4 ms·

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.
    - virgildotcodes 5y ago
      > And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Seems to me like he is very clearly talking about the viability of injecting disinfectant.
      - DoctorOW 5y ago
        The Politifact article even clarifies that Joe Biden's error was saying Trump advised "drinking bleach", as opposed to "express interest in exploring whether disinfectants could be applied to the site of a coronavirus infection".
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - billfor 5y ago
        You admit his is talking clearly then? Many people seem to chose when to give him that consideration.
        virgildotcodes 5y ago
        You have to forgive his genius occasionally overwhelming the average human’s ability to comprehend speech. > “Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart —you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”
  - DoctorOW 5y ago
    That's fair. Instructions on drinking bleach might cause others to be harmed. This is different because nobody has ever come to harm because of this. I'd imagine if people believed this, there would have been some kind of violence on say, January 6th the day of the insurrection-- sorry, inauguration. Please let me know if you know how to fix this unfortunate typo.
    - BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
      >” Please let me know if you know how to fix this unfortunate typo.” You can click the edit button. But you’re probably trying to make a snarky point. If we are going to say that censorship is justified because you want to prevent violence or insurrections, we open the floodgates to some seriously bad things. Here’s a scenario: Claiming that people are being systematically discriminated against could lead to violence and death. Saying that police officers kill minorities could lead to another CHAZ/CHOP, which was also an insurrection where people died. As a result, we need to silence ACAB and anyone who delegitimizes our police.
      - cryptonector 5y ago
        We don't do prior restraint on speech in the U.S. Only if there's an imminent threat of violence (and that imminence is not interpreted liberally) do we allow the government to stop a speaker. If speech eventually leads to violence, we expect law enforcement to deal with it, and there can be consequences after the fact, but not before.
      - DoctorOW 5y ago
        > You can click the edit button. Don't think so. > If we are going to say that censorship is justified because you want to prevent violence Nope. Just agreeing with my parent comment that there is a significant difference between harm-causing misinformation and this very good election business.
      - UnpossibleJim 5y ago
        >>If we are going to say that censorship is justified because you want to prevent violence or insurrections, we open the floodgates to some seriously bad things<< If it were just as bad as "The censors want to prevent the bad things", I think I might feel that it would be justifiable. This type of thinking also robs the broader public of its agency to reason. The broader public is not comprised of petulant children, regardless of what the media outlets would tell you and what the behavior of Twitter might show (very few of those people display that sort of behavior in actual life, where consequences happen). This "moral highgrounding", to protect us from the corruption of verbiage that may occur on one platform or another is a ridiculous idea to think that functional adults might need. We are not so weak as to be protected from ideas that "must not be named". Words are not magic, and people cannot be enchanted by their mere utterances. They can be enticed by them being outlawed and the verboten mystique that makes the forbidden seem so savory. People may be uneducated, but it is impossible to educate them through silence and the silencing of ideas. These verboten ideas will get spread around, major platform or no. They'll spread without any kind of resistance or discussion and no disinfectant light of truth by debate will be shone on them because they will be pushed down to the nooks and crannies, off of the popular platforms where the light of day can show them to be the BS that they are. They'll find their place in small groups and factions, I felt and grow and split people apart. They'll make people not talk to each other and they'll make us a weaker country and a less educated one. A country that tries to run away from hard questions and conversations because it's easier to tell someone or some group to shut up and don't talk about that, rather than address a topic with an open and honest conversation with facts and dialogue.
- exolymph 5y ago
  > If it's instructions on drinking bleach, why censor it? How to drink bleach: Unscrew cap from bottle. Pour bleach down your throat. Was that so bad?
  - lijogdfljk 5y ago
    Fair, what i meant should probably have been worded: "Recommendations on drinking bleach to cure Covid" or etc.
virgildotcodes 5y ago
> If it's nonsense, then why censor it? Because people believe the nonsense and then storm the capital, and/or support overturning democratic elections in order to allow would-be dictators to seize power. Misinformation can have a serious and deeply negative impact on the world, and the general public is clearly not immune to it.
- cryptonector 5y ago
  Specious argument. First of all, the democrats did a lot of calling of elections into question, and so have republicans, and so what? Second, there has been an enormous amount of violence in the U.S. in the past several years, and the vast majority of that did not happen on 2021-01-06. Third, "storming" of capitols is a thing that has happened plenty in the U.S., and fairly recently too, once in the past year alone in Georgia, and in Wisconsin in 2010, and so on.
  - virgildotcodes 5y ago
    Your argument seems to boil down to: “bad things have happened before, so bad things aren’t bad”. 1. In a close election, contesting it or demanding a recount is fine and sane. Step aside once the results of that process are in. Trying to discredit the entire system with a mountain of bullshit and overthrow an election when it is overwhelmingly clear that it did not go in your favor is an incredibly dangerous road for us to go down. The two practices are incomparable. 2. I can’t understand this argument. Are you saying that 1.6.21 must compose a minimum of 51% of all violence in the US over the past several years before it qualifies as an issue? 3. Presidents inciting their supporters to violently overthrow elections that did not go in their favor is not a thing that has happened plenty recently nor should it ever.
    - cryptonector 5y ago
      I'm saying we don't do prior restraints on speech in the U.S. Law enforcement can take care of the rest.
a_shovel 5y ago
This argument would work equally well to support spreading neo-nazi propaganda material. Trite catchphrases are nothing to base a belief system around. An argument doesn't have to make logical sense for it to convince millions of people. Especially not if they like the conclusion.
- cryptonector 5y ago
  That's Godwin's law territory. I remember being taught in the very liberal NY schools I went to that the ACLU defending the free speech rights of Nazis in Illinois was part of the deal in a free society, and in this case we're not even talking about Nazis. But I'll defend to the death your right to say ridiculous nonsense.
  - a_shovel 5y ago
    Well, on one hand, there's a group's right to say what they like, and on the other, there's the discussion of what a corporate platform should host for free, what they can remove, what they ought to remove, what they're required by law to remove, and whether/how monopoly status changes any of that. Those are thorny and nuanced questions that catchphrases are no use in solving. Also, we were already off topic when you mentioned censorship, so Nazis aren't that much further a digression. I think the real topic here is that Youtube can never possibly support a moderation team proportionate to its size while still offering free uploads, so it's limping along with garbage moderation that often has disastrous effects.
  - x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
    Youtube isn't saying that no one has the right to say ridiculous nonsense, they are saying that they can't use their platform and infrastructure to do so.
- jankyxenon 5y ago
  Who gets to decide what other people are allowed to believe, and on what basis?
anonymouswacker 5y ago
YouTube is just a wolf in sheep's clothing; another media outlet disguised as a sharing platform. “The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses. The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he’s a the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. It will make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” ― Malcom X
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  It's a media outlet for those that treat it as such. If I come there for news, it's from channels I know and trust. Other than that, it's mostly for non-political entertainment.
enkid 5y ago
You don't think people could believe non-sense?
- cryptonector 5y ago
  I do. I know lots of people who believe things I believe are nonsense. You won't see me going around saying they should be censored.
  - sixstringtheory 5y ago
    Yeah but are you going to print out all their insane bs in gigantic lettering and put it on signs on your lawn and the exterior walls of your house? You going to print it on tshirts and wear them to work or out in public? There’s a difference between letting people think and say what they want, vs letting them use you as a megaphone.

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.
  - virgildotcodes 5y ago
    > And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Seems to me like he is very clearly talking about the viability of injecting disinfectant.
    - DoctorOW 5y ago
      The Politifact article even clarifies that Joe Biden's error was saying Trump advised "drinking bleach", as opposed to "express interest in exploring whether disinfectants could be applied to the site of a coronavirus infection".
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - billfor 5y ago
      You admit his is talking clearly then? Many people seem to chose when to give him that consideration.
      - virgildotcodes 5y ago
        You have to forgive his genius occasionally overwhelming the average human’s ability to comprehend speech. > “Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart —you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”
- DoctorOW 5y ago
  That's fair. Instructions on drinking bleach might cause others to be harmed. This is different because nobody has ever come to harm because of this. I'd imagine if people believed this, there would have been some kind of violence on say, January 6th the day of the insurrection-- sorry, inauguration. Please let me know if you know how to fix this unfortunate typo.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
    >” Please let me know if you know how to fix this unfortunate typo.” You can click the edit button. But you’re probably trying to make a snarky point. If we are going to say that censorship is justified because you want to prevent violence or insurrections, we open the floodgates to some seriously bad things. Here’s a scenario: Claiming that people are being systematically discriminated against could lead to violence and death. Saying that police officers kill minorities could lead to another CHAZ/CHOP, which was also an insurrection where people died. As a result, we need to silence ACAB and anyone who delegitimizes our police.
    - cryptonector 5y ago
      We don't do prior restraint on speech in the U.S. Only if there's an imminent threat of violence (and that imminence is not interpreted liberally) do we allow the government to stop a speaker. If speech eventually leads to violence, we expect law enforcement to deal with it, and there can be consequences after the fact, but not before.
    - DoctorOW 5y ago
      > You can click the edit button. Don't think so. > If we are going to say that censorship is justified because you want to prevent violence Nope. Just agreeing with my parent comment that there is a significant difference between harm-causing misinformation and this very good election business.
    - UnpossibleJim 5y ago
      >>If we are going to say that censorship is justified because you want to prevent violence or insurrections, we open the floodgates to some seriously bad things<< If it were just as bad as "The censors want to prevent the bad things", I think I might feel that it would be justifiable. This type of thinking also robs the broader public of its agency to reason. The broader public is not comprised of petulant children, regardless of what the media outlets would tell you and what the behavior of Twitter might show (very few of those people display that sort of behavior in actual life, where consequences happen). This "moral highgrounding", to protect us from the corruption of verbiage that may occur on one platform or another is a ridiculous idea to think that functional adults might need. We are not so weak as to be protected from ideas that "must not be named". Words are not magic, and people cannot be enchanted by their mere utterances. They can be enticed by them being outlawed and the verboten mystique that makes the forbidden seem so savory. People may be uneducated, but it is impossible to educate them through silence and the silencing of ideas. These verboten ideas will get spread around, major platform or no. They'll spread without any kind of resistance or discussion and no disinfectant light of truth by debate will be shone on them because they will be pushed down to the nooks and crannies, off of the popular platforms where the light of day can show them to be the BS that they are. They'll find their place in small groups and factions, I felt and grow and split people apart. They'll make people not talk to each other and they'll make us a weaker country and a less educated one. A country that tries to run away from hard questions and conversations because it's easier to tell someone or some group to shut up and don't talk about that, rather than address a topic with an open and honest conversation with facts and dialogue.
exolymph 5y ago
> If it's instructions on drinking bleach, why censor it? How to drink bleach: Unscrew cap from bottle. Pour bleach down your throat. Was that so bad?
- lijogdfljk 5y ago
  Fair, what i meant should probably have been worded: "Recommendations on drinking bleach to cure Covid" or etc.

virgildotcodes 5y ago

> If it's nonsense, then why censor it? Because people believe the nonsense and then storm the capital, and/or support overturning democratic elections in order to allow would-be dictators to seize power. Misinformation can have a serious and deeply negative impact on the world, and the general public is clearly not immune to it.

cryptonector 5y ago
Specious argument. First of all, the democrats did a lot of calling of elections into question, and so have republicans, and so what? Second, there has been an enormous amount of violence in the U.S. in the past several years, and the vast majority of that did not happen on 2021-01-06. Third, "storming" of capitols is a thing that has happened plenty in the U.S., and fairly recently too, once in the past year alone in Georgia, and in Wisconsin in 2010, and so on.
- virgildotcodes 5y ago
  Your argument seems to boil down to: “bad things have happened before, so bad things aren’t bad”. 1. In a close election, contesting it or demanding a recount is fine and sane. Step aside once the results of that process are in. Trying to discredit the entire system with a mountain of bullshit and overthrow an election when it is overwhelmingly clear that it did not go in your favor is an incredibly dangerous road for us to go down. The two practices are incomparable. 2. I can’t understand this argument. Are you saying that 1.6.21 must compose a minimum of 51% of all violence in the US over the past several years before it qualifies as an issue? 3. Presidents inciting their supporters to violently overthrow elections that did not go in their favor is not a thing that has happened plenty recently nor should it ever.
  - cryptonector 5y ago
    I'm saying we don't do prior restraints on speech in the U.S. Law enforcement can take care of the rest.

a_shovel 5y ago

This argument would work equally well to support spreading neo-nazi propaganda material. Trite catchphrases are nothing to base a belief system around. An argument doesn't have to make logical sense for it to convince millions of people. Especially not if they like the conclusion.

cryptonector 5y ago
That's Godwin's law territory. I remember being taught in the very liberal NY schools I went to that the ACLU defending the free speech rights of Nazis in Illinois was part of the deal in a free society, and in this case we're not even talking about Nazis. But I'll defend to the death your right to say ridiculous nonsense.
- a_shovel 5y ago
  Well, on one hand, there's a group's right to say what they like, and on the other, there's the discussion of what a corporate platform should host for free, what they can remove, what they ought to remove, what they're required by law to remove, and whether/how monopoly status changes any of that. Those are thorny and nuanced questions that catchphrases are no use in solving. Also, we were already off topic when you mentioned censorship, so Nazis aren't that much further a digression. I think the real topic here is that Youtube can never possibly support a moderation team proportionate to its size while still offering free uploads, so it's limping along with garbage moderation that often has disastrous effects.
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
  Youtube isn't saying that no one has the right to say ridiculous nonsense, they are saying that they can't use their platform and infrastructure to do so.
jankyxenon 5y ago
Who gets to decide what other people are allowed to believe, and on what basis?

anonymouswacker 5y ago

YouTube is just a wolf in sheep's clothing; another media outlet disguised as a sharing platform. “The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses. The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he’s a the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. It will make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” ― Malcom X

selfhoster11 5y ago
It's a media outlet for those that treat it as such. If I come there for news, it's from channels I know and trust. Other than that, it's mostly for non-political entertainment.

enkid 5y ago

You don't think people could believe non-sense?

cryptonector 5y ago
I do. I know lots of people who believe things I believe are nonsense. You won't see me going around saying they should be censored.
- sixstringtheory 5y ago
  Yeah but are you going to print out all their insane bs in gigantic lettering and put it on signs on your lawn and the exterior walls of your house? You going to print it on tshirts and wear them to work or out in public? There’s a difference between letting people think and say what they want, vs letting them use you as a megaphone.