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The headline has important context: “YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel hours after Rudy Giuliani appeared on an episode and blamed the Capitol siege
by bryan0 6y ago
The headline has important context:
“YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel hours after Rudy Giuliani appeared on an episode and blamed the Capitol siege on Democrats”
At some point the lies need to stop.
- brighton36 6y agoThese are opinions though. It may be untrue, but you're going to find yourself with a ministry of truth. "Who decides" who gets charged with the crime. These opinions can be entertained. After all, most trump supporters are clearly enraged by democrats.
- scsilver 6y agoThere is no ministry being erected, just a bunch of private parties not willing to get dragged into the mud.
- laretluval 6y agoNo official ministry, but the private parties appear to be acting with a great deal of coordination.
- grzm 6y agoWhen a hurricane hits the coast, you'll find that a lot of people happen to board up their windows as well. A common set of pressures can provoke the same response from different people working independently. No coordination needed.
- justforyou 6y agoZeitgeist is not coordinated.
- anigbrowl 6y agoGoogle round earth conspiracy
- pmiller2 6y agoThose are some serious charges you're levelling. I'm assuming you have proof, yeah?
- MrMan 6y agoI really do think they have been visited by the FBI, who has warned them not to implicate themselves in ongoing plots to kill more people.
- scsilver 6y agoReally? Whats the evidence?
- notadev 6y agoSo we've outsourced the parts the government can't do to companies who are essentially shadow actors doing their censorship all while everyone rushes to reply with the "censorship only applies to government" line.
- undersuit 6y agoWell the free market is more efficient. /s But not /s because I'm actually mocking people and dang should censor me(Don't do it this time though dang).
- katbyte 6y agoOpinions stated as facts are no longer “just an opinion”
- brighton36 6y agoIt would really help if there were ages attached to our profiles. I'm starting to think there's a generational component to these values. Not that younger or older is better. I'd, just like to know why this became such a disconnect in the population, all of a sudden...
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago> These are opinions though Help me out here, Hacker News. This guy thinks: "Democrats attacked the capital", is an opinion. How do we even talk to this person?
- Jtsummers 6y agoYou can't. People making absurdist statements like that and claiming them as "opinions" when someone rebuts them are the principle reason I stopped looking at social media sites (and I barely looked at it before then). If someone says, "The sun didn't rise today" and everyone else points out the sun in the sky, and their reply is "Well, that's, like, your opinion, man", it's safe to ignore them. Don't engage because they have tacitly admitted to being an unreasonable, delusional individual.
- bryan_w 6y ago> it's safe to ignore them. Don't engage because they have tacitly admitted to being an unreasonable, delusional individual. We saw last Wednesday that it's no longer safe to ignore them.
- drogon2020 6y agoWho claimed democrats attacked the capitol?
- brighton36 6y agoMaybe you would benefit from looking up the definition of opinion...
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y agoOk, I did. Explain to me where it says anything about lying is an opinion: https://bit.ly/39nLiwz https://bit.ly/39nLiwz
- dane-pgp 6y ago"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. "They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past." -- Jean-Paul Sartre
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoGuiliani said: "Believe me, Trump people were not scaling the wall. So there's nothing to it that he incited anything." That's not an opinion, it's a statement of fact whose truth can be evaluated. About the only thing that is even slightly ambiguous is how you define "Trump people", but given that essentially every person that has been identified in the insurrection has been shown to have documented pro-Trump views, what else would you call them? So what about this statement isn't provably false to you?
- erulabs 6y agoThank you for the vital context. “Democrats are to blame” -is- an opinion, but “No one who scaled the walls of the capital was a Trump supporter” is a statement of fact which can be disproven trivially (literally hundreds of photos of the hats and the shirts and the flags on the people scaling the walls). The lack of -context- irks me far more than any other issue here - particularly when the context is so damning. I’m always more frustrated with those with facts on their side when they fail to argue properly than with those who are wrong. Being wrong is easy - the burden of argument is on the intelligent - not the slow witted.
- DangitBobby 6y agoI believe you've misinterpreted Guliani's words. He is not claiming that they were not Trump supporters, he is saying that they did not scale the walls. By which he means that they did not have to sneak or break in because no one really even tried to stop them. That sentiment seems true on its face. Now whether the blame for that can be placed on Democrats is an entirely separate matter.
- erulabs 6y agoErm, here is a photo of people wearing Trump gear scaling walls. https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/16/03/72/20463283/3/ratio3x2_1000.jpg https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/16/03/72/20463283/3/ratio3x2_1...
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
- ars 6y agoI agree lies are bad. But lying is enough to get you banned? All the discussion up to now was "there's no slippery slope, only calls for violence" will get you banned. And now it's slipped to lying will get you banned?
- newacct583 6y ago> I agree lies are bad. But lying is enough to get you banned? It wasn't on Tuesday. It is now. Things are clearer. The lies were frankly only the proximate cause. Bannon and his guests have often veered into the kind of violent rhetoric that begat Wednesday's assault on congress. Bringing Giuliani on to continue to inflame people makes it clear Bannon has no intention of stopping. So he's out.
- Bud 6y agoCalling what happened mere "lying" is reductive and completely fails to capture the seriousness of the offense, here.
- gdulli 6y agoLying was allowed because it made Google money, and it would have been unqualifiedly allowed until the end of time if it hadn't started getting people killed. Rest assured, though, lying will continue to be allowed except for this one lie for this one moment in time until this blows over. Google will be happy to let any content through as long as it makes money and they can get away with it without facing consequences.
- meekmockmook 6y agoThis is the ugly truth. Big Tech has monetized hate since 2014 by guiding users to extremist content. Their algorithms were designed to create profit above all. The cost? Democracy. Do not let GAFA evade responsibility just because they're scrambling to pull the plug after 7 years of digital sectarian chaos.
- dragonsky67 6y agoSo what is the alternative, do we make all media completely responsible for the content that they carry in the same what that you tube is responsible for removing copywrite content that is posted? Will this not lead to all posts having to be moderated before being published? Do we really want to go down that path, and the inevitable removal of many open discussion forums that will be unable to effectively moderate content? This is a very difficult problem but I don't think the solution is to hold hosting organisations either legally or morally responsible for the content they carry. Where does this leave the voice of minority groups that for some reason are seen as "unacceptable" to the majority of the population? Should a non-religious voice in a religious society be banned from talking just because they express it would be nice if women could drive cars? Should we ban the gay person who talks about the shitty treatment they get when trying to get medical treatment just because they live in a primarily heterosexual society. Should we stop a group organising protests against deaths at official hands just because they are really pissed off and there is some potential that official organisation may react badly to the protest. Personally I find the language and behaviour of your president and his cronies to be completely unacceptable and frankly unhinged. However would you prefer them standing in public sprouting their rubbish where we can all hear them and point out the ridiculousness of their words, or would you prefer to have them hide away in private, able to say whatever they want with no chance of opposing voice? I don't really know what the answer to this movement is. I know one of the answers is better education, teaching people critical thinking, but I don't know that this is going to be something that happens quickly. What I do know is that you can never win somebody to your point of view unless you actually engage with them, rather than just tell them they are wrong and cut them off. To quote a song that escapes me at the moment, we need to "Keep on Talking"!
- vmception 6y agoWell that escalated ... steadily over four years.
- antifreeze0 6y agoOk by your logic when the Young Turks blame the BLM riots on the republicans they should also get banned, right? It should work both ways not just when conservatives make such statements. Edit: I like how I get downvoted but everyone is too scared to actually reply on this.
- hndudette2 6y agoIt's just a numbers game, there's more Dems here (probably 4:1 given the industry demographic) and so you lose the popularity contest on a topic like this which stokes tribal sentiments.
- awb 6y agoMaybe. But there’s also been a bipartisan rebuke of Trump and his gang’s tactics. For many Trump’s breaking of norms was funny, admirable or simply inept. But when you play with fire (like telling people a fair election was in fact stolen) and people die, it’s not funny anymore.
- redis_mlc 6y ago> But there’s also been a bipartisan rebuke of Trump and his gang’s tactics. There's been no investigation report. It appears the left was responsible for a false flag operation. (The guy breaking the Capitol window appears to be antifa, and the crowd tried to stop him several times.) > But when you play with fire (like telling people a fair election was in fact stolen) and people die, it’s not funny anymore. Yes, it was stolen. Dominion voting machines are owned by the CCP, and aren't FEC-compliant. The USPS was involved in back-dating ballots and discarding ballots. 3 of the 5 people who died, in a crowd of 500,000 people, died of natural causes. Not unexpected. Leftists, your feelings are not facts. The facts are not hard to find, unless you're wilfully ignorant.
- dang 6y agoI've banned this account because it's using HN primarily for political argument and that is not what this site is for. Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with. The purpose of this site is intellectual curiosity, which is not compatible with political battle. Some political overlap is fine and inevitable, but when accounts go way beyond "some overlap", we ban them. We have to or else the site will be wrecked for its main mandate. More explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. But please don't create accounts to break the rules with.
- Thorentis 6y agoPoliticians have been making false claims about the opposing party for centuries. Suddenly now Big Tech decides they have the right to pick and choose which lies will be allowed and which won't be? Pathetic.
- thereare5lights 6y agoFalse equivalence. Big Tech has always removed content that could imminently incite violence.
- khawkins 6y agoBanning things left and right is inciting more violence than the content itself. They're making a lot of people desperate who were already extremely distrustful of authority. They don't need Steve Bannon to tell them that tech companies are trying to silence their movement, all they need is Hacker News.
- Thorentis 6y agoHow do you determine which speech incites violence? Posts about the BLM movement increased the likelihood of a small minority of people engaging in looting. The majority of protesters did not loot. Just like the majority of Trump supporters did not storm Capitol Hill. If individuals will react to information with violence, that is on them. Big Tech is not the moral or behavioral conscience of the nation.
- 8note 6y agoSure, but is that notable for Steve Bannon?
- tenpies 6y ago> At some point the lies need to stop. Imagine that all the news agencies actually spread the lie. Imagine that for the next 4 years of Biden's presidency, they would talk non-stop about election fraud, how he's illegitimate, and how there needs to be an investigation. Imagine that the opposition party appointed a special investigator who's sole mission was to take down Biden by uncovering fraud. Now imagine that after 4 years, it turned out that all the evidence for fraud was actually based on lies, opposition research, or fabricated dossiers. The investigation found some other issues - but nothing that could take down Biden. Turns out they tarnished the presidency for four years for no good reason. You think apologies would be in order right? Yet that's exactly what the Russian collusion narrative was. A lie. A four year lie perpetrated by the Liberal media, the Democrats - including very prominent leaders who openly lied to people's faces - as well as some members of the intelligence agencies. So why didn't those lies need to stop? How would Democrats react if they had to deal with 4 years of fraud investigations, #Resistance, #NotMyPresident? And let me be clear, I think these will be remarkably similar events in a way that's going to look almost comical in hindsight. Imagine the outrage Democrats would have had if instead of being investigated, the courts had simply dismissed the Russian collusion narrative? If they marched, looted, and rioted with the courts entertaining the investigation, how bad would it have gotten if the Republicans of 2016 acted like the Democrats of 2020?
- karlshea 6y ago> How would Democrats react if they had to deal with 4 years of fraud investigations, #Resistance, #NotMyPresident? I'm sorry, did you not live through the entire Obama presidency?
- proc0 6y agoPeople forget about the streisand effect. Forget about morality, is it even effective because it seems to cause the opposite effect and no one seems to care.
- happytoexplain 6y agoI disagree - people aren't forgetting. The effect is simply often overstated, and gets applied to any kind of ban, even reasonable ones.
- endymi0n 6y agoAlso from the original article: "On November 5, 2020, Twitter permanently suspended Bannon after he called for Dr Anthony Fauci to be beheaded in an episode." It's good they finally pulled the trigger, but considering that Steven Bannon has been constantly putting oil to the fire on every single channel available, that point was very certainly much earlier.
- bitcharmer 6y agoI've seen the term "permanently suspended" several times already. Not a native speaker, could someone please explain to me the difference between that and "banned"?
- akhosravian 6y agoThey mean the same thing; it’s just a choice of words.
- remus 6y agoIn practice they effectively mean the same thing. I suspect they're going with "permanently suspended" now because they want to avoid people using phrases like they "banned free speech" or something similar to that.
- cbozeman 6y ago"permanently suspended free speech" doesn't really sound much different than "banned free speech". I can't really see this being a big deal, Bannon's got enough wealth to make his own website.
- KMag 6y agoAs a native speaker, it's probably a distinction without a difference. Both sound more harsh than regular suspension and both sound less harsh than permanently banned. Neither one tells you exactly what they've done in terms of the amount of effort required to re-instate him if they change their mind. Both signal that they're unlikely to change their minds any time soon. With a physical location, "banned" sometimes implies they've been declared a persona non grata, and the police will be called if they return. Clearly that doesn't apply to an online platform.
- enriquto 6y ago> At some point the lies need to stop. So you cannot tell lies on the internet? What happens to religion, then?
- colejohnson66 6y agoGod is in a unique position as, by his very nature, is unfalsifiable. The “Democrats are behind the siege” claim, OTOH, is falsifiable. Sure, you could probably pull up some shred of evidence to put a Democrat behind the curtain, but there’s mountains more that put the alt-right behind this.
- Tepix 6y ago> God is in a unique position as, by his very nature, is unfalsifiable. It seems to me that Trump is in the same position if you ask his devotees. The existance of god is an extraordinary claim with no evidence.
- chinathrow 6y ago> At some point the lies need to stop. At some point the lies need to be brought to court.
- teekert 6y agoAt some point we need to understand that currently it is too easy to delude people and we need our educational system to address this.
- chinathrow 6y agoI fully agree. However, both things can go in parallel, no?
- NicoJuicy 6y agoGoogle should really ban Breitbart News from collecting ad revenue... The cost of producing lies is way lower than producing real journalism.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Grustaf 6y agoYeah the lying needs to stop. I'm not sure this piecemeal approach will work though, what if some right-winger starts a new social network and we're not able to stop it? I mean sure with Parler it worked because of the coordinated effort of Apple, Google and Amazon, but can we always count on that? Wouldn't it be better to have a centralised authority that regulates these things, with the legal authority to shut down any service that broadcasts lies and evil things? Like a Ministry of Truth. To avoid people lying to each other in private conversations, I think it would be best if messaging services would also fall under their control, how else could we stop people from texting conservative propaganda to their friends?
- teekert 6y agoIs this the answer of more oil on the fire though?
- jariel 6y agoThis is not a lie though. If you say "Democrats have ignored certain classes of Americans and pushed them to the brink and this is the result" - it's a heavily editorial opinion The press overall uses these types of editorial lies daily. The Guardian today is Blaming the existence of COVID on Boris Johnson, unsurprisingly. To me it's a stretch, and basically a lie, but well within editorial distortions we can expect these days. I'm not fan of either of those Giuliani/Bannon fools, but this kind of 'lie' I don't think is ban-worthy. Youtube might be using current political conditions I think to go after those they don't like. If Giuliani was on the podcast actively calling for further acts of sedition - like he was at the rally a few days ago - then it would be a ban for sure. But he's not, so it's not.
- ccsnags 6y agoIf someone believes a lie, is it a lie? We are in a situation where all sides of the argument are essentially lies (to someone) because of how we have had events framed for us. Is the media responsible? Depends on who you don’t like. Is Pizzagate or Russiagate real? Conspiracies have flown in all directions. Lie itself is a term that is more persuasive than falsehood. When i hear someone call something a lie i tend to ignore everything that person says. Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. Lie or falsehood? If you don’t give them the benefit of the doubt, call it a lie. I think using the term lie itself is a self-contained conspiracy theory. One is assuming that what they are hearing is not just wrong, but not worth investigating because the person saying it doesn’t actual believe it.
- jariel 6y agoThat's a good point, but we are supposed to have systems of credibility for that. Even Fox news - after the election - was careful not to directly support Trump's false claims. Instead, they 'sympathized' with voters who 'felt disenfranchised' - which is a kind of indirect lie, but not a 'straight up lie'. Even when facts are contentious we can still get the word out. We absolutely need integrity in the system at all levels - which is why having a President that completely fabricates stories, it's a problem. The press has been bending reality more since the election of Trump, which is why his presence adds to the toxicity - it just creeps into everything. It's why, despite however much some might agree with his policies, they come at an addition 'hidden cost' of the erosion of integrity in some of these systems. We all have to play our part and try to be as objective as we can I guess.
- sneak 6y agoWhy do the lies need to stop? Who needs to stop them? By which authority? Who decides what is a lie and what is truth? Who cross-checks them when they're inevitably wrong? By which authority? Simple dismissals like this miss the point. Until there are some good answers to these questions, kneejerk censorship is no solution at all. Stating falsehoods should absolutely not be grounds for censorship, even the private kind undertaken by hosting providers.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sdwa 6y agoI understand and broadly sympathise with the sort of ~absolute freedom of speech outlined in the US constitution, but I am completely baffled by this recent push seen here on Hacker News and elsewhere that this freedom should be extended to in effect compel others to publish your speech. This is not in the US constitution, and is in fact completely unconstitutional (1st amendment protects against compelled speech). This almost seems like a push for speech without consequences, that no matter what you say everyone should be forced to provide you with services and support. This would be both unprecedented and also extremely unhealthy for society. It wouldn't even be conservative ideology, as at no point in US history has anything like this been the law, legalising compelled speech would be truly radical and unconservative politics.
- sneak 6y agoYou seem to be replying to a different comment than the one I wrote. I am not addressing any legal or constitutional issue. I am also not advocating for compelled speech. Very soon, it will be impossible to buy webscale hosting from anywhere but a half-dozen providers. Should those providers be the sole and exclusive authority of what is or is not allowed on the web? Airlines aren't permitted the authority to decide who flies and who doesn't. Why is AWS? This isn't a constitutional issue, or even an American one. It's one about the place that censorship has in our civilization. A tiny number of infrastructure providers should not have a unilateral ability to veto unpopular speech, especially considering, as we just witnessed, the definition of unpopular can change on a dime with the wind. Today, it's Parler and Stormfront. What will become the target of censorship in five years? Ten? Increasingly services are linked to our identities, and bans are lifetime. Will creating new accounts after political wind direction changes endanger one's data storage, email, contact lists, or hosting/publishing ability one day? How many individual people or organizations are really provider-independent and could survive losing all of their data at a host because they once belonged to the wrong faction? Don't underestimate this risk.
- redis_mlc 6y agoActually the protester breaking the Capitol window doesn't appear to be a Trump supporter, so it could be a leftist provocateur.
- bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y agoHe said there were Antifa agents provocateur who catalyzed the violence — is that false? What evidence do you have? Have you seen the video he's referring to?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]