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YouTube permanently bans Fox News host Dan Bongino

• qwertyuiop_ 5y ago
  He talked about this book. https://www.amazon.com/Red-Handed-American-Elites-Helping-China/dp/0063061147/ https://www.amazon.com/Red-Handed-American-Elites-Helping-Ch...
• nonethewiser 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30092136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30092136
• analogdreams 5y ago
  In a week or so whatever they claimed to be 'misinformation' will likely be the new talking point of the CDC and another group of users will have moved on to rumble, gettr, etc. Keep it up Google....
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • nonethewiser 5y ago
    He said masks were useless. That's why he was banned. The US chief medical advisor said the same thing. But that's ok because he didnt believe it and only said it to deceive the public.
• usaphp 5y ago
  Why is it removed from the frontpage? It got almost 20 points in less than 30 minutes, and then suddenly got removed from the front page?
  • JohnTHaller 5y ago
    Because people flagged it. Quite a few people likely think that someone violating YouTube's terms of service (circumventing a suspension by posting on a second channel) and being banned for said violation isn't something that fits Hacker News.
  • nonethewiser 5y ago
    Same thing happened with this thread earlier today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30087769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30087769
  • knaik94 5y ago
    It may have initially been an attempt to avoid political topics. It may also have been because a moderator and users may have expected there will be a lot of non productive comments because people from both sides tend to be passionate. Either way I see it now. Edit Now I don't.
  • floatingatoll 5y ago
    User flags can do that. There’s also a flamewar response algorithm that reacts poorly to, for example, ideological wars between differing groups. You could email the mods using the page footer’s contact link and let them know that you’re seeing unusual behavior in the site; they can look into further, but might otherwise miss your comment here without the email.
  • dan-robertson 5y ago
    Postings are penalised if the comments/votes ratio is high
  • sm4rk0 5y ago
    Silent censorship? I tried posting this article today and it was [dead] immediately: https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/i-live-in-ukraine-we-have-been-living-under-the-looming-shadow-of-russian-invasion-for-eight-years-no-one-here-is-freaking-out-as-much-as-my-relatives-in-the-us-are-youre-getting-heavy-pro/ https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/i-live-in-ukraine-we-hav...
  • fuckcensorship 5y ago
    Hacker News has many undocumented features [1] which should give you some insight into how/why this happened. [1]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
  • knaik94 5y ago
    In case you haven't seen the guidelines in a bit. I assume it is people mass flagging because people believe it's off topic for being political. And maybe that the comments won't be an on topic and productive discussion even if the article does fit from a perspective. This article is gone again. It's not censorship. People just don't want to discuss it. I imagine it's the same for some other topics mentioned in this comment thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did." "What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic"
  • ahthat 5y ago
    Interesting. I like Hacker News because its community is so great compared to nearly every other platform I know. Too bad that we can't talk about stuff like this.
    • dang 5y ago
      Certainly we can and do talk about stuff like this. The issue is the other way around: there have been tons of threads about topics just like this already. That leads to having the same discussion over and over again. Since the core principle of HN is intellectual curiosity, it's important to avoid too much repetition (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). That's particularly important when it's repetition of a high-indignation topic, since indignation shuts down curiosity even faster than repetition does. BigTech bannage in the eras of Trump and Covid is a classic Major Ongoing Topic (MOT). Such topics have a way of appearing over and over again and getting upvoted a lot, because people feel strongly about them. The problem is that there's little curiosity value to be gained from having them repeat so much—they tend to be generic and to metastasize into flamewars. Yet sometimes the MOT mutates in an interesting way. What's best for HN is if the interesting milestones in a MOT saga get front page threads, but not all the garden-variety instances. Over the years, we worked out a heuristic for this which turns out to work well: it's called SNI (Significant New Information). Each time there's SNI, it makes sense to have a fresh discussion because there's something fresh to discuss. Each time there isn't SNI, it makes sense not to have a frontpage discussion, because that discussion has already taken place, usually many times. We came up with this approach after the Snowden MOT of 2013, in which users were rightly complaining when one article after another would show up on the front page repeating things that had already been reported and discussed. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... Moderators haven't touched this post, btw—users flagged it. We sometimes turn off flags when the article is interesting, contains SNI, and is able to support a substantive HN thread. But I don't think this story really clears that bar. It's a yet-another case in a long sequence. People already know how they feel about it and even already know what they have to say about it. That makes for HN badness.
• choward 5y ago
  Name one time in history the people on the side of censorship been in the right. If someone says something you disagree with then you debate it to convince people that you're right. You don't censor them. The only censorship that should happen is when something illegal is said. If you don't want someone saying something, get a law passed. I'd love to hear counterexamples. And for those of you who think it's okay because "free market" and "private corporation", you're naive to think the government isn't heavily influencing social media censorship.
  • nonethewiser 5y ago
    We should expect youtube to value free speech regardless of whether or not they're legally obligated.
    • chrischen 5y ago
      They value their bottom line, and censorship is being done because they think it will help their bottom line, not because of some belief in being right. They're just trying to avoid controversy because it's bad for business.
      • worried4future 5y ago
        You are correct and I believe that it therefore falls on government to effectively manage that situation. Youtube is basically a monopoly and without trying to debate the ethics or correctness of how they got there, the message should be that they can choose to uphold certain principles like free speech or they can choose to be broken up.
    • ninkendo 5y ago
      Nah. I prefer well-moderated platforms (the one I’m currently typing into is a great example.) I’m ok with bars throwing out rude patrons, and I’m ok with YouTube banning nutjobs. Nutjobs can pay for their own video hosting.
      • 5y ago
• chasd00 5y ago
  Did any of the people banned for wondering aloud if the Covid-19 virus could have escaped from a research lab even get an apology? YouTube censors are a joke.
  • josephcsible 5y ago
    Forget an apology. Did they ever even get unbanned?
  • invalidname 5y ago
    The problem was never with that. It's OK to speculate and ask. Most of these people Trump included, used this as a typical persuasion tactic to stop conversation. Similar to a child instinctively opening a different debate front to hide his misdeeds. This is actually very effective as people ended up debating if the virus was man made (which has ramifications but requires evidence). Instead of debating important short term policies (distancing, masks etc.). This type of debate was a precursor to the relatively strong anti-vaxx movement which is responsible for our current predicament. There's a way to have public discourse. they weren't they were acting as a propaganda machine. They have freedom of speech but not of amplification by commercial entities.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• COGlory 5y ago
• artursapek 5y ago
  Biden said that if we take the vaccine, we won't catch coronavirus. This was misinformation. Why hasn't YouTube banned the White House's channel?
  • analogdreams 5y ago
  • tablespoon 5y ago
    > Biden said that if we take the vaccine, we won't catch coronavirus. This was misinformation. Why hasn't YouTube banned the White House's channel? Honestly? Because Biden is trying to tackle a real problem, while people like Bongino are working to sabotage those efforts (usually due to incompetence or a kind of "malicious indifference").
    • artursapek 5y ago
      Who is to judge if Biden is actually trying to solve the problem? He said something that was false, that's misinformation. How do you know he didn't know it was false when he said it?
      • tablespoon 5y ago
        > Who is to judge if Biden is actually trying to solve the problem? I am. It's the difference between advocating or taking specific actions to address a problem and reflexively arguing against and resisting every action proposed. > He said something that was false, that's misinformation. Misinformation does not simply mean "false statement." I'm no dictionary writer, but it has strong connotations along the lines of "misleading to bad ends." > How do you know he didn't know it was false when he said it? Honestly, I don't give your report much credence, so I wouldn't go so far as the say he even said what you claim. Given the presentation, I judge there's quite a high chance he either said no such thing, or your report is distorted (like through a game of telephone). And even if you did quote him correctly, your line of questioning gives the impression of either being sophomoric or deliberately obtuse. The most reasonable course of action is to leave it up to you to figure out how to evaluate (without telepathy) when something is honest misstatement vs a deliberate lie.
• friendlydog 5y ago
  Alphabet should rip the bandaid off and just ban all conservatives, antivaxers, and other undesirables from using their products.
• AdrianB1 5y ago
  > YouTube suspended [...] after he posted a video where he questioned the effectiveness of using masks against the coronavirus, a violation of the company's pandemic-related misinformation policy Is this true? How does this make sense, questioning is misinformation? (Am I already breaching a misinformation policy by asking these questions?).
• mrintellectual 5y ago
  Actions like this do nothing to repair the growing rift between conservative and liberal groups.
  • RealityWinner 5y ago
    Actions like what? Receiving a temporary ban for spreading harmful misinformation and then receiving a permanent ban after evading that ban. > YouTube suspended one of Bongino's YouTube channels on Jan. 20 after he posted a video where he questioned the effectiveness of using masks against the coronavirus, a violation of the company's pandemic-related misinformation policy. His later attempt to circumvent that one-week suspension by posting from another channel triggered a permanent ban, YouTube said.
    • ahthat 5y ago
      The problem is that the mouthpiece is assuming a monopoly over truth. It is utterly arrogant for any entity to do so. Let the talking heads debate, and the minds of men and women in the world decide. If we abandon faith in each other to discern for each his or her own self what truth is to be, we run the risk of traveling down the path whereon Free Thought and discourse is no longer celebrated but discouraged by ever-present and ever-domineering structures of power, damning future generations to totalitarianism.
      • RealityWinner 5y ago
        You are free to question the initial suspension but the permanent is the topic of discussion here as the result of the ban evasion. Violating Terms of Service is not a partisan issue. Might I direct you to the Paradox of Tolerance[1] in the meantime. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
    • AdrianB1 5y ago
      Questioning = spreading harmful misinformation? Or actually we should question everything? (if asking 'why', search for the meme).
• ahthat 5y ago
  Very sad. The internet was crafted and promoted in a spirit of radical social experimentation, where all kinds of ideas could be shared at light-speed all over the world, each man could have a mouthpiece, and we'd have access to the greatest library of unfiltered information ever devised. These internet companies have ridden the crest of this wave of revolution in human thinking, many glorifying their interest in human revolutions along the way. As private enterprises these companies have the right to police their platforms, but they betray the spirit that gave wind to this experiment in human Idea. And now we are seeing the grand experiment failing. The last 245 years have seen a great experiment in society and freedom, with the society to speak freely, and that the Market of Ideas might itself guide truth, arbitration by the few kept to a minimum. The Internet has been the culmination of this experiment. We are in danger of failing it today. I say WE, because it is ultimately us today collectively, with however much influence we can afford to effect, many Americans and also citizens of the world, that hold within our power to determine for good or for ill the course of our time in the span of the generations. It is US: We are the ones who are fated to determine whether a world society can truly withstand free discourse or crumble utterly beneath it, that the individual of society today might have in his ability in the greater average to discern Truth where the matter is up to his faculties, and that this Truth may will out from the collective good minds and hearts of all men upon this Earth. This is the moment in history, let us not fail this chance to today together continue to craft the free societies of tomorrow with good faith in the heart of mankind. If enough of us do our part honestly, there is a good chance that the generations of tomorrow might look on this moment and say, "In this time, the goodness of humanity prevailed." WBS
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    Meh. YouTube is only one site among millions. They're a profit-seeking business, not a charity. They're under no obligation to host Dan Bongino's video content, given that they have clear policies against posting health-related content that's widely discredited as misinformation.
    • ahthat 5y ago
      Indeed they do. The problem is their betrayal of the spirit of the internet. We built the internet with a vision of optimism, but now that the vision is in danger. When things become difficult for only a moment, we abandon that spirit altogether. For shame. It'd be much better if their service didn't abandon it. The Internet has been the great social experiment of our time. I'll take any opportunity to speak out against actions that diminish free and open discourse.
• ggm 5y ago
  I know I'll get thumped for this. But, youtube is only de-facto a commons. its actually not the commons, its a contract-enforced space, with T&C and its about as far from "the public forum" that free-speech rights attach to as its possible to be. Now, we can talk about how in practice these places are the only commons we have and sure, if you want to do that, we can talk about google, the monopoly, regulation of effective public spaces, free speech. But its property. Its google's property. They can pay groundskeeper willie to yell "get off my lawn" and not be un-constitutional.