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The video has now been restored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VidUXZjzNVk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VidUXZjzNVk Worth a watch. Should we "assume the

The video has now been restored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VidUXZjzNVk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VidUXZjzNVk Worth a watch. Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI, and without human check? MP says: “This is an outrageous attack on free speech. Throughout the pandemic we've seen blatant attempts by Big Tech to silence opposition voices challenging the conventional wisdom. This episode serves as a further example of the worrying trend of strangling free speech" "My speech at conference was carefully researched, wholly accurate & backed up with the latest scientific evidence." "Govnt must stop the erosion of free speech online. That starts with looking again at the wholly inadequate proposals in the Online Safety Bill” "The unambiguous attempt by YouTube to censor my speech is a warning." "If YouTube is happy to attempt to silence elected Members of Parliament, then they are also happy to censor anyone uploading content to their services."

mojzu 5y ago
Yeah it seems likely to me to be an overzealous AI decision, given the background noise of anti-vaccine disinformation on youtube these days I wouldn't be surprised if they've turned up their algorithms at the cost of more false and marginal positives What's strange however is them seeming to use this to try and 'strengthen' the online safety bill which in it's current form would already be damaging to free speech online (adds massive liability for illegal/'harmful' content if it isn't removed quickly so companies will most likely block more content as a result)
- PontifexMinimus 5y ago
  > an overzealous AI decision Then they simply shouldn't use AI algorithms to censor people. > What's strange however is them seeming to use this to try and 'strengthen' the online safety bill which in it's current form would already be damaging to free speech online It's not obvious to me that the UK government has any coherent idea of what it is trying to do.
  - ColinHayhurst 5y ago
    Some would say the Bill is a symptom of Facebook Derangement Syndrome https://webdevlaw.uk/2020/12/09/facebook-derangement-syndrome/ https://webdevlaw.uk/2020/12/09/facebook-derangement-syndrom... Based on those they are consulting with that seems justfied.
- mathw 5y ago
  Sadly that is not strange - if there are any technologically literate people advising our government on policy they're not being listened to.
- hliyan 5y ago
  Should we be more forgiving of harm done by faulty algorithms than by negligent human beings? It was the company's choice to save money by automating a process that normally only human beings can do reliably. The consequences to the victim are the same regardless of the instrument used in the commission of the wrongdoing.
  - mojzu 5y ago
    Given the quantity of video uploaded to youtube I'm not sure human moderation of any significant amount of it is even possible anymore. Humans are definitely better at handling many situations but are also prone to their own biases (e.g. there were facebook moderators a while back who would take down reported content they disagreed with for religious reasons), they are often not given enough time to reasonably review a report, and when exposed to the kind of videos being reported can experience serious mental health problems Some of these could be dealt with by the companies investing more in moderation (make them employees/better pay/healthcare etc.), but if you want to moderate at the scale of youtube/facebook/etc. then I don't see how you could do it without some automated tools
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      "human moderation of any significant amount of it is even possible anymore." Then maybe free video hosting is not a viable business, why should youtube destroy all competition and then complain that checking their uploads is not possoble?
      - hliyan 5y ago
        Exactly. Perhaps if lots of little video hosting companies existed, this wouldn't be an issue. "Too big to do the right thing" seems like an even worse version of "Too big to fail".
      - mojzu 5y ago
        The argument that these companies are too big and that creates bad incentives/lack of incentives to improve is one I'm much more sympathetic to. I'd be in favour of more smaller companies/communities although I don't think this would remove the need for automated tools (e.g. smallish reddit and discord communities often use bots and other tools to automate some moderation). And to make something like this a reality you'd probably need government intervention to overcome the network effect that these bigger platforms have
andrekandre 5y ago
> "Govnt must stop the erosion of free speech online. That starts with looking again at the wholly inadequate proposals in the Online Safety Bill” why don't they (govt) open a public video site for anyone to upload to, so they don't have to mess with private sites? forcing private entities to host things they dont want to sounds like a huge can of worms
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ben_w 5y ago
  This particular government is very fond of opening cans of worms, but is always surprised and upset to find worms inside them.
- PontifexMinimus 5y ago
  It would make a lot of sense for the UK government to encourage UK-based PeerTube websites (and other federated social media such as Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, etc), and to make sure all UK government content is uploaded on such sites. Then once they have done that, and these sites have lots of users and traction, mandate that Google, Facebook etc also federate using ActivityPub. If they don't, block their sites.
  - my123 5y ago
    PeerTube doesn't scale when most of the user base nowadays is on mobile, with asymmetric connections that have data caps. (which happens to be the real world)
    - PontifexMinimus 5y ago
      > most of the user base nowadays is on mobile I've never actually watched a video on a mobile device (I tried once and didn't have enough bandwidth). If I'm at home or office, I have a desktop PC, and if I'm out and about I have better things to be doing with my time.
    - 5y ago
thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
>Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI, and without human check? Isn't that exactly the problem? Social media platforms' business models depend on not being able to moderate all content. Examples like this are an inevitability of the concept.
protomyth 5y ago
How about we blame the company regardless of the technology used? The result is the same.
paganel 5y ago
> Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI, Imo that would be the worst, because a human doing it can be corrected (more training, revised check-lists etc.), but afaik AI moderating in its current form is a black hole and it will remain a black hole for the foreseeable future.
- oauea 5y ago
  AI can easily be turned off.
- ColinHayhurst 5y ago
  I agree and should have said "should we assume the best of intentions by humans". Delegating decisions on freedom of speech to AI is a flawed and dangerous path.
jameshart 5y ago
The idea that a member of parliament should enjoy at least a a much freedom of speech over private media as the broader public actually deserves some challenge. In the UK tradition, political speech in the private sphere is somewhat tightly regulated. As an MP he can’t buy advertising space on terrestrial TV; during election cycles if he is featured on TV the broadcasters are obliged to give equal time to his opponents; there are strictly limited amounts of time permitted for ‘party political broadcasts’ and they are allocated to all parties equally. So the precedent in UK law is not that MPs have unfettered access to broadcast their private speeches. Quite the opposite. As a member of parliament he does enjoy parliamentary privilege, and the ability to put his views on the permanent public record of Hansard by delivering a speech in the Commons. That should give him quite enough of a soapbox. It certainly doesn’t entitle him to oblige a private entity to carry his speech without comment - and any legal regime which required such a thing would be dangerously authoritarian. When political campaigners show up at a radio station and demand to be put on the air, we don’t call that ‘normal exercise of free speech’, we call that ‘the first step in a coup’.
- torstenvl 5y ago
  > the broadcasters are obliged to give equal time to his opponents Um. This is not the rebuttal to the MP's position that you think it is.
  - jameshart 5y ago
    It might not be intended to be the rebuttal you are assuming it is. I’m not saying that British law broadly sets a precedent of requiring equal treatment of contrasting political views. It absolutely does not - look at the UK newspaper opinion pages. I am mainly responding to the ‘if they’ll do this to an MP they will do it to you’ syllogism, which seems to rest on the underlying assumption that an MP has at least the same speech rights (on a private website) as a member of the public - when in fact the ability of an MP to oblige a private company to carry their speech is expressly limited. I am arguing that the fact he is an MP does not entitle him to special treatment and indeed historically brings his speech rights under greater scrutiny. My point is mostly that MPs are not broadly entitled to use private platforms to speak unopposed, and in fact are more restricted by current law in that respect than people who are not MPs or parliamentary candidates.
ralfn 5y ago
>Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI, and without human check? How is that 'the best'. Only Silicon Valley thinks that is a valid legal excuse for anything. If you can't operate within the law you can't operate. The US better start regulating their companies or you end up with a trade war due to the whole world including Europe just kicking these vendors out of the market entirely and permanently
- rawTruthHurts 5y ago
  >How is that 'the best'. Hence the quotes wrapping sentence.
- revolvingocelot 5y ago
  >If you can't operate within the law you can't operate That's demonstrably untrue. Look at the rise of Uber. If I started running an unlicensed taxi, they'd come down on me very hard and very quickly, but Uber had the resources to tie up enforcement until public opinion about their VC-subsidized "taxis" prevented any action.
  - ralfn 5y ago
    >they'd come down on me very hard and very quickly I can't speak for the rest of the world, but here in the Netherlands, it wouldn't have been the state that would come down 'hard'. (its the other cab drivers, physically assaulting you) As a response to this kind of energy, we actually ended up liberizing our cab market a lot more before Uber came. And when Uber came here there was no good will for the existing established cab companies, because people considered them borderline mobsters.
- true_religion 5y ago
  Okay. So it wasn’t a mistake. Google like any other media company decided to exercise editorial control and let part A speak while muzzling party B. Now what? There is no consensus of what to do with political speech and media. In some counties only the ruling government gets access. In some counties, only the leading parties have access and all must share time equally. In others, you only get the access that you can buy. In still others, no one gets access except under regulated conditions like a debate. If Google takes a step back from the label of Big Tech and admits that YouTube is just another multinational media company… then what do they lose?
caeril 5y ago
> wholly accurate & backed up with the latest scientific evidence. Much of the problem comes down to the fact that the "science" changes quite frequently. When new evidence appears, which updates our Bayesian Priors ( airborne vs aerosol/fomites, vaccine type effectiveness, delta variant transmittivity, ventilator usefulness, lab leak hypothesis, comorbidity statistics, etc ) the Powers That Be rely on the pre-update "science" to determine if censorship is warranted. One can argue if censorship of "disinformation" is a societal good, and I won't litigate that general matter here, but it becomes a particular point of contention if what is classified as disinformation changes with every Lancet publication.

mojzu 5y ago

Yeah it seems likely to me to be an overzealous AI decision, given the background noise of anti-vaccine disinformation on youtube these days I wouldn't be surprised if they've turned up their algorithms at the cost of more false and marginal positives What's strange however is them seeming to use this to try and 'strengthen' the online safety bill which in it's current form would already be damaging to free speech online (adds massive liability for illegal/'harmful' content if it isn't removed quickly so companies will most likely block more content as a result)

PontifexMinimus 5y ago
> an overzealous AI decision Then they simply shouldn't use AI algorithms to censor people. > What's strange however is them seeming to use this to try and 'strengthen' the online safety bill which in it's current form would already be damaging to free speech online It's not obvious to me that the UK government has any coherent idea of what it is trying to do.
- ColinHayhurst 5y ago
  Some would say the Bill is a symptom of Facebook Derangement Syndrome https://webdevlaw.uk/2020/12/09/facebook-derangement-syndrome/ https://webdevlaw.uk/2020/12/09/facebook-derangement-syndrom... Based on those they are consulting with that seems justfied.
mathw 5y ago
Sadly that is not strange - if there are any technologically literate people advising our government on policy they're not being listened to.
hliyan 5y ago
Should we be more forgiving of harm done by faulty algorithms than by negligent human beings? It was the company's choice to save money by automating a process that normally only human beings can do reliably. The consequences to the victim are the same regardless of the instrument used in the commission of the wrongdoing.
- mojzu 5y ago
  Given the quantity of video uploaded to youtube I'm not sure human moderation of any significant amount of it is even possible anymore. Humans are definitely better at handling many situations but are also prone to their own biases (e.g. there were facebook moderators a while back who would take down reported content they disagreed with for religious reasons), they are often not given enough time to reasonably review a report, and when exposed to the kind of videos being reported can experience serious mental health problems Some of these could be dealt with by the companies investing more in moderation (make them employees/better pay/healthcare etc.), but if you want to moderate at the scale of youtube/facebook/etc. then I don't see how you could do it without some automated tools
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "human moderation of any significant amount of it is even possible anymore." Then maybe free video hosting is not a viable business, why should youtube destroy all competition and then complain that checking their uploads is not possoble?
    - hliyan 5y ago
      Exactly. Perhaps if lots of little video hosting companies existed, this wouldn't be an issue. "Too big to do the right thing" seems like an even worse version of "Too big to fail".
    - mojzu 5y ago
      The argument that these companies are too big and that creates bad incentives/lack of incentives to improve is one I'm much more sympathetic to. I'd be in favour of more smaller companies/communities although I don't think this would remove the need for automated tools (e.g. smallish reddit and discord communities often use bots and other tools to automate some moderation). And to make something like this a reality you'd probably need government intervention to overcome the network effect that these bigger platforms have

andrekandre 5y ago

> "Govnt must stop the erosion of free speech online. That starts with looking again at the wholly inadequate proposals in the Online Safety Bill” why don't they (govt) open a public video site for anyone to upload to, so they don't have to mess with private sites? forcing private entities to host things they dont want to sounds like a huge can of worms

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ben_w 5y ago
This particular government is very fond of opening cans of worms, but is always surprised and upset to find worms inside them.
PontifexMinimus 5y ago
It would make a lot of sense for the UK government to encourage UK-based PeerTube websites (and other federated social media such as Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, etc), and to make sure all UK government content is uploaded on such sites. Then once they have done that, and these sites have lots of users and traction, mandate that Google, Facebook etc also federate using ActivityPub. If they don't, block their sites.
- my123 5y ago
  PeerTube doesn't scale when most of the user base nowadays is on mobile, with asymmetric connections that have data caps. (which happens to be the real world)
  - PontifexMinimus 5y ago
    > most of the user base nowadays is on mobile I've never actually watched a video on a mobile device (I tried once and didn't have enough bandwidth). If I'm at home or office, I have a desktop PC, and if I'm out and about I have better things to be doing with my time.
  - 5y ago

thrwyoilarticle 5y ago

>Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI, and without human check? Isn't that exactly the problem? Social media platforms' business models depend on not being able to moderate all content. Examples like this are an inevitability of the concept.

protomyth 5y ago

How about we blame the company regardless of the technology used? The result is the same.

paganel 5y ago

> Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI, Imo that would be the worst, because a human doing it can be corrected (more training, revised check-lists etc.), but afaik AI moderating in its current form is a black hole and it will remain a black hole for the foreseeable future.

oauea 5y ago
AI can easily be turned off.
ColinHayhurst 5y ago
I agree and should have said "should we assume the best of intentions by humans". Delegating decisions on freedom of speech to AI is a flawed and dangerous path.

jameshart 5y ago

The idea that a member of parliament should enjoy at least a a much freedom of speech over private media as the broader public actually deserves some challenge. In the UK tradition, political speech in the private sphere is somewhat tightly regulated. As an MP he can’t buy advertising space on terrestrial TV; during election cycles if he is featured on TV the broadcasters are obliged to give equal time to his opponents; there are strictly limited amounts of time permitted for ‘party political broadcasts’ and they are allocated to all parties equally. So the precedent in UK law is not that MPs have unfettered access to broadcast their private speeches. Quite the opposite. As a member of parliament he does enjoy parliamentary privilege, and the ability to put his views on the permanent public record of Hansard by delivering a speech in the Commons. That should give him quite enough of a soapbox. It certainly doesn’t entitle him to oblige a private entity to carry his speech without comment - and any legal regime which required such a thing would be dangerously authoritarian. When political campaigners show up at a radio station and demand to be put on the air, we don’t call that ‘normal exercise of free speech’, we call that ‘the first step in a coup’.

torstenvl 5y ago
> the broadcasters are obliged to give equal time to his opponents Um. This is not the rebuttal to the MP's position that you think it is.
- jameshart 5y ago
  It might not be intended to be the rebuttal you are assuming it is. I’m not saying that British law broadly sets a precedent of requiring equal treatment of contrasting political views. It absolutely does not - look at the UK newspaper opinion pages. I am mainly responding to the ‘if they’ll do this to an MP they will do it to you’ syllogism, which seems to rest on the underlying assumption that an MP has at least the same speech rights (on a private website) as a member of the public - when in fact the ability of an MP to oblige a private company to carry their speech is expressly limited. I am arguing that the fact he is an MP does not entitle him to special treatment and indeed historically brings his speech rights under greater scrutiny. My point is mostly that MPs are not broadly entitled to use private platforms to speak unopposed, and in fact are more restricted by current law in that respect than people who are not MPs or parliamentary candidates.

ralfn 5y ago

>Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI, and without human check? How is that 'the best'. Only Silicon Valley thinks that is a valid legal excuse for anything. If you can't operate within the law you can't operate. The US better start regulating their companies or you end up with a trade war due to the whole world including Europe just kicking these vendors out of the market entirely and permanently

rawTruthHurts 5y ago
>How is that 'the best'. Hence the quotes wrapping sentence.
revolvingocelot 5y ago
>If you can't operate within the law you can't operate That's demonstrably untrue. Look at the rise of Uber. If I started running an unlicensed taxi, they'd come down on me very hard and very quickly, but Uber had the resources to tie up enforcement until public opinion about their VC-subsidized "taxis" prevented any action.
- ralfn 5y ago
  >they'd come down on me very hard and very quickly I can't speak for the rest of the world, but here in the Netherlands, it wouldn't have been the state that would come down 'hard'. (its the other cab drivers, physically assaulting you) As a response to this kind of energy, we actually ended up liberizing our cab market a lot more before Uber came. And when Uber came here there was no good will for the existing established cab companies, because people considered them borderline mobsters.
true_religion 5y ago
Okay. So it wasn’t a mistake. Google like any other media company decided to exercise editorial control and let part A speak while muzzling party B. Now what? There is no consensus of what to do with political speech and media. In some counties only the ruling government gets access. In some counties, only the leading parties have access and all must share time equally. In others, you only get the access that you can buy. In still others, no one gets access except under regulated conditions like a debate. If Google takes a step back from the label of Big Tech and admits that YouTube is just another multinational media company… then what do they lose?

caeril 5y ago

> wholly accurate & backed up with the latest scientific evidence. Much of the problem comes down to the fact that the "science" changes quite frequently. When new evidence appears, which updates our Bayesian Priors ( airborne vs aerosol/fomites, vaccine type effectiveness, delta variant transmittivity, ventilator usefulness, lab leak hypothesis, comorbidity statistics, etc ) the Powers That Be rely on the pre-update "science" to determine if censorship is warranted. One can argue if censorship of "disinformation" is a societal good, and I won't litigate that general matter here, but it becomes a particular point of contention if what is classified as disinformation changes with every Lancet publication.