviously better than me at figuring out what is true and what isn't! And isn't it great that they always act selflessly in favor of the truth and never in the narrow interest of Google? I don't know what I would do if I didn't have them there to protect me from the dangerous misinformation. I am so helpless on my own.
  • 93po 6y ago
    We've always been at war with Eastasia
  • AndrewKemendo 6y ago
    I'll take the bait in the spirit of casual friday night internet debating and recognizing your tone as purely sarcastic. I would ask then... What if, there was in fact an organization comprised of people smarter than you and obviously better than you at figuring out what is true or not - and I would go further - one that can tell you how to make better/more optimal decisions than you would have made without them? Would you then cede your decision making to them if it were demonstrably better? Would you argue that you should be free to make measurably worse or less optimized decisions for yourself - by virtue of the value of you being un-baised was more important than you making a better decision? This is probably my favorite topic where optimization and normative economics converge, so I'm curious the replies here.
    • travisoneill1 6y ago
      > Would you then cede your decision making to them if it were demonstrably better? There are, and I use them constantly in the form of domain experts. So does everyone. For example, I would never assume a plumber is wrong and I am right about pipes, though I may get a 2nd opinion. > Would you argue that you should be free to make measurably worse or less optimized decisions for yourself - by virtue of the value of you being un-baised was more important than you making a better decision? Yes, and this is the case in most areas. There is nothing preventing me from representing myself in court, for example. I think this would be analogous to Youtube adding content filters to block different categories of potentially undesirable content, including their filter for misinformation, and allowing the user to opt in or out. If Youtube did this I would not object, even it the default was to turn the filters on.
• tracerbulletx 6y ago
  In one post you might have everyone absolutely berating Facebook for allowing the platform to be used to spread misinformation, in another you have everyone berating Google for trying to disallow it. :/ Is there anyone discussing what to do about this trade off and not just yelling? How do you protect people from weaponized information, should you, can you? It seems like there should be consequences to lying and spreading invalid information as fact, but who should do it and how?
  • int_19h 6y ago
    The problem is that the two sides have fundamentally incompatible moral stances, that stem from different premises. There's no long-term consensus to be had here - we can allow "a little" of free speech, and "a little" of hate speech, but neither side will accept that as a permanent state of affairs; at best, it would be a truce.
• makomk 6y ago
  The Palmer Report is probably an even better example of just how cynical and partisan this push by social media sites to purge claims of election fraud is than the article makes clear. Back when their anti-Trump articles started to spread across social media, I did some quick searching (y'know, just basic old-school internet literacy stuff when seeing sensational articles from a publication you haven't heard of spreading virally online) and concluded their main claim to fame seemed to be having their own Snopes tag due to the bullshit they'd published. No detectable presence on respected or independent sites beyond that, not even a Wikipedia entry. All the normal hallmarks of your classic fake news site, in the pre-2016 sense of the term. In no time at all after they started saying what Trump's opponents wanted to hear, though, Twitter had given them a verified account, their Wikipedia entry was glowing and featured prominently when searching for them, and they'd been granted a veneer of respectability by big tech companies and were being spread by the personal but work-associated social media accounts of those who worked for big tech. There was no fearmongering about social media sites spreading disnformation that undermined democracy, even though the articles were strikingly like what Trump and his supporters are pushing now, down to the specific arguments even, and every bit as dubious.
• it 6y ago
  rumble.com is better about free speech than YouTube, although they don't yet support live streaming as far as I've seen.
• autocorr 6y ago
  If people disagree with YouTube's normative choices they can (a) wage a boycott, (b) create a new platform that follows the desired norms, (c) attempt political action to regulate private companies. I don't think (a) is very effective due to the practicality of network effects and also that video hosting is quite expensive. A distributed system may solve the money issues of (b), but the legal ramifications of child exploitation will chill any unmoderated distributed system. For (c), because of the first amendment, I'm not sure what political regulation is possible (see Citizen's United). The government probably can't regulate YouTube's free speech (hosting videos) even if that limits other peoples speech (on their platform). I think one solution would be a distributed but not private video peer-to-peer hosting system. Perhaps like a public IPFS? Speech would protected against government intervention, but without privacy it could be easily policed. I don't think a peer-to-peer system will gain any traction if it is possible to host illicit content that the government could punish you over, so that's why I raise those points.
• kordlessagain 6y ago
  > Silicon Valley couldn't have designed a better way to further radicalize Trump voters Fuck Trump voters. Unethical behaviors are not desirable online.
• cromwellian 6y ago
  Every online forum has moderation policies. The "law and order" brigade doesn't seem to like "order" when it is imposed on them. And if that order is to stop posting misinformation in the form of crazy conspiracy theories that encourage stochastic terrorism, or racist violence, etc then online forums are well within their rights to moderate that content. Taibbi doesn't even talk about the biggest problem with these conspiracy videos: reinforcement bubbles. If you watch one, you will be shown more, and more and more, deep down the rabbit hole. I'm pretty sure if tech companies changed their algorithm to de-rank subsequent video suggestions of MOAR conspiracy theories, he'd again claim that they were putting their finger on the scale and that this would enrage Trump voters. The thing is, social media is creating reinforcing but non-intersecting world view bubbles through AI suggestion mechanisms in their feeds, and unless that problem is fixed, you can't just allow an infinite amount of this shitty propaganda to be posted, because it will have damaging effects, and none of the viewers will see any counter-claims, and by the time they finally get served a counter-claim, they'll be so inside the bubble, they won't watch it. Instead, they'll go watch a reaction to it, that confirms to their existing opinion and soothes any triggering. There there now, your worldview is safe.
• phailhaus 6y ago
  The author theorizes that this ban will inflame tensions, but I don't believe that's true. Look at Reddit's ban on toxic subreddits. They found that banning toxic subreddits reduced the toxicity in the website as a whole, and that "post-ban, hate speech by the same users was reduced by as much as 80-90 percent." [1] Reddit is just a closed system of communities; YouTube is one such community in the larger system of social media. I think YouTube made the right calculation that this will in fact _reduce_ tension and slow the momentum of this destabilizing movement. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits-controversial-ban-of-its-most-toxic-subreddits-actually-worked/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits-contro...
  • effingwewt 6y ago
    I see this argument all the time. Sweeping opinions you don't like under the rug doesn't make them go away. People will still hold the same opinions they will just do so where you can't hear them. I prefer the racist I can see. This pushes them underground and radicalizes them. You mentioned reddit. Do you remember what voat became when reddit closed down subs? That hate didn't go away it just moved and concentrated itself.
    • joe_the_user 6y ago
      Sweeping opinions you don't like under the rug doesn't make them go away I think we need to look at that carefully - especially, how much of youtube hate is well-considered, articulated positions and how much is people just "swept into the propaganda." That's a complicated question but think the medium of video tends to be worst form for well-considered opinions and the form most likely to just be a carrier of irrational-emotional/progandistic messages. It's real time stream of imagines/words quality makes it hard to consider the logic of an argument and easier to get swept up in the emotions of a claim as well as easier to think that, say, an image of a scientist gives legitimacy to a claim,etc. I think this quality was demonstrated back in the days of TV as mass medium.
      • seppin 6y ago
        No but feeding one opinion, slightly more radical than the last over and over very much does cause an increase in radical and extremist views. This isn't about removing hate, this is about making sure it's not promoted at scale.
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  “If you want a population of people to stop thinking an election was stolen from them, it’s hard to think of a worse method than ordering a news blackout after it’s just been demonstrated that the last major blackout was a fraud.“ Great quote.
• bird_monster 6y ago
  I would argue that YouTube is behaving _more american_, in that they're a private business that's doing whatever they want within their rights (taking down content they deem inappropriate). The government isn't censoring YouTube. Any Trump supporter that believes that YouTube is over-moderating is free to create their own website from which they can spawn whatever garbage content they want. Spoiler, though: They won't. It turns out the only reason most nutjobs on Facebook/YouTube/Reddit amounted to anything at all is because they were given a free megaphone and millions of listeners. I'm not sure why private businesses have to allow such behavior? Until slander and libel get enforced on social media sites, which would solve most of these problems anyway (I think), why does anyone think these websites _have to_ cater to every single subculture? If I were at the helm of any reasonably sized social media company I certainly would not want my site attached with fascist propaganda.
• iron0013 6y ago
  Oh for God’s sake—-attempting to execute a coup to end democracy in America is pretty darn unamerican too, don’t ya think?
• charliebrownau 6y ago
  Does anyone clearly define what is American Australian English White ' Right wing ' Hate speech is ANY SPEECH Jews Left Anti Whites hate hearing/seeing
• secondcoming 6y ago
  America is fucking stupid. Yours, The Rest of the World
  • dang 6y ago
    We've already asked you to stop posting nationalistic flamebait: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24191922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24191922. If you keep doing it we're going to have to ban you, so please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• TwoNineFive 6y ago
  You don't appease fascists.
  • yew 6y ago
    You certainly don't.
• zug_zug 6y ago
  When Trump got elected I had to listen to my friends freak out about a "Hitler" "Fascist" crazy-man. I silently rolled my eyes. Then when he lost the election, and lied about it, and confused more than a third of the country in the process, I realized I was wrong. I had wanted to believe (though never based on any evidence), that more information was always better, and that people are smarter than TV assumes. I wanted to believe that a pre-selected, pre-digested set of channels was ludicrous, and removing the gatekeepers would force a radically more efficient system. I wanted to believe that because I "knew" I personally didn't need such pabulum. Perhaps we'll grow into it. Personally, I'd rather not risk it right now.
• RickJWagner 6y ago
  It really does seem out of line for much of the media to have dismissed or delayed accurate information about Hunter Biden prior to the election. It seems pretty clear this effort was designed to avoid upsetting the election.
• badconvincer 6y ago
  Bullshit. This is exactly the kind of targeted censorship that works very effectively. I’ve seen it work on multiple platforms anecdotally.
• dangus 6y ago
  Surely the conservatives will believe in the freedom of private enterprise. YouTube can do whatever they want on their platform. For example, they can ban model train enthusiasts for no reason at all. Love it or hate it, there's nothing un-American about a private company doing whatever they want inside their area of control. That's kind of the definition of America.
• cambalache 6y ago
  I would only say that I FAR prefer an online landscape like the one we have right now, with loonies in the far right and left to be able to express themselves in all platforms, that a corporate controlled, sanitized, heavily censored Internet, it is not even close.
• ceilingcorner 6y ago
  I find it really disconcerting how many people on Hacker News want a corporate entity to decide what information is deemed acceptable to know. Do you even know where that word came from? The irony is almost overwhelming. But I digress... The idea that banning certain information will somehow result in it disappearing has been shown repeatedly to not work. A cursory reading of history should make this clear. You cannot turn the entire world into West Coast USA by banning everyone that disagrees with you. You’ll only create further echo chambers, both on your own platform and on the (new) platforms inevitably created by the exiled.
  • tim333 6y ago
    It's a free market. YouTube can host videos it wants to or not. Likewise you can get a $5 server and host what videos you want to or not. That's different from "decide what information is deemed acceptable to know."
    • andrewprock 6y ago
      It's not just different, it's very different. The weirdest thing about this whole discussion is the number of people that want to impose more regulation on private entities, but who are trying to couch this as some kind of anti-censorship crusade.
  • kill-procrustes 6y ago
    This is a really underrated point. This whole site is really "tech industry news" with some hacking sprinkled in, but its name at least is based on the idea of the hacker ethos. That whole thing about decentralization, distrusting authority, information being free? A curiosity for how things work and logical investigation rather than letting someone else do your thinking for you? Disinformation is a huge problem and I understand the impulse to grab for the easiest available solution, but this is fool's gold and anathema to what hackers and Western democracies claim are the foundations of their belief system.
    • deleted 6y ago
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• pooya13 6y ago
  The problem is that YouTube, Twitter, Facebook et al. want to have the protections of social networking platforms (e.g not being accountable for the content), while at the same time be able to autonomously remove/censor content outside the existing legal system. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. (well, apparently you can in this day and age but you shouldn’t be able to in a fair society)
• noetic_techy 6y ago
  I actually agree somewhat and hear me out. I think these people don't realize the juggernaut they are creating. I'm a political centrist but even I see it. Suppression of the message will only amplify it. Prediction: Trump will run again in 2024, no doubt. Consider the implications of that for a second. He already said he will be holding a major 2024 rally in DC during the Biden inauguration. Imagine the shadow that will cast on Biden Day 1, especially if half the population thinks the election was stolen and no outlet for that opinion (even Fox News). Coupled that with the current infighting within the DNC between progressives vs the corporate establishment elitist liberals that they accuse Biden of being, and they are essentially giving Trump all the foundation he needs to become the underground anti-establishment anti-DC-swamp anti-deep-state no-lobbyist no-China-influence anti-MSM anti-big-tech real-middle-east-peace i-already-was-president anti-hunter-biden-corruption and even anti-fox-news candidate which will go viral and make him even more of outlier then he was in 2016. Trump will use all of this and more (Hunter Biden story suppression especially) as real a boogyman to point to. The totalitarian dictator analogies will no longer hold any water when it turns out he steps down peacefully but not quietly on Nov 3rd, albeit with a huge legal fuss that fizzled out. He will aggrandize himself and play that as him being a fighter to the bitter end to his base. I don't think the GOP can primary anyone good enough to beat that version of Trump and you will see a massive blue collar class vote swap from DNC to GOP. The writing is on the wall, eventually there will be bifurcation in Big Tech and Twitter and Youtube will become the walled garden for the left of center only and largely irreverent with conservatives with things like Parlor and BitChute and others taking the exodus. It will turn into a battle for the centrists eyeballs to come to their sides platform or straddle both. The analogy of Reddit banning toxic subs only holds if everyone is ACTUALLY on reddit, most simply left. There is already talk among conservatives of alternative Reddits and Facebooks, alternatives Netflix/Hollywood companies, alternative Fox News even. Many will say "but those will be subject to the same problems of early Twitter and Reddit, how to excise the toxic elements and keep the real discussion." I would say that can EASILY be done without going down the censorship rabbit hole by simply knowing where to stop. Get rid of the illegal stuff, the spam and pornography, and leave the rest regardless of how distasteful it is. Its an Overton Window problem, you just need slightly looser boundary condition on discourse. Stop pretending to be platforms and admit you are indeed publishers to an extent. Give users the ability to filter what they don't want to see and pledge to never bias your algorithms. The cries of the left will be largely irrelevant, they will simply tell you to "go back to Twitter if you don't like it". Once the public loses faith and trust in your company or institution due to your sacrifices in credibility in the name of censorship of one sides information, there wont be any coming back from that loss of face. I'm not saying this is a good or healthy thing for public discourse, but I do think ti will come to pass. Its questionable whether Biden will make it all the way through his term due to age and decline, and he has already said he will step down after one term. That means the DNC will likely roll with Kamala next (If they are smart they would re-primary her, but I dont think they have the will to, the backlash and collectivist guilt will be huge). Kamala who couldn't get 2% of her parties own primary vote in 2020, up against juggernaut viral version of Trump holding mega rallies and creating an alternative media empire he has already dropped hints at. I predict the headlines of the future will largely revolve around how the MSM and Big Tech blew it and need find a way to outreach and repair their reputations and faith to the general public - and will look back at this move as a huge mistake compounding others. The landscape will look totally different. I welcome anyones disagreement with my prediction. I will say it hinges on Trump pivoting correctly.
• kraf 6y ago
  The author mainly belittles the misinformation problem and doesn't get at all that we're in real trouble here. The internet is being flooded with wrong information and it gets increasingly harder for people to tell truth from fiction. Something _has to_ be done, YT can't sit and just watch it's Plattform be used to destroy democracy.
• leepowers 6y ago
  This is an extraordinary step for YouTube to take. But we live in extraordinary times; or a least, this is an extraordinary circumstance. The president is unwilling to concede his loss. He baselessly claims the election was stolen, alleging massive fraud with no supporting evidence. This claim of a stolen election is a form of government propaganda. It's a lie issued by government officials: the president, his administration, and his allies in federal and state offices. This propaganda is designed as cover for a naked power grab. Either to keep the president in office; or to radicalize his base to support further restrictions on the franchise, which aids minority Republican power. Censoring government propaganda is the right thing to do. Especially this most noxious type that is designed to attack and destroy democracy. The failure of the president and his allies to respect democracy means this responsibility must fall on other actors, such as YouTube. Or at the very least these actors should refrain from promulgating the government's destructive propaganda. Taibbi's concern that this will lead to more radicalization is exactly that: a worry and a concern. Yet the uncritical spreading of these government lies is causing damage here and now, in real time. It's bizarre that Taibbi is so focused on theoretical downsides, yet seems to discount the damage that has been done and will multiply should the lie fester. What about free speech? First; Free speech does not exist for itself. The purpose of free speech is truth. Free speech is a guarantor of discourse, of our ability to have free and open conversations that reveal some truth about our universe or about ourselves. And the ability for us to agree or disagree about what the truth is, what is right and what is wrong, and what is true and what is false. Propaganda and bald-faced lies are anathema to free speech. Trump's claims are baseless self-serving lies. They shed no light, they are designed to mislead, and they hide the truth. The national discourse now centers on this big lie. In this context lies are bad not just because they are lies, but because they narrow and constrain the discourse. I'm not talking about lies that come from misinformation or misunderstanding or mistake - the goal of free discourse is to correct these kind of lies. Instead I'm speaking of the deliberate lie designed to achieve some goal, the knowing lie. If the goal of discourse is to uncover truth, the goal of the knowing lie is to preempt discourse, and by extension the truth itself. Second; Free speech has always been bridled. Consider holocaust denial and the flat earth hypothesis. Both have approximately the same amount of supporting evidence (none or close to zero). But only holocaust denial is banned from YouTube. Why? Because there is a nexus of holocaust denial, anti-semitic violence, white supremacist groups, and racism. Flat earthers are benign by comparison (unless they start blowing up NASA buildings). Holocaust denial is dangerous because it's part of larger violent white nationalist movement. Trump's lies about the election are of this latter type; not that they are white nationalist; but that they are part of a larger effort to subvert democracy. And have already stoke death threats an calls to violence. Individuals and corporations (like YouTube) should actively rebut and censor these lies.
• scoot_718 6y ago
  The real problem here is that YouTube is a monopoly and needs to be anti-trusted down to allow competition.
• robbywashere_ 6y ago
  Russia has every right to spread disinformation in our country via an administration which was never brought to proper trial because witnesses were silenced. It’s a free country!
• dleslie 6y ago
  If you don't like YouTube's content policy then use something else; as many other people are now doing. Vimeo, DailyMotion, PeerTube, BitChute and so on and so forth. I'd hazard to say that this marketplace of providers and their variety of policies is quite American.
  • trident1000 6y ago
    Because any of those are even close to competitors...there are 2 billion youtube users (80% of internet users). Posting this reply here since the site says Im posting too fast at a lightspeed rate of 3 comments for the day: I just dont agree with you that there is a "healthy marketplace" by all metrics youtube has a monopoly on video streaming. For instance Vimeo has 1.5 million subscribers...compared to 2000 million for youtube. Thats .075%.
    • dleslie 6y ago
      You can upload videos to them and share them freely. Doing so draws views away from YouTube that they may have otherwise enjoyed, and may expose more users to the competition. Demanding that YouTube be regulated to be forced to carry content when a healthy marketplace of competitors exists is hilariously un-American.
• robswc 6y ago
  I hate politics in general... that said this is such a dumb precedence imo and anyone cheering it on I feel is short sighted. There was some quote about how unfortunately when you defend free speech, you're mostly sticking up for the worst of the worst. Same thing here. Personally, I hate how hard it is to find the really crazy conspiracy stuff these days on youtube. I remember you could fall down some rabbit holes and I loved that. I didn't believe a word of it... but all the same, it was fascinating to see these far out takes.
• awak3ning 6y ago
  If I were a foreign actor with malign intent towards the US, I would be very pleased with how things are playing out. 1. Corrosion of formerly stalwart American Institutions 2. The majority of Americans being habituated to mistrust their fellow American 3. The ability for a few entities with concentrated power to harness and control the nervous systems of millions of Americans
  • aaronbrethorst 6y ago
    If you are Matt or Glenn, or stalwart followers of either, then this line of thinking is strictly verboten. (Which is funny because I think Glenn’s express aim is to do everything he can to undermine American hegemony. Shrug.)
  • jmnicolas 6y ago
    > If I were a foreign actor with malign intent towards the US, I would be very pleased with how things are playing out. Then you wouldn't have thought enough about it. Look at what happened when the USSR collapsed: the world became less stable and nuclear tech and scientists found their ways in unsavory countries. There were some civil wars or frozen conflicts that are still a pain today (Transnitria, breakaway republics in Georgia, the whole Ukraine thing, and more recently Azerbaijan vs Armenia). When the enemy has nukes you want him to be a known quantity, stable and predictable.
• forgingahead 6y ago
  A lot of gymnastics in the comments here trying to justify the Youtube decision. Take a step back: If things are free-and-fair, then let transparency prove your point. As Taibbi correctly points out in his article, bending over backwards to STOP transparency and debate is simply fuel to the fire of the people who believe otherwise than you do.
  • hackyhacky 6y ago
    You're assuming a hypothetical "informed viewer," who is able to consume multiple streams of information and make a rational choice. That's not what we're dealing with. The worst kinds of propaganda make their point with emotion, repetition, and invective. Most people can't tell the difference between that and real information. Thus, sources that seek to manipulate people will win against those that are fair and honest. The question is, if we as a society are just going to accept a significant proportion of our population being manipulated into accepting counterfactuals from whoever has the most Twitter followers.
    • forgingahead 6y ago
      No I don't. Your point about "propaganda making their point with emotion, repetition, and invective" is a great descriptor of ALL media for the past several years, from all sides. If established elites are determining which media outlets are "correct" and which ones are "propaganda", then the disenfranchised, minorities, subjugated, and others who are outside this elite group have no way to amplify their voices without permission from the entrenched. Then, when those groups realise they don't have legitimate means of voice, they either choose to exit (migration), or armed action. This is the point Taibbi is making - don't back people into a corner.
      • hackyhacky 6y ago
        You're right. I've been foolishly ignoring the subjugated minority of white, male, wealthy, Christian Trump supporters. Let's give a voice to this oft-neglected underclass. /s obviously.
• dawnerd 6y ago
  I'm for one glad YouTube is doing this. I've heard so many times from friends and such "I watched this doctor on youtube and he says" People don't fact check and yes, I agree people should be free to post what they want, but come on. The only people really fighting against this are the ones benefiting from the misinformation being spread. If they wanted to really argue why it's a bad thing they should start discrediting people instead of using it to their advantage.
• cblconfederate 6y ago
  There is one positive side, that this will further erode the trust to social media, with youtube becoming official part of conspiracies. People will adapt, they ll find new venues
• slaymaker1907 6y ago
  The main problem is that debunking conspiracy theories takes far more effort than spreading them. Not sure if YT has the right balance of rejecting things outright, but I do think there is a line. For example, most people wouldn't criticize YT for taking down holocaust denial theories so they should at least do that much. However, they should probably avoid being the arbiter of truth except where truly necessary. I voted for Biden, but I'm not sure if we have hit the threshold quite yet where you should stop discourse on fraud. This should be done after the EC votes, but right now feels a little early.
• TedShiller 6y ago
  What are they so afraid of?
• wruza 6y ago
  From for-profit perspective, YT should have done flagging banned videos as UNTRUSTED! and benefit from both free speech supporting and outraging everyone “far” and vocal into epileptic ads seizures.
• prohobo 6y ago
  To anyone reading these threads who is disconcerted by all the apologists, rationalizations, and blindness: Hello, this is what modern totalitarianism looks like. The whole point is to shake the foundations of your principles, and make you doubt yourself. Corporations that control 90% of the internet, and therefore public discourse, are hiding behind the technicality of being private entities, and therefore can enforce whatever rules they want. This can't really be disputed, but it's obviously unethical, and obviously used in bad faith. They are no longer just companies, but quasi-states. Some people saw this coming in the early 2010's, but no one really cared. We saw people's indifference to being tracked by these companies and governments with Snowden's leaks. We saw the transformation of Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter from supposedly "open platforms" to editorialized publishers, and arbiters of truth. This is exactly what we all signed up for, without caring about the consequences. This is only going to get worse. Some people have called for a decentralized internet, where there is no overlord, but truly open platforms. That's the modern counter-culture, or modern activism. Decentralization won't solve all our problems, but it would make it easier to work on them in good faith. Things I'd like to encourage, from a pragmatic view: - Stop using the corporate internet. - We must hear people out, even if they're wrong. - We need to remove the addictive and exploitative systems currently ingrained in social media design. - Move from a perspective of "us versus them" into a mindset of compassion for others who have valid grievances that are not being addressed.
  • rendall 6y ago
    > "To anyone reading these threads who is disconcerted by all the apologists, rationalizations, and blindness:" That's me! I'm disconcerted by this! What words of comforting wisdom do you have for me? > "...this is what modern totalitarianism looks like" sad trombone
    • prohobo 6y ago
      Haha, apologies... At least it's only soft totalitarianism, or inverted. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism I think it's encouraging that there's a way to categorize what's happening, because it suggests an alternative route, or at least a way to engage with it without feeling crazy. These are strange times, and a lot of smart people seem to be voting in favor of their own defeat. A tough question would be to ask why, and I think it's a combination of factors: an atmosphere of insecurity and wanting a strong figure to end it, naive idealism, wish fulfillment, cultural alignment, etc. Smart people can find ways to rationalize bad things. There's no sense in getting caught in the quagmire of trying to convince someone on the internet that we're headed down the wrong path. Instead, we can actually create an alternative that's just plain better. So, maybe it's not all so bad - but more of a call to action.
• jasonvorhe 6y ago
  Perhaps people should refrain from using the term "un-American" for a while. That term didn't age well during the last 4 years. It doesn't mean anything right now.
• somehnrdr14726 6y ago
  A lot of discussion about whether YouTube censorship is valid or not, carries an implicit assumption that the marketplace of ideas is up to the task of sorting fact from fiction. It isn't, at least not right now, because of technologies like YouTube's recommendation engine. When everyone thinks that virality is a signal of truthiness, an algorithm which amplifies outrage to generate virality undermines the marketplace of ideas. YouTube isn't going to address the source of the problem because they would go out of business, or at least have a few very bad quarters. What they can do however, is pretend to moderate the marketplace and do it poorly enough that we stay focused on one another; instead of on their algorithm that literally converts outrage into money.
  • lambdatronics 6y ago
    >When everyone thinks that virality is a signal of truthiness, an algorithm which amplifies outrage to generate virality undermines the marketplace of ideas. Nailed it! >YouTube isn't going to address the source of the problem because they would go out of business In a way, we (the people) are getting exactly what we asked for... "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." H. L. Mencken
• cybert00th 6y ago
  YouTube is a technology company, and deciding what is and what isn't acceptable speech is not their prerogative - that's what constitutions and law courts are for. Once they start down this censorship road there's no turning back until either all their users leave and they're forced to shut up shop or they end up as a defacto department of governments.
• AntiImperialist 6y ago
  No, it is very likely that it won't backfire. If you look throughout history, for every anti-establishment movement that succeeds, they're are many many more that are curbed in various stages. History has selection bias which may suggest that anti-establishment movements do well. It has happened a lot of times, but if you look at the probability of an individual movement, it is very low. My prediction is that this will only make the establishment much stronger and they'll be able to curb even more dissidents way before they become a thing.
• togs 6y ago
  IMO if a person isn't satisfied with a business they take their money elsewhere. The market will decide if the business is right or wrong.
• orestarod 6y ago
  I am curious what the comments will now be when the next (insert official, by America, despotic regime) censorship story breaks out in the front page.