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YouTube suspends The Hill for playing clip of Trump denying election results

• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• stereoradonc 5y ago
  The extent of the "censorship" is getting ridiculous. It is an overreach of the platforms.
  • michaelmrose 5y ago
    Why would you imagine that anyone has a right to have their content on youtube. How is it in any way overreach. Surely its users can vote with their fingertips for a different site if they have a problem with it.
    • Talanes 5y ago
      Users have just as much right to complain about policies they find ridiculous as they do to leave.
      • michaelmrose 5y ago
        Yes but they have no right moral or legal to force tech companies to be complicit in the spreading of their malicious lies.
        • Talanes 5y ago
          Believing that someone shouldn't do something and that someone shouldn't have the right to do something are not the same thing. GP comment only stated the first and I see no reason to pile on with retorts assuming they really meant the second. Also, I don't see how systematically scrubbing video recordings of a man who loves to say "I never said that" about things he has said on camera is a net gain to truth-telling.
      • mulmen 5y ago
        And the rest of us are entitled to not find those complaints interesting.
  • downandout 5y ago
    Agreed…the hypocrisy of these decisions grows increasingly outrageous each day. For example, the reasoning behind the banning of Donald Trump from Twitter was that his rhetoric was “dangerous,” in that it may have encouraged/not discouraged the January 6 riot. On Tuesday (March 1), a Russian official threatened actual war over the economic sanctions the world is taking against his country [1]. His account is still active and the tweet is still up. [1] https://twitter.com/medvedevrussiae/status/1498619750334750725?s=21 https://twitter.com/medvedevrussiae/status/14986197503347507...
    • pfisch 5y ago
      It is reasonable to say that Donald Trump caused the January 6 insurrection. The bigger issue for platform owners is that the insurrection represents catastrophic risk to them, and it is within their power to prevent it. The social media platforms can't prevent if Russia goes to war with NATO. Censoring the russian official won't do anything.
      • headsoup 5y ago
        How did the 'insurrection' cause catastrophic risk to Twitter?
        • heavyset_go 5y ago
          Much of it was organized on social media, and many those who participated it used the platforms to live stream and tell more people to come and participate, too.
          • sacrosancty 5y ago
            Isn't that the opposite of catastrophic risk, and instead an opportunity for more active users?
            • headsoup 5y ago
              And is it those platforms' responsibility to enforce thought-crime intervention anyway? It's easy after the fact to lay blame, but interfering in discussion, even heated and wild, is an easy slope into censorship and tyranny.
  • Program_Install 5y ago
    I disagree, if you don’t like it you can move to another platform. No one is forcing you to use it. For that matter “The Hill” can create their own. Always silly, the entitlement to someone else platform based on some misunderstanding of censorship and the 1st amendment.
    • selfhifive 5y ago
      Or, if you don't like it, don't watch the channel or leave a dislike or comment why the claim is wrong. This isn't even a call to violence or targeted harassment. It's the opinion of a man about election results.
      • headsoup 5y ago
        I think you missed the bit where the platform removed content for the mere mention of Trump. So you agree YouTube is perfectly ok to remove content because it mentions 'the opinion of a man about election results.'? And if Trump was to hypothetically win in 2024, would it be perfectly fine for YouTube to remove any content which is dissenting of Trump? I'm sure a dislike or negative comment would stop that...
        • scarface74 5y ago
          Yes. There is nothing stopping Trump from creating his own video platform. He is supposedly a billionaire isn’t he?
          • headsoup 5y ago
            And of course nothing from stopping Biden creating his own platform should the tables turn, right? It's true the large social platforms are privately owned and so they can censor to their hearts content, but given the obliquity and integration these largest platforms have in the social fabric, is that reasonable? Should they at least have clear moderation policies? It's an issue that needs some hefty discussion and evaluation especially, as we're seeing in this thread, the outsized influence on and control of public discourse they have.
  • scarface74 5y ago
    The government censors. How is it not an unnecessary encroachment on liberty when the government tells a private entity what they must publish?
    • odessacubbage 5y ago
      the fcc does that every single day.
      • scarface74 5y ago
        The FCC has a say on what goes on over the public airways - not cable or the internet.
  • forgingahead 5y ago
    The incredibly dangerous outcome of all this is precisely what foolish commentators are suggesting: alternatives will be built, that themselves will become echo chambers. If you disagree with certain ideas, you have to fight it in the open. That's how we get a big tent with general consensus across key issues, and avoid parallel universes of polar opposite information. The end result of all this is just going to be a truly Balkanised / multipolar world, but instead of geographical boundaries, it's all going to be in the mind. Your neighbour and you could have totally different ideas about certain issues - because you are consuming and contributing to totally different sets of information. And that will lead to immense physical conflict in the future. Very worrying times right now.
    • mistermann 5y ago
      > The incredibly dangerous outcome of all this is precisely what foolish commentators are suggesting: alternatives will be built, that themselves will become echo chambers. What if the dangerous outcome is what's happening right here in this thread, and the thousands of others like it here on HN and elsewhere? Right in front of our eyes every day but we cannot see it, because it is normal.
  • yibg 5y ago
    Why is this type of "censorship" problematic? Is it also problematic that youtube doesn't host porn?
  • ayngg 5y ago
    Based on what I have seen and what I have heard people say, the principle of freedom of speech is probably dead in the west. People will give their sanctimonious justifications like "it only means the government can't censor not us," "it's freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences," or misuse quotes like Popper's intolerance towards intolerance, or Schenck v. United States's yelling fire in a theater, but in reality the principle of free speech is a foundational social element from which the law is built upon, not the other way around. If society doesn't believe in freedom of speech then it doesn't matter if the government upholds that standard for itself anymore. If we as a society aren't capable of having empathy towards people who have differing opinions instead of dismissing them, then censoring them after ignoring them has caused their beliefs to radicalize to a point, that is the recipe for making politics more entrenched, polarized and escalated than they already are. Yeah just go build your own platform they will say as if it had not been attempted numerous times only to be censored off every hosting/ payment/ app platforms they could use or hacked to have all the personal information of their users doxxed because they had "bad opinions." Even the ones that actually exist just become hiveminds of their own because they become populated by people who have been censored everywhere else, as if having every community devolve into hive minded safe spaces is actually desirable.
    • nebula8804 5y ago
      > as if it had not been attempted numerous times only to be censored off every hosting/ payment/ app platforms Was this really something that stopped any of the services? >or hacked to have all the personal information of their users doxxed because they had "bad opinions." Come on this is not fair. This was caused by these services choosing to hire low skilled developers. The guy building Parler didn't even understand the proper way to set up his authentication strategy nor did he really understand his database and its advantages/limitations. If anything, this should teach the other side to respect the effort that goes into developing these platforms(this disrespect for the skillset is something I see A LOT among the right wing youtubers I follow). They are so freaking proud to be not one of the "elites" by eschewing the desire for knowledge and a love of learning so much so that it bites them in the ass when they are booted off an existing platform and then realize this tech stuff is so hard. >Even the ones that actually exist just become hiveminds of their own because they become populated by people who have been censored everywhere else, as if having every community devolve into hive minded safe spaces is actually desirable. These platforms need to welcome the other side then, the ones doing the censoring.
• choward 5y ago
  This is inexcusable. Just cancelled my YouTube premium subscription. All they did was play a clip from CPAC. I wish nothing but the worst for Google.
  • coolso 5y ago
    Over the past year I've switched from Google search to DDG; Google Maps to Apple Maps; Chromecast to Apple TV+; and Drive to Dropbox. I've held off on switching away from Gmail, but I'm switching to something else tonight. Suggestions welcome. By the way, not that I would support this at all (since I believe in free speech), but any idea if any speeches from Putin or Xi, or official government accounts from either country have been banned from Twitter or YouTube et. al. like our own US President's social media accounts were? I'm guessing not likely, given that they've really done nothing about ISIS accounts in the past, or posts from those on the "left" side of the culture wars calling for and supporting outright violence in US cities or against individuals.
    • adamhearn 5y ago
      Protonmail or fastmail are my go to hosted mail providers.
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      I pay for fastmail and iCloud+ email now that it is included in the monthly bundle.
    • k2enemy 5y ago
      A common suggestion, and one that I myself chose, is Fastmail. I have nothing but good things to say about them. Fairly inexpensive, fast, and great tools for using a custom domain (which I also highly recommend).
      • lliamander 5y ago
        How do you choose a name for a custom domain?
• scantis 5y ago
  Right on. If you are dumb enough to censor, you can only censor content and the frame you are looking through doesn't make any difference. Imagine in a totalitarian regime, you would like to inform people on system critical thoughts others have been executed for, so people can avoid them.
  • tyler_sf 5y ago
    I can imagine a regime like this having enough people who simply enjoy the killing.
    • cryptonector 5y ago
      Ask Argentines. I'm not sure how many killers they had during the Proceso, but however many it was, they killed many. And, crucially, people knew, and they looked the other way, and if need be said of the victims that "they must have done something". (What else were they going to do anyways? If you live under a murderous regime, maybe the best thing to do is not rock the boat and hope you survive, and the last thing you want is a knock at 3AM and the cattle prod put to your genitals a few hours later and your drugged broken self tossed out of a plane into the ocean a few days later. There's a always enough people who would enjoy the killing, if only someone would employ them to do it. And most people would probably deal with it as long as they aren't the victims. It's really sad. Our societies are very vulnerable to falling into such messes.
  • noduerme 5y ago
    That's the purpose of newspeak and doublethink. To ultimately communicate by their absence from official channels the list of things that cannot be said. Of course, Russia has has more experience with this than anyone. But as a sibling post says, they've reached the point where plenty just enjoy killing, and the west could too, at some point.
    • scantis 5y ago
      It scares me, that some of us actually enjoy the killing and the carnage. The problem of newspeak is that most of us don't see it, until it's too late. When we feed the machine with our fears, it will cut us off. Most of us still like each other.
• empressplay 5y ago
  I see a number of defamation cases Google won based on neutrality being relitigated in the near future. But that's okay, they have deep pockets.
  • heavyset_go 5y ago
    The CDA ensures that any operator of an interactive computer service is not liable for user uploaded content, even if the operator curates user content.
    • lliamander 5y ago
      As it should. But the capricousness and arrogance with which these platforms treat their users (both content creators and viewers) is not a good long term strategy. I mean, was the Hill supposed to know the content was prohibited? And how are people going to be able to actually access the news of the day? Certainly seems to me like YouTube wants users to go elsewhere.
• hanniabu 5y ago
  Yet there's tons of animal abuse videos which they don't even have an issue monetizing.
• bombcar 5y ago
  Next up: playing this when you don’t want videos/recordings spreading on YouTube …
• j_walter 5y ago
  This makes no sense at all. Are we supposed to just pretend that Trump never made these claims? It's one thing to try to continue supporting these claims with false information and an entirely different thing to post him repeating those claims in an unrelated matter.
• freedomben 5y ago
  One of the hosts wrote this about it [1]: particularly appropriate quote: > What casual observers might not understand, however, is just how far the policy goes. Not only does YouTube punish channels that spread misinformation, but in many cases, it also punishes channels that report on the spread of misinformation. The platform makes no distinction between the speaker and the content creator. If a channel produces a straight-news video that merely shows Trump making an unfounded election-related claim—perhaps during a speech, in an interview, or at a rally—YouTube would punish the channel as if the channel had made the claim, even if no one affiliated with the channel endorsed Trump's lies. [1]: https://reason.com/2022/03/03/youtube-rising-the-hill-election-misinformation-suspension/ https://reason.com/2022/03/03/youtube-rising-the-hill-electi...
  • hammock 5y ago
    Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
    • bashinator 5y ago
      Not at all. Google is a private concern with the right to publish or not any content they see fit. That they can defacto censor opinions they don’t approve of is a failure of the market.
      • erichocean 5y ago
        Corporations do not have rights, they are government-defined entities—not people. There's no "Bill of Corporate Rights" or "UN Convention on Corporate Rights." Corporations have locally-defined privileges and exist by, and at, the will of the people where they reside. Governments can change what those privileges are at any moment, for any reason—or no reason at all. If we don't like what Google is doing, we can simply write laws regulating it differently. ----- In reply: > "In a U.S. historical context, the phrase "corporate personhood" refers to the ongoing legal debate over the extent to which rights traditionally associated with natural persons should also be afforded to corporations." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood Hint: ongoing legal debate, i.e. it's up to government to decide what "corporate personhood" means—exactly what I am saying. It's up to government, not "inalienable" or "natural" or whatever. It's a purely legal question whether trillion dollar corporate mega-platforms with billions of users have the same regulations and responsibilities as widows and orphans. We don't have to let the Googles and Facebooks and Amazons and YouTubes of the world trample on basic human rights "because ackshually, corporations are people too." Certainly nothing about the 14th Amendment requires it.
• cm2187 5y ago
  • ALittleLight 5y ago
    I'm only old enough to remember two Republican presidents - Trump and Bush. Both had widespread and, to some extent, mainstream narratives about why their elections were illegitimate. It will not surprise me if future Republican presidents or politicians are illegitimately elected as well.
  • pfisch 5y ago
    To be fair they let Trump run with this stuff a long time. It was really only after he led an attempted insurrection based on these "claims" that they shut down his ability to keep spreading this stuff.
    • hatware 5y ago
      • flyingcircus3 5y ago
        Are we to believe that you don't understand object permanence? Your argument amounts to "certain images of this event appear peaceful".
        • hatware 5y ago
          It was a "mostly peaceful protest."
      • pfisch 5y ago
        Is this the event that you are referring to? https://twitter.com/RepLizCheney/status/1489691175883882496 https://twitter.com/RepLizCheney/status/1489691175883882496
        • hatware 5y ago
• coolso 5y ago
  No surprise, given the fact that Google execs were literally crying tears of fury and despair in a company meeting after Trump won in 2016 [0] [0]: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/09/13/breitbart_posts_leaked_video_of_google_leadership_reacting_to_2016_election.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/09/13/breitbart...
• KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
  • choward 5y ago
    So anything that places any blame on the west is propaganda? So you think this Russia Ukraine conflict just started in 2022? These people aren't claiming that Putin did the right thing. They're just claiming that the US isn't completely innocent in all of this.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • kragen 5y ago
    John Joseph Mearsheimer (/ˈmɪərʃaɪmər/; born December 14, 1947) is an American political scientist and international relations scholar, who belongs to the realist school of thought. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He has been described as the most influential realist of his generation.[3] ... Mearsheimer's books include Conventional Deterrence (1983), which won the Edgar S. Furniss Jr. Book Award; Nuclear Deterrence: Ethics and Strategy (co-editor, 1985); Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (1988); The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), which won the Lepgold Book Prize; The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007); and Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics (2011). His articles have appeared in academic journals like International Security and popular magazines like the London Review of Books. He has written op-ed pieces for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune.[9] Mearsheimer has won several teaching awards. He received the Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching when he was a graduate student at Cornell in 1977, and he won the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Chicago in 1985. In addition, he was selected as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for the 1993–1994 academic year. In that capacity, he gave a series of talks at eight colleges and universities. In 2003, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[9] He is the recipient of the American Political Science Association's 2020 James Madison Award, which is presented every three years to an American political scientist who has made distinguished scholarly contributions. The Award Committee noted that Mearsheimer is "one of the most cited International Relations scholars in the discipline, but his works are read well beyond the academy as well."[10] Mearsheimer's works are widely read and debated by 21st-century students of international relations. A 2017 survey of US international relations faculty ranks him third among "scholars whose work has had the greatest influence on the field of IR in the past 20 years."[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mearsheimer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mearsheimer I very much do not agree with Mearsheimer's point of view, but describing his lectures as "Russian propaganda" suggests that you are the one in the grip of an extreme form of propaganda. Rethink where you're getting your information.
• jorgesborges 5y ago
  I’m becoming more convinced that the future I’ve been planning simply won’t be possible in the decades to come. The world is scarcely recognizable. And having experienced nothing but peace and prosperity makes me feel woefully unprepared. The WEIRD world is becoming increasingly more authoritarian. I’m already detached from real conflict and scarcity, knowing nothing but peace and prosperity, and the TikTok generation behind me meming about WW3 doesn’t inspire much confidence.
  • xiphias2 5y ago
    Meming about and being afraid of WW3 is critical in containing/deescalating it. WW1 happened partly because nobody was afraid of it happenning.
    • choward 5y ago
      Not when the meming calls for escalation by sending weapons to Ukraine and imposing sanctions.
      • slowmovintarget 5y ago
        Escalation is what Russia is doing: cluster munitions, rolling elite troops in, and shelling apartment buildings. Sending weapons to the people who live there to fend off invaders, and imposing sanctions is a fairly tepid response.
      • xiphias2 5y ago
        Ukrainians using anti-tank weapons to fight on their own land against a different nation trying to take ownership of the country is the definition of defence.
    • dsauerbrun 5y ago
      WWII happened despite people being afraid of it happening. Could you elaborate on your point?
      • 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• awb 5y ago
  Soave (co-host of The Hill’s morning show: Rising) wrote an article about it here: https://reason.com/2022/03/03/youtube-rising-the-hill-election-misinformation-suspension/ https://reason.com/2022/03/03/youtube-rising-the-hill-electi... > YouTube has taken the position that merely acknowledging an utterance of the false claim is the same thing as making the claim yourself unless you correct and disavow it elsewhere in the video. It is also sufficient to post a warning label in the video's description that a false election claim makes an appearance. Not saying it’s a smart policy, but just to be clear, YouTube does allow you to play a video of Trump saying the election was rigged, provided you warn viewers about it.
  • lliamander 5y ago
    What nonsense from YouTube. Do they really think putting in such disclaimers is actually going to change anyone's mind?
    • BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
      I sense the goal isn’t to change anyone’s mind from “the election was stolen” to “the election was fair”. Rather, it serves to enforce the notion that believing the former is considered unacceptable.
      • atlantas 5y ago
        That's interesting. If they're not trying to persuade (and it doesn't appear so), then is the point of that to flex their power or what?
        • DoctorOW 5y ago
          No it's more about the importance of challenging bad ideas with good ones. All the justifications for spreading what we agree are lies are under the assumption that the value is in debunking them.
        • BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
• morpheos137 5y ago
  The modern world was an interesting experiment of evolution.
• bfung 5y ago
  Seems like the underlying problem is that YouTube is 1 generic platform that contains news, entertainment, random home videos, etc. Perhaps the right answer is to “divide” it up and set requirements for each category of video, similar to how “YouTube kids” is a thing now. News and podcasts would go under its own section and have some level of sanity checks while home videos can be as random as they want to be.
  • kevincox 5y ago
    I don't think there needs to be division by topic, there just needs to be alternatives. If you divide by topic you still have effective monopolies, just smaller ones. I think we need to focus on how to make it easier to consume content from multiple platforms together. Small starts are things like web notifications (which are unfortunately abused) so that you can be notified about new videos from an author your just discovered, even if they aren't on your regular platforms. Of course RSS is an awesome version of this but needs some UX built for the average user. The harder thing is getting curation and recommendation across platforms. But this definitely isn't impossible.
  • monkpit 5y ago
    As a parent I must say, that’s an extremely generous characterization of YouTube Kids.
    • rootusrootus 5y ago
      Whenever I see YT Kids I get the nagging feeling that the content may actually be more harmful to kids than regular YT.
  • makeitdouble 5y ago
    Youtube kids is just an excuse to put the blame on creators if a video happens to be problematic. For a lot of reasons actual kids targeted content is not there, and a ton of predatory stuff still thrives there. To your point, Youtube has a strong legal incentive to make Youtube Kids succeed, and they failed. I’m not sure we can expect better for other category splits that are no less controversial.
• fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
  Large scale psychological manipulation
• godmode2019 5y ago
  I really don't know why people think elections are not rigged. In my opinion all elections are rigged, why on earth would you risk losing power to the whim of the 'unwashed'. Both parties are two sides of the same coin and go back and forth to give everyone the illusion of choice. But when people mass together and demand social change, BLM ect its allowed to happened only until it starts working, then the authorities crack down with a iron fist. Its well documented that the USA rigs elections in other countries. So if the technology exists and the appetite exists, what's stopping them? Laws? Morals? Do we really think that the intelligence community is going to let a random popular citizen have command of the biggest military in the world and a finger on the nuclear button, just because a couple of extra people put their name on a piece of paper? I think that is absurd, all elections are rigged and to suggest otherwise is naive, holding on to a romantic notion that we choose our leaders.
  • daenz 5y ago
    In Kill All Others[0] (excellent), there was only one Party, but everyone must vote for it anyways, as a gesture of approval and submitting to the authority. 0. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6912900 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6912900
  • 3np 5y ago
    This is ridiculous hyperbole. Maybe what you’re saying is true in the US and several other places but there are absolutely unrigged elections elsewhere. Then you could respond with how things are effectively systemically rigged through gerrymandering/news media/misinformation/propaganda/mind control/harassment/selective enforcement but that’s something else.
    • godmode2019 5y ago
      Where are you thinking? Iceland maybe, but that would be the exception to the rule.
      • 3np 5y ago
        What are your sources that elections are rigged in Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, New Zealand, Austria, Ireland, Japan, Taiwan, Czech Republic?
• Thorentis 5y ago
  This is what "private companies can do what they like" results in.
  • good8675309 5y ago
    I think once your an international multi billion dollar monster corporation, we should have serious checks and balances. And we did but now all of those checks are paid off to ignore anti competitive practices and abuses. Make career lobbyists illegal. Also, politicians should not be able to buy stocks, let them have a 401k but no picking stocks.
  • pumaontheprowl 5y ago
    "Private companies can do what they like" should only apply to companies that are not monopolies. Due to network effects there is no legitimate competition to YouTube, so YouTube needs to be regulated as a monopoly (unless maybe TikTok has started hosting longform videos instead of just people doing stupid dances).
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • aqme28 5y ago
    Yes, but sadly I’m not convinced that “private companies can’t do what they like” would necessarily turn out different.
  • kerneloftruth 5y ago
    They're also doing what their regulators in the House and Senate have demanded they do. The line between a private operator exercising their will, and acting on the will of the government, is very thin and quite blurred. I think of YouTube (and many others) as akin to state media anymore.
  • roenxi 5y ago
    This isn't a problem, there are alternatives. Attacks that involve choking off access to the banking system are dangerous because starting a up a new bank is legally challenging. Attacks involving deplatforming are just a temporary annoyance, there is already a fairly healthy constellation of alternative platforms growing that can host serious political debate that have grown up in a few short years once these companies went off the rails circa 2020. There are competent competitors out there to at least Twitter & YouTube. Probably Facebook too in time. YouTube can play politics if they want. It isn't a good thing, but life has survived CNN and Fox News and it doesn't get worse than that for biased publishing.
• dayvid 5y ago
  It's scary how many of the systems we were worried about in China (e.g. social credit system, censorship, etc.) are basically being created now in the west through the proxy of critical companies blocking access and/or working together.
  • another_story 5y ago
    A bit different considering the west has alternatives which are not blocked, whereas China doesn't. You can even spin up your own sources and serve whatever you want,a right not afforded the average Chinese citizen.
    • Karunamon 5y ago
      Given the centralization and collusion of payment providers, I don't think that holds.
      • octoberfranklin 5y ago
        Why downvotes?
        • vengefulduck 5y ago
          Ever heard of bitcoin?
          • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
            I have! But my landlord and the store where I buy most of my food have not.
    • YaBomm 5y ago
      Only a bit different when you compare monopolies to governments which are ultimate monopolies...
    • CamperBob2 5y ago
• cryptonector 5y ago
  If it's nonsense, then why censor it? If it's not nonsense, then why censor it?
  • lijogdfljk 5y ago
    If it's instructions on drinking bleach, why censor it? The discussion has to be one of nuance, but i think back to the days of TVs (lol). TV and radio had (to my understanding) laws about what you can say on air, different than what you would encounter on the sidewalk. It seems to make sense. After all, piping instructions on drinking bleach into everyones home seems bad. Inciting riots in mass seems bad. I don't know, but it seems logical to me. The internet is obviously different.. but not different in every way, in my view. It seems like we need to be honest with ourselves. The internet is different than just yelling things on street corners. What should be allowed? I don't know. But i don't think it has the same freedoms as yelling on the sidewalk.
    • cryptonector 5y ago
      > If it's instructions on drinking bleach, why censor it? Not comparable.
      • SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
        > > If it's instructions on drinking bleach, why censor it? >Not comparable. Nor did it ever actually happen. https://www.dailywire.com/news/fact-check-no-trump-did-not-tell-people-to-inject-themselves-with-disinfectant-or-drink-bleach https://www.dailywire.com/news/fact-check-no-trump-did-not-t... https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/11/joe-biden/no-trump-didnt-tell-americans-infected-coronavirus/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/11/joe-biden/... https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/live-blog/2020-10-22-trump-biden-election-n1244210/ncrd1244478#blogHeader https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/live-blog/202... Not anywhere will you find Trump saying to “inject bleach”. That was the media narrative, completely their words.
        • 5y ago
• jmyeet 5y ago
  The self-serving, inconsistent, intellectually-dishonest take that some have when they can't parrot provably false nonsense that is a mere Google search away from being debunked is really obnoxious. I imagine many of these same people championed the rights of private businesses to decide who they did and didn't serve when it came to the infamous cakeshop [1] yet when Youtube or Twitter or Facebook makes exactly the same choice not to be a vehicle for disinformation, those same people lose their minds. The point here is that the majority of people complaining about this aren't standing up for principle. They just want to get their way. Live by the sword. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colorado_Civil_Rights_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
  • insickness 5y ago
    I imagine many of the same people who championed the rights of Youtube or Twitter or Facebook to censor whomever they want were the same people who lost their mind when it came to the infamous cakeshop. That sword cuts both ways. They would also lose their mind if the laws changed and companies could discriminate against whomever they want in hiring. But when those same companies want to censor a viewpoint, they're a private company, they can do whatever they want.
    • KennyBlanken 5y ago
  • SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    Are there any YouTube sized cake shops monopolies?
• adamredwoods 5y ago
  Two points: 1. At what point will the information on the internet become so obfuscated that communication and "truth" is difficult to discern from "lies", if not presently today? Consider a person using the internet for the first time in order to find more information on a current event. How many sources (and what qualifies as one) does one have to traverse to weigh what one can consider to be "truthful enough"? Does a person have enough time to sift through all the available sources? To me, this is why media outlets filter their content, in order to protect their version of "truth". News outlets have always been biased, I don't see why YouTube or Twitter or FB cannot do the same thing. 2. Democracy will always be a thin line. There must be a point of "truth" of recording votes that the population is willing to accept. If the majority consistently challenges results or insists that the results are false, then democracy cannot exist, and another form of governmental control, possibly an evolution of authoritarianism or dictatorship, will take its place. Is that more acceptable than less-than-perfect democratic outcomes?
  • ipaddr 5y ago
    Once you get off the mainstream internet you get more varied viewpoints. As censorship increases more people leave mainstream sources. We are living in an era where everyone is on aol. Leaving those comforts will bring a richer experience.
• dukeofdoom 5y ago
  • dillondoyle 5y ago
• fredgrott 5y ago
  as a side note compare it to what current words Russian people are using to get around Russian censors to talk about the war When did Youtube become A Russian censor?
  • dqpb 5y ago
    Sergey Brin is getting back in touch with his roots.
• rtpg 5y ago
  A reminder that The Hill can put MP4s on their own servers and host them this way.
  • zuminator 5y ago
    Which they have.[0] And they didn't even need to do that. It's up on Twitter. [1] Of course, the issue isn't just this one video but the week ban which undoubtedly and perhaps ironically, has a chilling effect.[2] [0] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/595709-white-house-spokesman-calls-trump-putin-pigs-who-hate-what-america https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/595709-white-hou... [1] https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1499545712668905473 https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1499545712668905473 [2] I'm speaking of course of LumenDatabase, which used to be called "chillingeffects.org" back when Google was ostensibly in accord with its philosophy.
• syspec 5y ago
  Super liberal, don't agree with this move at all. It's one thing to have people making false claims, but covering the former president tying of election his claim to the current Ukraine crises should not fall into that category.
  • nopenopenopeno 5y ago
    [flagged]
• brightffw 5y ago
• FollowingTheDao 5y ago
  Whose fault is this? Are you all still using YouTube? Propping up the U.S. Corpocracy by watching kittens and puppies? Or are you a blogger and making bank yourself by talking about technology or cooking? This authoritarianism is powered by the people, not by direct Government action. What should you be fighting for? Making these platforms public utilities so using them would confirm protection of the 1st amendment.
  • EMM_386 5y ago
    > Are you all still using YouTube? Propping up the U.S. Corpocracy by watching kittens and puppies? I'm a cord-cutter and yes, I use YouTube constantly. It obviously has a lot more than kitten an puppy videos, it's not that cut and dry.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  Good. YouTube's platform. Don't like it? Don't use YouTube. There is a plethora of alternatives.
  • wtf03i24 5y ago
    Why is this good? Your comment lacks any context including and especially any indication that you understand the reason why The Hill played the clip.
    • 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
      I don't care why they played the clip because it's not my platform to police.
• Lamad123 5y ago
• ComradePhil 5y ago
  Alphabet/YouTube should seek for government regulations that requires them to not delete the videos that are not explicitly illegal. They keep removing videos to keep their advertisers or customers happy. If they are not allowed by the government to delete videos that are not illegal, they can just blame the government. Of course, they should not be forced to keep every video. It has to be profitable for them.
  • coffeefirst 5y ago
    Or they could actually use their brains and check if an account in otherwise good standing suddenly gets flagged, why that happened. This would eliminate most the edge cases. The problem is trusting the algorithm to make decisions and then pretending you aren’t responsible for them.
    • ComradePhil 5y ago
      Clearly you have not considered the scale they operate in. What you are thinking would apply if they were handling 10s of hours of video everyday from dozens of individuals. They have about 10 hours of video uploaded every second, throught the day, all week, every month, every year... and their platform has 2 billion users. What you are suggesting would not be possible even if they hired everyone eligible to work in the world.
      • Lascaille 5y ago
        >Clearly you have not considered the scale they operate in. Youtube literally operates walk-in 'creator spaces' where creators with popular channels can go to make use of editing equipment and resources. They can staff a media liaison office. They can staff a media liaison office in every major city of every first world country. They have those offices already existing to sell adverts, after all. It would be trivial for them to operate those media liaison offices and ensure that things like this don't happen. They choose to hide behind the 'oops, the algorithm did it, nothing we could have done' excuse.
• CamperBob2 5y ago
  When reached for comment, YouTube policy communications manager Ivy Choi confirmed that the channel had been suspended for posting content in violation of YouTube’s policies. “We removed content from and issued a strike to this channel for violating our election integrity policy, and as a result, this channel is suspended from publishing new videos or livestreams for seven days,” Choi told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We do allow for content with sufficient educational, documentary, scientific or artistic context, which the removed content did not contain.” Wow. If you want another Trump elected, Ms. Choi, then by all means, proceed.
• Overtonwindow 5y ago
  The Hill is a widely read DC newspaper. Its to government what the Wall Street Journal is to NYC. Ludicrous action by YouTube
• jrobn 5y ago
  Death and calamity is going to be the theme of the next 100 years and beyond. Climate change, mass displacement, cheap & effective propaganda, ignorance, resource contention, soil degradation, nuclear proliferation. We've only had nuclear weapons for 70 years. We used them to blow each other up on day 1. The odds are not in our favor that nuclear warfare will be contained.
  • robjan 5y ago
    Death and calamity has been the theme of the whole of history. We're still generally in a much better situation than 100 years ago, even better than 200 and so on.
    • jrobn 5y ago
      What is your metric? We have weapons that can end our entire human species. Never before in the history of our entire planet was this even been a possibility. Its like living with a loaded gun to your head. Not to mention the impending climate related crisis domino effect we are going to face in the next 50 years. I'm sure having nuclear weapons will make that go smoothly.
      • bobsmooth 5y ago
        >What is your metric? Poverty and disease, for one.
        • jrobn 5y ago
          Yes for some. But I still would say you are missing the forest for the trees.
          • robjan 5y ago
            Not really. There is inequality in the world but pretty much universally we have a better standard of living than 100 years ago. Suggested reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nat...
• sergiotapia 5y ago
  https://odysee.com/ https://odysee.com/ Much better alternatives exist. Support decentralized internet ideas, save the internet for future generations.
• qndreoi 5y ago
  It seems they could have put a sentence on the bottom of the screen "There is no credible evidence for Trump's claim of a stolen election." Takes approximately zero effort to solve the problem.
  • rc_mob 5y ago
    Yeah. The Hill is claiming they were just reporting what Trump said. They have a moral duty to report that Trump is saying lies that are very dangerous to the very fabric of society.
• russellbeattie 5y ago
  If you've got a better way to stop the spread of malicious lies and misinformation, please share with the class! If you're Republican, conservative or "libertarian" (riiiight), you need to be quiet and go sit in the corner while the rest of us decide what to do with you.
  • throwaway1038 5y ago
  • ghoward 5y ago
    What to do with us? You have no right to do anything to those of us who did nothing to you. Leave us alone.
• justnotworthit 5y ago
  The Hill should start posting on Rumble, along with their ideological enemies.
• lmilcin 5y ago
  It all comes down to not having/not following principles. Once you start compromising on principles, the rest is just slippery slope that we are observing.
• dukeofdoom 5y ago
  Youtube is fighting populism. The common people no longer believe anything the mighty have to say. You can see it in this reporters eyes when he gets relentlessly mocked during the trucker protests in Canada. https://twitter.com/glen_mcgregor/status/1495146891646013443 https://twitter.com/glen_mcgregor/status/1495146891646013443 This is a path where all this censorship will lead to if they don't stop it. It will be as bad for the modern day Oligarchs as it was for the French nobility during the revolution, if they can't control it. But the problem is during the last year only more and more trust has been eroded. All week on twitter Pfizer, and vaccine side effects has been trending. Today on twitter it's "They lied" is trending. You can see how alarming this is to some at the top.
  • DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    > The common people no longer believe anything the mighty have to say Hypernormalization
    • dukeofdoom 5y ago
      Thanks, never heard of it. Looked it up and found a Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation And the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thLgkQBFTPw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thLgkQBFTPw
• epa 5y ago
  This isn't new, remember when Biden took office and a number of right wing areas were banned. Corporate control is a time tested government lever.
• pengaru 5y ago
  When YouTube does stuff like this, does their viewership increase from the resulting commotion?
• selfhifive 5y ago
  Users can't tell misinformation and information apart when the dislike count is hidden. Who would've thought. Removing the dislike count was YouTube's renunciation of democratic ideals. Now it's a media outlet just like the others.
  • rsanek 5y ago
    I don't think like/dislike counts were ever a good way to identify misinformation, and I would argue that even if they were, they shouldn't be.
    • wraptile 5y ago
      When it comes to political stuff it was a good way to identify "contraversy" which is very useful in this world of information: should I research this further or can I trust this? Is there more going on with this subject? I think our minds naturally stray to find these patterns to reduce computational load. For example, reading news on reddit and seeing hundreds of comments and very few upvotes puts your mind into "investigation mode" while seeing something average makes you much more trusting of it.
• JoshTko 5y ago
  The avg. American reads at a middle school level. Many read at an elementary school level, meaning ~1/4 of America will take this video as fact. Couple this with an algorithm that will only feed you things you like and you have a recipe for disaster. 100% unrestricted freedom of speech only works with a highly educated populate which America does not have.
  • headsoup 5y ago
    Yes only free speech for the 'intelligent.'. I wonder what you might be a bit ignorant about in future that would require restricting your participation... Amazing how many people support tyranny by thinking they are on the side of righteousness. Everyone has rights, or no one has rights. Remember that
  • fuckcensorship 5y ago
    Sounds like the solution is better education, not censorship.
    • noahtallen 5y ago
      Totally, but only one of those things is within YouTube’s power. There are all kinds of decisions to make where “what do we do to mitigate this now” looks different from “what’s the ideal place we want to be?”
      • headsoup 5y ago
        Definitely a good idea to let corporate social media behemoths decide what is acceptable speech. What could possibly go wrong?
      • rsanek 5y ago
        Is it not? I'm sure this would be very difficult to get right, but I've often wondered why there isn't more innovation in the direction of not censorship but rather "gating" behind proof of knowledge. What I mean is, what if there were a series of questions presented to the viewer before they could consume this kind of content? This could act as a way to deter folks from mindlessly viewing the video but also as an educational tool. For this kind of political video, you could ask relevant questions from eg the US citizenship test [0]. [0] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/questions-and-answers/100q.pdf https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/questions...
• imnotlost 5y ago
  Fine. You can’t force people or businesses to listen to you or broadcast your speech. That’s American liberty. That’s freedom. You can’t claim that a business is “the public square” and then force them. If you do want a digital public square look for something run by the government with a mandate to publish everything. I’m pretty sure people wouldn’t be too happy with that either… too many libtards, too many nazis, too many racists, too many whatevers…
  • InvertedRhodium 5y ago
    > You can’t claim that a business is “the public square” and then force them. Why not? We place some pretty serious obligations on a few industries - one example is electricity providers of last resort.
    • bduerst 5y ago
      >Why not? Electricity is deemed a common utility and a regulated, granted natural monopoly - one considered a necessary requirement for all citizens and organizations. Video streaming is not a monopoly, and no number of bad faith arguments about popularity or awareness in consumer headspace change the fact that there are a number easily accessible competitors.
      • abernard1 5y ago
        > Video streaming is not a monopoly It is more of a monopoly than Standard Oil was in terms of market share. There were plenty of competitors back then, just as now, and yet the Sherman Antitrust Act happened. The network power of these organizations makes them monopolies even aside from market share. In Sherman era anti-trust, "Build your own rail network" would not have flown as an argument, because it was clear that coercive actions to force people into a different network were problematic. The government can regulate monopolies for any reason. You can read the Sherman Act, court opinions during that time, and the argument of it removing centralization of power. The "predatory pricing" argument is a recent invention, ironically created with right-wing judicial activism, and neither historical or textual in nature.
• ok123456 5y ago
  After the mid-terms, any Section 230 protection these companies have is going bye-bye. Any kind of active moderation of perfectly legal speech through 'terms of service'/'community standards' will remove any common-carrier liability shield. Actions like this have turned this into political red meat for some. These companies really need to learn how to read the room. Ratcheting downward the ability of people to freely use these platforms just feeds into whatever persecution complex they have, and justifies it. You don't get rid of bad ideas by allowing them not be spoken no matter how well meaning you are.
  • themitigating 5y ago
    Why would the midterms do this?
    • mise_en_place 5y ago
      The midterms won’t, but the Fed losing control of interest rates will. You’re going to see a lot of valuation disappear in the next year as the bubble deflates.
    • rhdunn 5y ago
      If the midterms result in more Republicans being elected -- which is a possibility -- it would be easier to vote through laws like this. That risk is likely one reason why Biden's state of the union speech echoed Trump policies: strengthening the border, moving jobs (like chip manufacture) to America, improving police funding, etc.
    • greyhair 5y ago
      In this election year, Republicans will, at the very least, retake control of the House of Representatives, making Kevin McCarthy, speaker of the house. There is also an opportunity for them to take control of the Senate, returning Mitch McConnell to his leadership role. The far right despises technology companies, and there will be a huge push by their members to bring them all to heel.
      • 5y ago
• eyelidlessness 5y ago
  I’ll take the downvotes or whatever argumentation incoming but this is obviously (to me) Google being bad at technology and intentionally opaque about it, and just as mealy mouthed about the subject matter as always because they don’t give a fuck.
  • gundmc 5y ago
    I feel like this is the case with 99% of YouTube takedowns.
    • eyelidlessness 5y ago
      Yep but it feels worth recognizing in the context of freezed peach.
  • abnry 5y ago
    In that case, it is still bad. And it makes for a good cover to actually censor based on political speech. And it is hard to give Google the benefit of the doubt in this regard. But you are probably right.
    • eyelidlessness 5y ago
      It is bad but it’s not clear what cover it gives to censor. They suspended a neutralish account which would ostensibly be part of the “liberal” media for playing verbatim a far right media clip to report on the fact of it existing. Who’s being censored here?
• mathogre 5y ago
  Fuck YouTube. If they're going to control what news I get, I'll choose other than YouTube. I do not need them. I have read from both hard left and hard right, and am intelligent enough to make my own decisions about what makes sense. Let them play their games, whether silly or dangerous. I form my own opinions. Losers!
  • hankman86 5y ago
    Agree - I don’t need some “ministry of truth”. Figured out for myself that these “alternative” news shows on YouTube (The Hill, Breaking Points etc.) are populist garbage. This isn’t journalism, but sensationalist cherry-picking of facts with an unhealthy dose of opinion sprinkled on top. All that being said: i think that censorship does way more harm than whatever nonsense these channels put out.
    • imnotlost 5y ago
      It’s an advertising business. They sell advertising. Everything else is filler between the ads. Network news runs on the same model. Sometimes the filler (news or other content) is good but not always.
      • cudgy 5y ago
        My understanding is that Breaking Points at least is mostly funded by direct donations to purposely protect them from censorship by YouTube. I take their perspectives with a grain of salt and their discussions can get long winded. However, in comparison to main stream media, these programs provide far more detail and context than a 2 minute soundbite of talking points straight from the White House or the CIA.
    • bradlys 5y ago
      While good for you to figure things out - I’m surrounded by people who don’t have the skills for that. How do you solve that? Education? Too late - they’re adults.
  • px43 5y ago
• zpeti 5y ago
  Is it just me or has YouTube gotten super boring at this point? It’s like I can feel they’ve turned down the viral KPIs, and they’re only showing established channels now, most if which are boring. I was basically addicted to YouTube a few years back, first thing every day was go there, I could stop going to it many times a day, even when I felt it was too much. Now, I maybe actively go to YouTube 2-3 times a week, otherwise I just watch embedded videos on websites or Twitter. I’m not surprised tiktok has taken over. I think YouTube have basically neutered themselves over trying to “do the right thing” politically
  • atorodius 5y ago
    Might be just you. I still find awesome content, new hobbies (recently picked up analog photography because of a recommended channel), new food, new shows to watch. There is some garbage in my feed (family clips) but overall I go there daily.
• _hudj 5y ago
  [dead]
• mabbo 5y ago
  Moderating a top web destination today isn't possible to do correctly. You could automate moderation with ML, automatic recognition, user-flagging but the sheer number of false positives, and alleged false positives, means you basically need to have a full human moderation team to have real accuracy. You could just use human moderators, but then you have to pay for them all. Ads based websites can't afford that. You could charge users money and not be purely ads-based, but then you won't be a top web destination because people aren't willing to pay for the internet with money. So the only remaining option is to automate, ignore the false positive problem entirely and rake in money while abusing your content creators and users. This is 'The Google Strategy'.
  • px43 5y ago
    I think the main thing lacking on modern platforms is a quick, reliable way to verify the reputation of any given content creator. First off, it obviously needs to be relative reputation, and not centralizedI think some sort of cross platform web of trust, where you publicly endorse some friends, some content creators, and some investigative journalists, etc. You also publicly repudiate sources of information that you don't find credible. This means that if anyone goes off the rails there's a visible trail of distrust, and that information is de-prioritized in your network. This also has a bit of sybil resistance built in, because upvotes or downvotes of thousands of bots isn't relevant at all to your trust graph unless friend of friends actually endorse some of these bots or something. Still though, it would probably also be good to have some burnable staking mechanic. Everyone needs to put in a dollar, or 10 dollars, or something to participate (which could be removed at any time), and people who clearly violate terms of use would have their stake burned, and all of their endorsements or repudiations would be invalidated. I feel like eventually someone is going to have to build something like this. Incentives are hard to get right, but if by some miracle it works, and the trust graph takes off, then lots of these problems just go away. Imagine something like DNS that you could just query to see how much you should trust some chunk of information. It would be a game changer.
    • ducktales 5y ago
      So, like, a social credit score....? I'm being quite reductive, but at the same time your points could be interpreted to resemble the concept. Fruit for thought
• Khelavaster 5y ago
  Not even the president is safe from censors..
  • Azurin 5y ago
    What year is it?
• alkonaut 5y ago
  A strange decision, but so is the decision to watch news on YouTube.
• ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Just to break up the angry posts self-radicalizing themselves: This is a good thing. Basically every media outlet mentioned here has a long history of publishing really big lies about important stuff they know to be false for monetary gain. The Hill had to quietly oust one of their own top propagandists recently because of how badly his obvious lies about Ukraine helping to steal the US election from Trump went down with people familiar with objective reality. Here's their own internal review: https://thehill.com/homenews/news/483600-the-hills-review-of-john-solomons-columns-on-ukraine https://thehill.com/homenews/news/483600-the-hills-review-of... We're seeing on a big scale where this leads right now, and it is no coincidence that all these people seem big fans of Putin and dislike democracy. And we've got all these people on HN carefully avoiding mentioning that they believe, or worse? support, these lies, and taking the pure and noble stance that we should never censor lies. Which would be a bad stance even if that itself wasn't just another obvious lie for political gain.
  • Azurin 5y ago
    It's sad to see how many conservative"reeee muh freedom" is in HN. Hope they all get their Herman Cain Awards too
    • ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      I dont want to be harsh, since you may well have lost people close to you because of this specific propaganda, but wishing further pain, misery, suffering and death on the victims of propaganda and their families isn't really cool. Some things are complicated and murky, but there's fairly clear boundaries too sometimes.
      • Azurin 5y ago
        If their single death will stop senseless spread of a harmful virus to MORE innocent people who do their best to stay safe, it's good riddance. Some family members or even relatives are stuck with some people who are ignorant and just cause it to spread.
    • blindmute 5y ago
• w14 5y ago
  The UK is leading the charge for legislation [0] to force platforms to impose certain types of censorship. Youtube and the others are just getting ahead of curve. They have known what's coming since they were invited into No. 10 to discuss these issues with Theresa May and Amber Rudd in 2017. The legislation is based on the principle that everyone has the right to say what they want to say, but they have no right to be heard by others. This phraseology was used by several during the recent committee hearings, including by Facebook employees for example. So it will effectively enshrine in law: shadow banning, delisting from Google search etc. Also enshrined in the legislation is the principle of banning content which is 'legal but harmful to adults'. 'Harmful', amongst many other terms, is not defined. Also enshrined in law will be the principle that certain types of 'journalistic' content will be protected from this censorship if it meets criteria to be decided upon by the new regulator, Ofcom. This will be an enabling act. It is full, from front to back, of opportunity for scope creep through secondary legislation. As I said, the UK is leading the charge with this, but the EU has been keeping pace [1]. I haven't seen similar in the US as of yet. [0] - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-online-safety-bill https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-online-safe... [1] - https://ec.europa.eu/info/digital-services-act-ensuring-safe-and-accountable-online-environment_en https://ec.europa.eu/info/digital-services-act-ensuring-safe...
  • native_samples 5y ago
    Truly Orwellian double-think on display in that legislation. "Legal but must be censored", "you can speak but not be heard" etc. The root cause of this is that our society has forgotten how to argue for free speech as a moral case. We've taken it for granted for so long, we can't remember why it's good. Meanwhile the enemies of it have spent years steadily attacking it, often with lies (e.g. the numerous fake claims of Twitter bots controlling elections).
    • mark_l_watson 5y ago
      It absolutely blows my mind how many of my friends support soft censorship that supports their points of view. I try to listen to podcasts, occasionally, that are contrary to my own beliefs, not because of free speech but rather to make sure that I don’t end up in a “bubble.” Coincidentally, I listed to something by The Hill on YouTube last week and it was reasonably good because they had three people speculating on the future economy with slightly different points of view. Not great stuff but worth having on while I was cooking dinner. Also, as a liberal, there is a conservative think tank at Stanford University that I occasionally listen to, not always comfortable for me, but worth a little time every month. Free speech, in supporting views different from own own, is so very important.
• thinkingemote 5y ago
  They are not platforms, they are publishers with editorial control. Thus they censor because they cannot claim to be impartial anymore. But there used to be platforms on the internet. But they got threatened by the left and the right for different reasons. Censor or be broken up. We will see more ex-platforms this year but for different reasons.
• blunte 5y ago
  This is lunacy. If a YouTube video contains a clip of an elected official (or former) making a false claim (which they almost all do to varying degree), that is simply highlighting an event that occurred. The politician said X, and here is the video documentation of that event. The state of our world is comically broken, and it’s getting worse by the year. I cannot fathom any viable solution to turning things around. Roger Waters album “Amused to Death” was astonishingly prescient.
• FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  The article has a link to a Twitter thread that starts with an excerpt from the video. (This feels meta: HN links to a Tampa newspaper, which links to a Twitter thread, which embeds a clip from a video released by The Hill, which contains a clip from Fox News, where one half of the audio comes from a phone line to Donald Trump. Pointers to pointers to pointers. Oh, and now you get me, talking about it.) The framing is interesting. (I have always found it hard to pin down The Hill.) First, what Trump said: Mostly, he tried to take credit for cancelling Nord Stream 2. This is a little weird, because it didn't seem especially cancelled. Related to this, he told an unverifiable but plausible anecdote about giving Angela Merkel a white flag, to say that she was "surrendering" to Russia: I say "plausible" because he was pushing Germany (and Europe in general) to increase its defense spending (by threatening not to defend NATO, which you could say emboldened Putin, but you could say that about other things too, like Obama's "red line". "Mistakes were made."). And at the end of the Trump clip, a little unnecessarily, they leave in one sentence from him to the effect that "this would have never happened if I'd been re-elected", which of course he expresses in terms of a supposed "steal". Could the Hill have cut the clip just before that last sentence? Yes. They would have lost none of their main message. They would have lost something to react parenthetically to, though. Did they include that one sentence simply because it was adjacent and it gave them some shock value? Or was this their way of smuggling the message to their (not-so-Republican) audience? ("We are ostensibly laughing at Trump, but at least this gets you to listen to him"?) I don't know. Their reaction is one of implicit mockery. They also imply that Trump typically would also insert some talking point about his supposed healthcare plan (which never happened). Which again they laugh at, because everybody knows there was nothing there. They also refer to Trump's supposed "defense" of Putin: From context, it sounds like Trump said that Putin's use of the word "peacekeepers" was clever. But there is a weird moment where the host repeats the word "peacekeepers" several times, almost unnecessarily. A paranoiac could say he was trying to reinforce the message. So what is The Hill's slant? With Rising they lean towards a kind of moderate populism that I have always associated with Russian propaganda. Though that has only ever half- made sense to me: Sure, Russia would want to get support away from the more interventionist centrists ("first choice Trump, second choice Bernie, last choice Hillary"), but you'd think they'd also want to push division, and The Hill's moderate populism is actually not so inflammatory (it does not shove wedges into cracks between identities, like, honestly, CNN/BBC/(CIA?) do. Or did until Biden got them to moderate themselves, a little?) And The Hill has tended to give time to writers like Matt Taibbi who emphasize that they think "Russiagate" is fake. (Maybe they're right though?) So then how do we put it all together? Maybe I should just take The Hill at face value: They're trying to do an "inside baseball" thing, and this really is the compromise political position they've decided they believe in (presumably because it looks like a way forward that seems "good" to them while also protecting their interests). Anyway, I guess the lesson for The Hill is that, if you're using sarcasm to deal with Trump's claims, you're being too subtle. And if I can write a post this long wondering what their angle is, then they're being too subtle. Which might be necessary and true, but would still be a little sad: "We can't have interesting things because the other people are too stupid."
• spacexsucks 5y ago
  Before internet, the village idiot was just that and laughed off. With internet, they got a group and justified themselves and now people are falling for that. If these idiots were taking just themselves off the cliff, then sure. But they are taking villagers who cant tell the difference between legit or not off the cliff too. Even worse, those idiots are turning these misguided villagers onto the rest who know better to not listen to these idiots. This is a failing of the education system here. But no one is talking about how to really distinguish propaganda from real. Sure they misguided people have freedom of speech, but they are growing like a virus and a virus needs to contained. Social literally has the term "viral" for crying out loud. The other more important thing to contain would be the medium on which this infection is spreading. Which mean reducing the impact of the feed algorithm. Access to the feed should be limited. Also, facebook and youtube dont want to give up the feed. That is what keeps the humans hooked. If one part of the body is cancerous, you cut it off. You dont stand around arguing if that part of the body has right to free speech.
  • trustscientism 5y ago
    I agree the news feed algorithm is pouring gasoline on the fire, but how do you expect human beings to react to being persecuted and censored as "viruses" and "cancers"; untermensch? What is the ultimate end game with that line of thinking? "Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."
    • quantified 5y ago
      To continue the analogy, the way that information flows now allows the exposure to infect everyone else. Is it the information a boil of injustice or an Ebola cough of Nazism? I’m not arguing either way. I lean more toward keeping information uncensored, but let’s recognize that the ready ingestion of poison isn’t in the majority’s interest. And society always is willing to say “we’ll censor our taboos”, we didn’t really mean uncensored anyway.