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Good. I'd rather live in chaos than a world controlled by these technocrats. Let's do Twitter while we're at it.

• chapium 5y ago
  I don't understand this, is controlling youtube's database that google hosts equivalent to controlling the "world"?
  • rolobio 5y ago
    Not yet, but its close. How many people know how to search the internet without Google? Google has become so ubiquitous that people are totally reliant on them. Look at Tulsi Gabbard, her advertising account was "accidentally" taken down after a successful presidential debate, making it so people couldn't find her. Sure they're a private company, and they made a mistake. But the direction of the mistakes are always in the direction the people running the company lean politically. https://web.archive.org/web/20210322220851/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/technology/google-tulsi-gabbard-lawsuit.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210322220851/https://www.nytim...
• xxpor 5y ago
  State violence is being used to force a private company to host content it finds objectionable. Who's the technocrat here?
  • throwawayswede 5y ago
    The company doesn't find anything objectionable. It's the Who (a political org that has nothing to do with science) that is dictating what YouTube should do. YouTube and other technocrats believe that can tell people how and what they should think. With that being said, forcing a private company with state violence is not good either, unfortunately there's no magic wand to wave and reset everything. We shouldn't be pragmatic, but we have to be practical.
    • ModernMech 5y ago
      > It's the Who (a political org that has nothing to do with science) that is dictating what YouTube should do. How are they dictating this? What power does the WHO have over YouTube to force them to make this decision?
    • jokethrowaway 5y ago
      I see where you're coming from but I disagree that the WHO is the source or the holder of power. They don't have enough money for that. The WHO is probably just another puppet in the hands of richer state actors, as the infamous Taiwan Skype Interview show us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fASh2_RzMuE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fASh2_RzMuE Besides, I don't even think the people involved in YouTube and on a similar level are directly influenced by anyone. They're just a liberal company parroting their party's political line and not noticing how totalitarian these measures are. It's people higher up setting the party line that are probably on the payroll of richer state actors. Most likely they also own the opposition to make sure nothing happens whoever is elected.
    • mousepilot 5y ago
      >YouTube and other technocrats believe that can tell people how and what they should think. If you go to youtube to be told what to think then you're probably using the internet for things it wasn't designed for lol
  • silicon2401 5y ago
    I wonder if you would agree to the following equivalent: > State violence is being used to force a christian bakery to bake (gay/muslim/etc) cakes it finds objectionable. Who's the villain here? The more you open service to the public, the more control over your output you lose because then it becomes a matter of discrimination.
    • happytoexplain 5y ago
      Why are they equivalent?
      • vageli 5y ago
        Both are instances of the state compelling a private enterprise to act in a way that is against the enterprise's interests.
    • hvac 5y ago
      Having a certain political opinion is not a protected class in the US
      • throwawayswede 5y ago
        That's not what this is about. In both cases, the state is forcing an company to do something they don't want. The only difference is that you agree with the one but not the other.
        • hvac 5y ago
          Yes, because the difference is that they are essentially immutable personal traits. The parent was presenting this scenario as an equivalent one and I don't think they are.
          • silicon2401 5y ago
            How is religion any more or less immutable from political beliefs? In my view both are fully equivalent.
  • nextlevelwizard 5y ago
    You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either Youtube needs to stop censoring videos or it needs to go through every single video it has and that gets uploaded
  • scotty79 5y ago
    Platform shouldn't have the right to an opinion on content. Same way that when you open a store you can't pick and choose your customers. Platforms should just obey law and at most create a process where users and lawmakers can express and enforce their opinion on content.
    • tedunangst 5y ago
      Should movie theaters be allowed to select which movies they show?
      • Const-me 5y ago
        There're many movie theaters, but only one youtube in the whole world. Youtube and facebook are natural monopolies due to their network effect. All the older natural monopolies, water networks, electricity networks, landline phone networks, railroad networks, and the rest of them are either nationalized, or regulated heavily. It's long overdue to add social networks to the list.
        • anigbrowl 5y ago
          There's only one YouTube, but lots of video sharing sites. You can put your material on Bitchute, Vimeo, ....
          • Const-me 5y ago
            Youtube's monopoly is not video hosting, there're many ways to do that. Their monopoly is their social network. People want to publish video where the audience is, the global audience happen to be on youtube, and going to stay there because that's where most videos are.
      • bobthechef 5y ago
        Not absolutely. They shouldn't be able to show porn, for example, or some other destructive content. (And no, it's not a question of taste or opinion. That relativist claim is worthless and tired. We're not talking about vanilla or chocolate ice cream here.) I suppose in this particular case (and that matters: things like this can be particular) you would just criminalize those sorts of movies. The idea that we shouldn't do such things because government could be used to impose horrible things is a bad one. Driving a car could kill you, but you wouldn't ban cars for that reason because cars are not bad in principle nor are they so dangerous that they should be banned. They are regulated, however, and this is good.
  • contravariant 5y ago
    Perhaps more importantly, what is 'technocrat' here? Because I'm fairly sure none of the accepted meanings make any sense.
  • xdennis 5y ago
    Google hosts billions of hours of video. It doesn't mind a few videos. They never argued that the costs are an issue.
  • CountDrewku 5y ago
    What are your thoughts on net neutrality?
  • bobthechef 5y ago
    What about private industry violence? Don't make Google out to be some victim. Private industry is pushing social changes that the US government could never dream of doing, not at this scale. Fear of government overreach needs to be balanced with fear of oligarchic overreach and corporate power.
• strogonoff 5y ago
  Losing control is what big social wants. The more they are regulated, the more intimate they are with the government, the safer and more entrenched their status. They already enjoy network effects and lock-in of their users; more rules widen the moat around the established players who got huge in the early unregulated days.
  • devoutsalsa 5y ago
    And the more compliance becomes a cost, the harder it is for underfunded upstarts to sneak in & grab marketshare.
  • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Saying things like "big social" does not make your argument more persuasive. It just makes you sound like part of the lunatic fringe. It also leaves people like me rather confused about what your point was in the first sentence.
    • imwillofficial 5y ago
      So it’s proper behavior for you to go around calling names because you’re confused? Get a grip.
    • jokethrowaway 5y ago
      I don't think "big social" is a term used by any group of people, including people you disagree with. I think it's a neologism and it's a comprehensible one. I interpret it as a big business doing social media.
  • the_optimist 5y ago
    Certainly not all forms of regulation result in regulatory capture. Simply following this German model where Google/Youtube isn't allowed to censor certain ideas doesn't lend itself to regulatory capture.
    • rocqua 5y ago
• LatteLazy 5y ago
  Really? You'd rather your children died of a preventable disease than YT ban antivax lies? Really?
  • byset 5y ago
    Can’t one frame either side of any controversy using these sorts of histrionics? This makes us all stupider.
    • LatteLazy 5y ago
      That's sort of my point: people make histrionic statements about freedom and chaos. Then you point out what those actually mean...
      • philovivero 5y ago
        Just stop. Repeat after me: "My apologies. I got a bit angry and said some things I didn't mean."
  • bobthechef 5y ago
    Opposition to _coerced COVID vaccination_, whether through law or through imposed burdens on those that don't, isn't antivax. Not even close. Speaking of lies, children are at virtually zero risk of death. Even if we put aside concerns about the COVID vaccine, there is no legitimate reason to require vaccination of the young. Being able to post videos that offer different points of view, many of them by healthcare professionals and people in medicine, is a good thing. The frantic desire to silence all discussion, no matter how level-headed and banal, that departs in the slightest from the "official narrative" only creates suspicion and distrust. We're not talking about censoring calls to violence (some of which were have not been censored by media platforms, btw, because the targets are political opponents). We're not even talking about weird conspiracy theories that barely anyone but a few people believe. We're talking about discussion about an experimental vaccine and the real dangers of COVID backed by data. (And btw, the whole antivax "controversy" is a media circus. 98% of Americans have the full regime of vaccines. That's a lot of vaccines. There is no real antivax problem. It's media hype. This given even the moral objections to e.g. the rubella vaccine's origins.)
• bobthechef 5y ago
  That's a false dichotomy. No society has ever been on any extreme, certainly not a livable one. While there are inviolable limits to what is morally acceptable, and things you should never do, you cannot decide everything beforehand because some things are highly contingent on circumstances. So this is a never-ending process of determining those things. It's called prudence.