7 ms·

Elections misinformation policies

good8675309 5y ago
"Keep in mind that this isn't a complete list." Yeah, so why even give us a list. Just keep striking videos and youtubers for no clear reason. The hoops people have to hop through with copyright, politics, etc is getting crazier by the day. Limiting free speech in the name of the greater good will not end well. And good luck creating an alternative platform that isn't a total echo chamber.
- pyronite 5y ago
  I disagree. If someone is posting misinformation according to these standards, I'm happy about YouTube taking such things down. How can we have an informed electorate when misinformation (whether intentional or not) is allowed to propagate? We know at this point that incendiary content tends to spread faster than the often-boring truth. Turning a blind eye is a race to the bottom that encourages political parties and those with an agenda to create more of this misleading content. They give a list so you have some guidelines. Ultimately, you can argue with the guidelines and generally agreed-upon facts, and I'm sure many will.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    Who gets to define misinformation? The lab leak theory was misinformation at one point. Wearing masks was misinformation at one point. The problem with censorship is that no man is fit to play the censor.
    - belltaco 5y ago
      >The lab leak theory was misinformation at one point So? We know more about it now, so the earlier wild claims without evidence or proof were definitely misinformation at the time, intended to deflect blame from the ineptness of the politicians in power in feb 2020.
      - fighterpilot 5y ago
        Given that lab leaks are fairly common through recent history and the location of the WIV, it was a totally plausible hypothesis back then. It was just taboo for purely political reasons. The case for a lab leak now is mostly the same as it was back then - circumstantial.
        belltaco 5y ago
        There were a lot of claims that it was a bioweapon leak, in the recent months there has been more circumstantial evidence that it might have been an accidental leak. So yes, there was a lot of misinformation at that time around this.
        vorpalhex 5y ago
        You can't badly conflate two different claims and then use that as a reason to engage in censorship.
        fighterpilot 5y ago
        The leak hypothesis itself - not merely a bioweapon leak - was verboten despite its evident plausibility as a hypothesis given a precedent of other lab leaks. Little has changed since then aside from Trump being voted out which then freed up the political left to consider this possibility in its discourse.
        belltaco 5y ago
        A case of the boy who cried wolf not being believed.
        fighterpilot 5y ago
        If you don't see a serious problem with scientists and journalists abdicating their responsibility to dispassionatly pursue the truth and the damage this does to institutions and the public confidence of those institutions, and moreover you do not even lay any blame at their feet and excuse this behavior just because the other side is more dishonest, then I can only think that you have some pretty powerful ideological blinders that have pushed you into a very partisan culture-war type worldview.
    - fighterpilot 5y ago
      YouTube deciding what is and isn't misinformation has a positive side effect in that it indirectly protects the first amendment through the middle ground of private voluntary self-regulation. 1A proponents need to understand that there's a grey area between outright incitement to violence and otherwise. Within that grey area lies conspiracy theories and hate speech which can motivate actual harmful and illegal activity downstream if these ideas become sufficiently widespread. It's plausible that the unmoderated hate speech on 8chan motivated numerous lone wolf shooters, given how many manifestos have been posted there. While we may want this speech to be legal (I largely do), we should not want to voluntarily assist in the spreading of this speech above and beyond the legal requirements of 1A. Anti-1A sentiment is growing on the political left and that sentiment isn't totally invalid if we zoom into specific examples of speech motivating heinous outcomes. So nipping a real problem in the bud with private self-regulation seems to be the least slippery slopey outcome of them all.
      - shockeychap 5y ago
        > Anti-1A sentiment is growing on the political left That statement, if you stop to think about what it means for all other freedoms, should genuinely scare you. Freedom only matters if it includes the right to offend others. Anything less isn't freedom at all. If you genuinely believe in the principles of freedom, you will trust that the free exchange of all ideas - good and bad, right and wrong - is the best and only way to bring out the truth. All of this hearkens back to dark ideas in which one class of people exercise power over another. Remember what they say about power.
        fighterpilot 5y ago
        "Free exchange of ideas... best and only way to bring out the truth." I don't believe this to be true. I only think the 1A is a good idea because it's too easy for an authoritarian government to co-opt speech restrictions. The free exchange in itself isn't what I care about. People on the whole are pretty stupid, tribal and irrational creatures. I see no reason why a free exchange of ideas can't sometimes lead to a fascist or communist state if certain ideas get enough social contagion.
  - smitty1e 5y ago
    These diabolical moves are sold as purely reasonable moves that only a reactionary nitwit would object to, yes.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
    I for one, am comfortable with the orthodoxy. The powers that be do not know how heresy will express itself, so it makes sense for them to be ambiguous about what is allowed. Why limit the orthodoxy’s ability to censor what they deem to be subversive disinformation? I would rather ten true facts be censored than let one piece of misinformation go free. /s
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    > How can we have an informed electorate when misinformation (whether intentional or not) is allowed to propagate? It's not up to youtube to define what is Misinformation, if they even have a little tiny pretense of being a platform and not a publisher.
- mehphp 5y ago
  I'm not absolving YouTube (or any other media platform) of blame, but I really don't see a good solution here. We've already seen how devastating misinformation can be; however, I still tend to err on the side of freedom of speech. I don't want widespread misinformation, but who gets to decide what that is?
  - umvi 5y ago
    Can't I decide for myself what is misinformation and what isn't? Why do I need a truth arbitrating nanny to shield me from what it deems to be false?
    - mehphp 5y ago
      Because it causes real harm, same as yelling bomb on an airplane or fire in a crowded building. Misinformation can cause people to not get vaccinated or storm the capital building... As much as we'd like to think people are "deciding" anything, it's simply not the case. They just take what they hear as fact because they believe the source is trustworthy.
      - CivBase 5y ago
        > They just take what they hear as fact because they believe the source is trustworthy. No, they take what they hear as fact if they believe the source is trustworthy. So how do we determine which sources are trustworthy? Who decides that? And how are they held accountable when they're wrong? These are very serious questions which need to be answered before I can support any effort to filter out misinformation. And to go back to the bomb-on-a-plane comparison, there is one key difference between that and something like election conspiracies. The person who yelled "bomb" is only penalized if they were knowingly wrong - something that's generally pretty easy to prove when it comes to bombs and fires. They aren't prevented from saying "bomb" in the first place and they aren't reprimanded until it's known that they were lying.
        mehphp 5y ago
        > No, they take what they hear as fact if they believe the source is trustworthy. So how do we determine which sources are trustworthy? Who decides that? And how are they held accountable when they're wrong? I agree, this is exactly my hesitation I pointed out in my original post.
- peteradio 5y ago
  Yep, its pretty weird. I feel like I'm doing more to train some AI bot than actually participating in discourse on youtube videos. Some comments of mine which are visible to me are invisible for any other user. The suggestion to discover what was wrong with my comment is to alter my sentences until something gets through. WTH? How about show the rules to play ahead of time. No more youtube comments for me I guess, I didn't realize that I was talking into a void.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    If it's a neural network system, it's probably more of a general "feeling" the system has. Explainability is a notorious problem for ML systems.
    - peteradio 5y ago
      That's fucked. I bet this comment would get censored. Would it be because of the "fuck", the "censor" or the fact that now I've written both twice. Or maybe I'm flagged as a dissenter and comments are saved from review. Who even knows whats going on? Could be some mechanical turk for all we know.
umvi 5y ago
Cool so now if election fraud really does occur in the future it will be impossible to inform people about it because it will be actively suppressed.
- smitty1e 5y ago
  Precedents: who can understand them?
- refurb 5y ago
  Incorrect! If YouTube leadership thinks election fraud is happening or they get a call from their Congressional connections that fraud happened, then they’ll allow it. I for one welcome our new Silicon Valley free speech gate keepers.
- kgwxd 5y ago
  That was the plan all along.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  Don't give them ideas
gadders 5y ago
"Election integrity: Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of select past national elections, after final election results are officially certified." I'm not saying any elections were hacked or fraudulent, but how does YouTube determine which claims are true or false?
- varispeed 5y ago
  > but how does YouTube determine which claims are true or false? They will contact the Ministry of Truth
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
  Let’s just make a dog whistle, “in Russia”. Video: “Mail in ballot discrepancies (In Russia)”
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nullc 5y ago
> Distribution of hacked materials: Content that contains hacked info, the disclosure of which may interfere with democratic processes. Clearly if you're a candidate and know a report is going to come out showing some questionable conduct you need only anonymously publish it yourself as the result of a purported "hack", and youtube will apparently suppress it. Multiple generations of Americans worked tirelessly to create a neigh absolute immunity for the press and, subsequently, internet platforms to publish material, even illegally obtained, that shines light on our government and our politicians. A right not exercised is a right lost.
- refurb 5y ago
  Precisely. Publishing the Pentagon Papers was a major win for the 1st amendment. No doubt big tech would suppress it if their buddies in DC asked them to.
bruiseralmighty 5y ago
>...false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of select past national elections, after final election results are officially certified. This currently applies to: > * Any past U.S. Presidential election > * The 2021 German federal election I don't ascribe to election stealing myths; but my god, listing them out specifically really makes me question whether I'm wrong. It's like a blueprint for what to review further.
- scohesc 5y ago
  I can't wait to see the list be modified further to include other countries that these companies want to gain footholds in by favoring local governments.
- Joker_vD 5y ago
  Hey, at least you're allowed to (apparently, truthfully?) claim that fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the recent Russian parliament elections because there is no way the ruling party ought to have won those.
- justinlink 5y ago
  Any past U.S. Presidential election? I'm sure there are a lot of old videos out there about Florida in 2000. Will youtube scrub them from history?
  - trothamel 5y ago
    How about every video that contains the idea of 'Russian collusion' in 2016?
    - enragedcacti 5y ago
      I'm not sure why everyone associates the russian collusion theory with election fraud. It has always primarily been the theory that the trump campaign and the russian government colluded to generate propaganda to support Trump's election. One aspect is that the russian government also attacked our election infrastructure but that isn't at all the core of the collusion theory or what Mueller investigated. Illegal but not election fraud.
jimbob45 5y ago
There are some factual arguments to be made here and it seems like they're wading into a gray area. For example, it's public knowledge that the electronic voting machines used in some states are completely hackable[0]. Demonstrating that surely isn't propaganda - it's informational and educational to aspiring security researchers. Is YouTube going to ban that too in their crusade against anyone suggesting the election could be hacked? Even worse, the left is pushing very hard to censor any and all information about elections getting hacked. That may or may not be the right solution - I don't know and I don't care. However, if there is any election fraud in 2024 on the part of the GOP, no matter how obvious or visible, the left will have an extremely difficult time convincing anyone that it took place unless they hard-180 on their election fraud stances here. [0]https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/93385-can-the-voting-process-be-hacked https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/93385-can-the-voti...
- umvi 5y ago
  > However, if there is any election fraud in 2024 on the part of the GOP, no matter how obvious or visible, the left will have an extremely difficult time convincing anyone that it took place unless they hard-180 on their election fraud stances here. Hard-180s are done all the time, people usually can't remember claims of politicians more than 8 years back. When Trump won there was a significant portion of the left crying election fraud due to "Russian interference". A significant portion of the left claimed Trump "stole" the election from Hillary. The party roles have now reversed, nothing to see here, the roles will surely flip again whenever a party doesn't like the outcome of an election.
  - Joker_vD 5y ago
    I do remember how the warnings before and during the 2020 elections about possible Russian meddling stopped precisely the moment it became obvious Trump was going to lose.
- tzs 5y ago
  If these were to be actual election fraud in 2024 outside of isolated incidents here or there there would be evidence for it. It would then not be false claims, and would not violate YouTube's policy.
xdennis 5y ago
Not accepting results in the US is bad for democracy. Accepting faked results in authoritarian countries is even worse for democracy. But now Google is in charge of deciding which is which. Tech barons deciding what the truth is can't be good for democracy either.
- Joker_vD 5y ago
  What about the faked results in the US? In the early XX century there was quite a significant amount of election fraud at the local-level elections in the USA, so what prevents it from happening again?
  - sk2020 5y ago
    Amusingly, if you state that the political process in the United States is corrupt, then most listeners will nod in agreement. However, if you give a concrete example of such corruption, then everyone recoils in horror and disbelief. You must be a misinformation agent on foreign payroll.
- sleepysysadmin 5y ago
  >Not accepting results in the US is bad for democracy. Accepting faked results in authoritarian countries is even worse for democracy. What if the election was indeed stolen? You must accept the results? Do you just accept the results no matter what? It seems like you have to do that because it's bad for democracy otherwise right? Lets say you accept the results, but what do you do in the face of probably a stolen election? Isn't it over 50% of US states changed/updated their election rules since this last election? I guess actions speak louder than words. I don't know if I have seen so many states agree they needed to fix something so universally and so quickly. Politicians rarely work so quickly.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > Not accepting results in the US is bad for democracy. What's bad for democracy is when elections are not auditable. That's why in many countries people do it the old fashion way, with paper balots, ID, and in person, with citizens watching the counting process. Anything else is just prone to be manipulated sooner or later.
FpUser 5y ago
>"Distribution of hacked materials: Content that contains hacked info, the disclosure of which may interfere with democratic processes." Is that you Hillary? This reads to me like - "do not dig / publish dirt on candidates". Well I'd prefer for government people to stick to their own mantra that they are trying to impose on us: if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about. Do not do anything that "may interfere with democratic processes" in a first place.
tediousdemise 5y ago
Thoughtcrime is not illegal yet, so at least we still have the solitude and sanctity of our own minds.
- umvi 5y ago
  Well hopefully our phones will be able to penetrate our minds and detect when we are spreading misinformation and secretly take action to save us from ourselves. After all, our phone is the closest device to our own thoughts since it can detect and parse everything we read and search for. Apple recently developed a feature for its phones to detect when its users are depressed - just one more baby step and phones could detect when its users are misinformed. And then the phone could do subtle things to manipulate the user into being less misinformed, for example by serving pro-vaccination links when the user searched for anti-vax articles. In this way we will achieve a utopia where everyone is informed and united in thought and purpose.
- Joker_vD 5y ago
  Bloomberg recently published an article on the proposed UK and EU laws that would force Facebook not to merely delete, but completely prevent "wrong" content from even appearing in the feeds. So we're getting there: people undoubtedly would start inventing euphemisms and loopholes to circumvent such policies, and the logical end would be adopting a whitelist approach, sorry, an allowlist approach of what kind of content is allowed to be published.
  - hagbard_c 5y ago
    A form of Newspeak [1] has already started to grow in the form of people talking around the subjects mentioned in the Youtube blocklist and other 'forbidden' subjects. Some people use descriptive terms to indicate the forbidden subjects, others use non-verbal gestures, others again state emphatically they would never ever dare to claim that ... (insert the thing they actually want to claim) ... , often with a call to the censor to please not delete their account. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
stickyricky 5y ago
Right on schedule, its off the front page...
- good8675309 5y ago
  Interesting, this is blowing up and should be on the frontpage but something tells me HN has it's own algorithm or super-mods that are demoting anything that they'd prefer not be discussed. Ironic. Also sucks because I used to love the tech crowds die hard love of free speech. Total absolutists. Aaron Swartz. Wikileaks. Snowden. You name it.
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28052552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28052552 There is an algorithm but it's less malicious than you might think.
    - good8675309 5y ago
      I don't think it's quite malicious but if I'm a mod and it's common to suppress anything election related then I could see that applying here. But according to the comment you linked their algorithm only targets upvote/downvote wars, I did not observe that happening here at all.
rvz 5y ago
Well this is the technocracy they have always wanted and now this is the first glimpse of it. YouTube (Google) will never change.
fighterpilot 5y ago
Can we just get rid of all electronic voting, please. Not because it's susceptible to fraud, but because it's susceptible to fraud conspiracy theories. It's just such an easy attack vector for people who wish to sow discord. Why the heck are we keeping this attack vector open for such marginal improvements in efficiency...
- tzs 5y ago
  Most of the places for what fraud is being falsely claimed in the 2020 US elections had paper ballots. They may have been tallied by machine initially, but when the losing side alleged fraud the paper ballots were audited directly. That hasn't stopped the losers from continuing to claim that there must have been fraud.
hagbard_c 5y ago
So get off Youtube (et al) already if you have opinions which do not coincide with the currently desired narrative in Silly Valley. The writing has been on the walls for years now, MegaTech™ has taken it upon themselves to push the desired narrative and frowns upon those who dare to dissent. Remember the old Soviet joke about there not being news in Pravda, nor being truth in Izvestia? The harder the censor squeezes, the more this becomes applicable to them. Either roll your own server or get an account on some Peertube instance, use Odysee, use whatever distributed platform you care but do not rely on any of these centrally controlled organs to do your bidding - they listen to another master. Use Youtube (et al) as a content distribution network if you want, referring to your primary channel on that Peertube (etc) instance if you want but try your best not to become dependent on them. The more people do this and the more content is blocked by the censors, the easier it becomes to show the discrepancy between what there is to know and what they want you to know - or not know. This was true for Pravda and Izvestia, it may become true for Youtube-Google/Twitter/Facebook-in-its-many-guises/etc.
tmaly 5y ago
this could backfire on the democratic process if there were something real that people needed to be made aware of. It is likely that any such incident would be suppressed by the algorithm.

"Keep in mind that this isn't a complete list." Yeah, so why even give us a list. Just keep striking videos and youtubers for no clear reason. The hoops people have to hop through with copyright, politics, etc is getting crazier by the day. Limiting free speech in the name of the greater good will not end well. And good luck creating an alternative platform that isn't a total echo chamber.

pyronite 5y ago
I disagree. If someone is posting misinformation according to these standards, I'm happy about YouTube taking such things down. How can we have an informed electorate when misinformation (whether intentional or not) is allowed to propagate? We know at this point that incendiary content tends to spread faster than the often-boring truth. Turning a blind eye is a race to the bottom that encourages political parties and those with an agenda to create more of this misleading content. They give a list so you have some guidelines. Ultimately, you can argue with the guidelines and generally agreed-upon facts, and I'm sure many will.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  Who gets to define misinformation? The lab leak theory was misinformation at one point. Wearing masks was misinformation at one point. The problem with censorship is that no man is fit to play the censor.
  - belltaco 5y ago
    >The lab leak theory was misinformation at one point So? We know more about it now, so the earlier wild claims without evidence or proof were definitely misinformation at the time, intended to deflect blame from the ineptness of the politicians in power in feb 2020.
    - fighterpilot 5y ago
      Given that lab leaks are fairly common through recent history and the location of the WIV, it was a totally plausible hypothesis back then. It was just taboo for purely political reasons. The case for a lab leak now is mostly the same as it was back then - circumstantial.
      - belltaco 5y ago
        There were a lot of claims that it was a bioweapon leak, in the recent months there has been more circumstantial evidence that it might have been an accidental leak. So yes, there was a lot of misinformation at that time around this.
        vorpalhex 5y ago
        You can't badly conflate two different claims and then use that as a reason to engage in censorship.
        fighterpilot 5y ago
        The leak hypothesis itself - not merely a bioweapon leak - was verboten despite its evident plausibility as a hypothesis given a precedent of other lab leaks. Little has changed since then aside from Trump being voted out which then freed up the political left to consider this possibility in its discourse.
        belltaco 5y ago
        A case of the boy who cried wolf not being believed.
        fighterpilot 5y ago
        If you don't see a serious problem with scientists and journalists abdicating their responsibility to dispassionatly pursue the truth and the damage this does to institutions and the public confidence of those institutions, and moreover you do not even lay any blame at their feet and excuse this behavior just because the other side is more dishonest, then I can only think that you have some pretty powerful ideological blinders that have pushed you into a very partisan culture-war type worldview.
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    YouTube deciding what is and isn't misinformation has a positive side effect in that it indirectly protects the first amendment through the middle ground of private voluntary self-regulation. 1A proponents need to understand that there's a grey area between outright incitement to violence and otherwise. Within that grey area lies conspiracy theories and hate speech which can motivate actual harmful and illegal activity downstream if these ideas become sufficiently widespread. It's plausible that the unmoderated hate speech on 8chan motivated numerous lone wolf shooters, given how many manifestos have been posted there. While we may want this speech to be legal (I largely do), we should not want to voluntarily assist in the spreading of this speech above and beyond the legal requirements of 1A. Anti-1A sentiment is growing on the political left and that sentiment isn't totally invalid if we zoom into specific examples of speech motivating heinous outcomes. So nipping a real problem in the bud with private self-regulation seems to be the least slippery slopey outcome of them all.
    - shockeychap 5y ago
      > Anti-1A sentiment is growing on the political left That statement, if you stop to think about what it means for all other freedoms, should genuinely scare you. Freedom only matters if it includes the right to offend others. Anything less isn't freedom at all. If you genuinely believe in the principles of freedom, you will trust that the free exchange of all ideas - good and bad, right and wrong - is the best and only way to bring out the truth. All of this hearkens back to dark ideas in which one class of people exercise power over another. Remember what they say about power.
      - fighterpilot 5y ago
        "Free exchange of ideas... best and only way to bring out the truth." I don't believe this to be true. I only think the 1A is a good idea because it's too easy for an authoritarian government to co-opt speech restrictions. The free exchange in itself isn't what I care about. People on the whole are pretty stupid, tribal and irrational creatures. I see no reason why a free exchange of ideas can't sometimes lead to a fascist or communist state if certain ideas get enough social contagion.
- smitty1e 5y ago
  These diabolical moves are sold as purely reasonable moves that only a reactionary nitwit would object to, yes.
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
  I for one, am comfortable with the orthodoxy. The powers that be do not know how heresy will express itself, so it makes sense for them to be ambiguous about what is allowed. Why limit the orthodoxy’s ability to censor what they deem to be subversive disinformation? I would rather ten true facts be censored than let one piece of misinformation go free. /s
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > How can we have an informed electorate when misinformation (whether intentional or not) is allowed to propagate? It's not up to youtube to define what is Misinformation, if they even have a little tiny pretense of being a platform and not a publisher.
mehphp 5y ago
I'm not absolving YouTube (or any other media platform) of blame, but I really don't see a good solution here. We've already seen how devastating misinformation can be; however, I still tend to err on the side of freedom of speech. I don't want widespread misinformation, but who gets to decide what that is?
- umvi 5y ago
  Can't I decide for myself what is misinformation and what isn't? Why do I need a truth arbitrating nanny to shield me from what it deems to be false?
  - mehphp 5y ago
    Because it causes real harm, same as yelling bomb on an airplane or fire in a crowded building. Misinformation can cause people to not get vaccinated or storm the capital building... As much as we'd like to think people are "deciding" anything, it's simply not the case. They just take what they hear as fact because they believe the source is trustworthy.
    - CivBase 5y ago
      > They just take what they hear as fact because they believe the source is trustworthy. No, they take what they hear as fact if they believe the source is trustworthy. So how do we determine which sources are trustworthy? Who decides that? And how are they held accountable when they're wrong? These are very serious questions which need to be answered before I can support any effort to filter out misinformation. And to go back to the bomb-on-a-plane comparison, there is one key difference between that and something like election conspiracies. The person who yelled "bomb" is only penalized if they were knowingly wrong - something that's generally pretty easy to prove when it comes to bombs and fires. They aren't prevented from saying "bomb" in the first place and they aren't reprimanded until it's known that they were lying.
      - mehphp 5y ago
        > No, they take what they hear as fact if they believe the source is trustworthy. So how do we determine which sources are trustworthy? Who decides that? And how are they held accountable when they're wrong? I agree, this is exactly my hesitation I pointed out in my original post.
peteradio 5y ago
Yep, its pretty weird. I feel like I'm doing more to train some AI bot than actually participating in discourse on youtube videos. Some comments of mine which are visible to me are invisible for any other user. The suggestion to discover what was wrong with my comment is to alter my sentences until something gets through. WTH? How about show the rules to play ahead of time. No more youtube comments for me I guess, I didn't realize that I was talking into a void.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  If it's a neural network system, it's probably more of a general "feeling" the system has. Explainability is a notorious problem for ML systems.
  - peteradio 5y ago
    That's fucked. I bet this comment would get censored. Would it be because of the "fuck", the "censor" or the fact that now I've written both twice. Or maybe I'm flagged as a dissenter and comments are saved from review. Who even knows whats going on? Could be some mechanical turk for all we know.

umvi 5y ago

Cool so now if election fraud really does occur in the future it will be impossible to inform people about it because it will be actively suppressed.

smitty1e 5y ago
Precedents: who can understand them?
refurb 5y ago
Incorrect! If YouTube leadership thinks election fraud is happening or they get a call from their Congressional connections that fraud happened, then they’ll allow it. I for one welcome our new Silicon Valley free speech gate keepers.
kgwxd 5y ago
That was the plan all along.
ekianjo 5y ago
Don't give them ideas

gadders 5y ago

"Election integrity: Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of select past national elections, after final election results are officially certified." I'm not saying any elections were hacked or fraudulent, but how does YouTube determine which claims are true or false?

varispeed 5y ago
> but how does YouTube determine which claims are true or false? They will contact the Ministry of Truth
BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
Let’s just make a dog whistle, “in Russia”. Video: “Mail in ballot discrepancies (In Russia)”

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nullc 5y ago

> Distribution of hacked materials: Content that contains hacked info, the disclosure of which may interfere with democratic processes. Clearly if you're a candidate and know a report is going to come out showing some questionable conduct you need only anonymously publish it yourself as the result of a purported "hack", and youtube will apparently suppress it. Multiple generations of Americans worked tirelessly to create a neigh absolute immunity for the press and, subsequently, internet platforms to publish material, even illegally obtained, that shines light on our government and our politicians. A right not exercised is a right lost.

refurb 5y ago
Precisely. Publishing the Pentagon Papers was a major win for the 1st amendment. No doubt big tech would suppress it if their buddies in DC asked them to.

bruiseralmighty 5y ago

>...false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of select past national elections, after final election results are officially certified. This currently applies to: > * Any past U.S. Presidential election > * The 2021 German federal election I don't ascribe to election stealing myths; but my god, listing them out specifically really makes me question whether I'm wrong. It's like a blueprint for what to review further.

scohesc 5y ago
I can't wait to see the list be modified further to include other countries that these companies want to gain footholds in by favoring local governments.
Joker_vD 5y ago
Hey, at least you're allowed to (apparently, truthfully?) claim that fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the recent Russian parliament elections because there is no way the ruling party ought to have won those.
justinlink 5y ago
Any past U.S. Presidential election? I'm sure there are a lot of old videos out there about Florida in 2000. Will youtube scrub them from history?
- trothamel 5y ago
  How about every video that contains the idea of 'Russian collusion' in 2016?
  - enragedcacti 5y ago
    I'm not sure why everyone associates the russian collusion theory with election fraud. It has always primarily been the theory that the trump campaign and the russian government colluded to generate propaganda to support Trump's election. One aspect is that the russian government also attacked our election infrastructure but that isn't at all the core of the collusion theory or what Mueller investigated. Illegal but not election fraud.

jimbob45 5y ago

There are some factual arguments to be made here and it seems like they're wading into a gray area. For example, it's public knowledge that the electronic voting machines used in some states are completely hackable[0]. Demonstrating that surely isn't propaganda - it's informational and educational to aspiring security researchers. Is YouTube going to ban that too in their crusade against anyone suggesting the election could be hacked? Even worse, the left is pushing very hard to censor any and all information about elections getting hacked. That may or may not be the right solution - I don't know and I don't care. However, if there is any election fraud in 2024 on the part of the GOP, no matter how obvious or visible, the left will have an extremely difficult time convincing anyone that it took place unless they hard-180 on their election fraud stances here. [0]https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/93385-can-the-voting-process-be-hacked https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/93385-can-the-voti...

umvi 5y ago
> However, if there is any election fraud in 2024 on the part of the GOP, no matter how obvious or visible, the left will have an extremely difficult time convincing anyone that it took place unless they hard-180 on their election fraud stances here. Hard-180s are done all the time, people usually can't remember claims of politicians more than 8 years back. When Trump won there was a significant portion of the left crying election fraud due to "Russian interference". A significant portion of the left claimed Trump "stole" the election from Hillary. The party roles have now reversed, nothing to see here, the roles will surely flip again whenever a party doesn't like the outcome of an election.
- Joker_vD 5y ago
  I do remember how the warnings before and during the 2020 elections about possible Russian meddling stopped precisely the moment it became obvious Trump was going to lose.
tzs 5y ago
If these were to be actual election fraud in 2024 outside of isolated incidents here or there there would be evidence for it. It would then not be false claims, and would not violate YouTube's policy.

xdennis 5y ago

Not accepting results in the US is bad for democracy. Accepting faked results in authoritarian countries is even worse for democracy. But now Google is in charge of deciding which is which. Tech barons deciding what the truth is can't be good for democracy either.

Joker_vD 5y ago
What about the faked results in the US? In the early XX century there was quite a significant amount of election fraud at the local-level elections in the USA, so what prevents it from happening again?
- sk2020 5y ago
  Amusingly, if you state that the political process in the United States is corrupt, then most listeners will nod in agreement. However, if you give a concrete example of such corruption, then everyone recoils in horror and disbelief. You must be a misinformation agent on foreign payroll.
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
>Not accepting results in the US is bad for democracy. Accepting faked results in authoritarian countries is even worse for democracy. What if the election was indeed stolen? You must accept the results? Do you just accept the results no matter what? It seems like you have to do that because it's bad for democracy otherwise right? Lets say you accept the results, but what do you do in the face of probably a stolen election? Isn't it over 50% of US states changed/updated their election rules since this last election? I guess actions speak louder than words. I don't know if I have seen so many states agree they needed to fix something so universally and so quickly. Politicians rarely work so quickly.
ekianjo 5y ago
> Not accepting results in the US is bad for democracy. What's bad for democracy is when elections are not auditable. That's why in many countries people do it the old fashion way, with paper balots, ID, and in person, with citizens watching the counting process. Anything else is just prone to be manipulated sooner or later.

FpUser 5y ago

>"Distribution of hacked materials: Content that contains hacked info, the disclosure of which may interfere with democratic processes." Is that you Hillary? This reads to me like - "do not dig / publish dirt on candidates". Well I'd prefer for government people to stick to their own mantra that they are trying to impose on us: if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about. Do not do anything that "may interfere with democratic processes" in a first place.

tediousdemise 5y ago

Thoughtcrime is not illegal yet, so at least we still have the solitude and sanctity of our own minds.

umvi 5y ago
Well hopefully our phones will be able to penetrate our minds and detect when we are spreading misinformation and secretly take action to save us from ourselves. After all, our phone is the closest device to our own thoughts since it can detect and parse everything we read and search for. Apple recently developed a feature for its phones to detect when its users are depressed - just one more baby step and phones could detect when its users are misinformed. And then the phone could do subtle things to manipulate the user into being less misinformed, for example by serving pro-vaccination links when the user searched for anti-vax articles. In this way we will achieve a utopia where everyone is informed and united in thought and purpose.
Joker_vD 5y ago
Bloomberg recently published an article on the proposed UK and EU laws that would force Facebook not to merely delete, but completely prevent "wrong" content from even appearing in the feeds. So we're getting there: people undoubtedly would start inventing euphemisms and loopholes to circumvent such policies, and the logical end would be adopting a whitelist approach, sorry, an allowlist approach of what kind of content is allowed to be published.
- hagbard_c 5y ago
  A form of Newspeak [1] has already started to grow in the form of people talking around the subjects mentioned in the Youtube blocklist and other 'forbidden' subjects. Some people use descriptive terms to indicate the forbidden subjects, others use non-verbal gestures, others again state emphatically they would never ever dare to claim that ... (insert the thing they actually want to claim) ... , often with a call to the censor to please not delete their account. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

stickyricky 5y ago

Right on schedule, its off the front page...

good8675309 5y ago
Interesting, this is blowing up and should be on the frontpage but something tells me HN has it's own algorithm or super-mods that are demoting anything that they'd prefer not be discussed. Ironic. Also sucks because I used to love the tech crowds die hard love of free speech. Total absolutists. Aaron Swartz. Wikileaks. Snowden. You name it.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28052552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28052552 There is an algorithm but it's less malicious than you might think.
  - good8675309 5y ago
    I don't think it's quite malicious but if I'm a mod and it's common to suppress anything election related then I could see that applying here. But according to the comment you linked their algorithm only targets upvote/downvote wars, I did not observe that happening here at all.

rvz 5y ago

Well this is the technocracy they have always wanted and now this is the first glimpse of it. YouTube (Google) will never change.

fighterpilot 5y ago

Can we just get rid of all electronic voting, please. Not because it's susceptible to fraud, but because it's susceptible to fraud conspiracy theories. It's just such an easy attack vector for people who wish to sow discord. Why the heck are we keeping this attack vector open for such marginal improvements in efficiency...

tzs 5y ago
Most of the places for what fraud is being falsely claimed in the 2020 US elections had paper ballots. They may have been tallied by machine initially, but when the losing side alleged fraud the paper ballots were audited directly. That hasn't stopped the losers from continuing to claim that there must have been fraud.

hagbard_c 5y ago

So get off Youtube (et al) already if you have opinions which do not coincide with the currently desired narrative in Silly Valley. The writing has been on the walls for years now, MegaTech™ has taken it upon themselves to push the desired narrative and frowns upon those who dare to dissent. Remember the old Soviet joke about there not being news in Pravda, nor being truth in Izvestia? The harder the censor squeezes, the more this becomes applicable to them. Either roll your own server or get an account on some Peertube instance, use Odysee, use whatever distributed platform you care but do not rely on any of these centrally controlled organs to do your bidding - they listen to another master. Use Youtube (et al) as a content distribution network if you want, referring to your primary channel on that Peertube (etc) instance if you want but try your best not to become dependent on them. The more people do this and the more content is blocked by the censors, the easier it becomes to show the discrepancy between what there is to know and what they want you to know - or not know. This was true for Pravda and Izvestia, it may become true for Youtube-Google/Twitter/Facebook-in-its-many-guises/etc.

tmaly 5y ago

this could backfire on the democratic process if there were something real that people needed to be made aware of. It is likely that any such incident would be suppressed by the algorithm.