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So this comment hinges on a particularly egregious bit of logic: The idea that the fact that 720,000 hours of video get uploaded to it justifies poor curation,

So this comment hinges on a particularly egregious bit of logic: The idea that the fact that 720,000 hours of video get uploaded to it justifies poor curation, because being responsible for it is hard. That is absolutely not reasonable: If YouTube cannot curate 720,000 hours of video a day, perhaps it shouldn't be accepting 720,000 hours of video a day. And perhaps, if it hired the staff to appropriately do so, it wouldn't be (part of) one of the most profitable companies on the planet. Scale is not an excuse. It isn't a defense for bad behavior. In fact, the only thing 720,000 hours of video a day speaks to is an absolutely unhinged problem that is apparently getting drastically worse every single day. And as a former library employee, I can absolutely tell you that libraries pay attention to each and every book that goes into their collections. And while libraries value speech of varying viewpoints, and often celebrates things like "banned books", they are also very rare to give home to outright defamation.

rektide 4y ago
This seems like a hideous & cruel way to take away a basic right to expression that humanity ought enjoy, given how very cheap & affordable digitalized expression is. Radically raising the barrier to entry to express yourself- turning back the clock to the 1970's level communication systems, or going Full Chinese Authoritarian moderation- does not seem worthy the rather abstract benefit of better regulation. Bits are cheap. Being so very very afraid of them isnt going to progress us through these times. Clutching for such absolute assurity is blanketly infeasible & cavalierly retrogressive.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  I would recommend tuning your language down from suggesting "holding companies accountable for ensuring their products follow the law" is "hideous and cruel". That seems really detached from the discussion. Similarly, insinuating that YouTube having to follow US or Australian law about published content is "Full Chinese Authoritarian" moderation is also unnecessarily ridiculous. The cost of bits has nothing to do with it. It's about ensuring companies are not causing mass global harm through their actions. Right now, Section 230-powered social media companies have been responsible for genocides, and you suggest that holding them to any sort of accountability would be "hideous and cruel". I think "dude can't spout off whatever defamation he wants unchecked on YouTube, but less people are slaughtered" is a fairly good tradeoff.
  - rektide 4y ago
    > * I would recommend tuning your language down from suggesting "holding companies accountable for ensuring their products follow the law" is "hideous and cruel". That seems really detached from the discussion. You've fictitiously made up the link between the first part & the second. I was replying to your absolutely shocking (to me) proposal that we shut down youtube until human moderators can review all incoming content, currently around 720,000 hours/day, and calling the stream of content an "absolutely unhinged problem" (your emphasis). My words might better be expanded into: > [Your demand to human moderate all content/be afraid of/revile against content/sharing] seems like a hideous & cruel way to take away a basic right to expression that humanity ought enjoy, Again I feel "misconstrue" is a generous definition of your other fork here: > Similarly, insinuating that YouTube having to follow US or Australian law about published content is "Full Chinese Authoritarian" moderation is also unnecessarily ridiculous. Once again, I was discussing your proposal, not the law. Perhaps if we do take Australia seriously (hard to do at present), & regard them a publisher, sites hosting user-content have a higher bar to moderation than what they're doing. Perhaps just ongoing legal court cases are the check & balance they need & the system is working; they will refine their tools for filtering content to get better, fulfillent to the law perhaps without ever becoming anything humanity would ever have recognized in any way as a publisher before. Personally, I think that would reflect very poorly on the law, would define government as ignorant stupid & incapable of it's base sovereign duty, be unable to make even a simple grasp of reality, but perhaps modern expression can adapt & survive under such merciless ignorant stupidity anyhow. Alas, most likely, it will only be the very very large, existing companies that can navigate & adapt, wade through this legal hell, develop the complex & careful processes & systems to still accept user-content. I still don't see what you are trying to protect against or how. I don't see great evils about. I don't see these platforms as bad. It's a hard job trying to insure moderation standards are met worldwide. I don't see systematic bad behavior you write about, I see company's trying to do a pretty good job, trying to navigate hard social issues of the say safely (something you propose blowing up by eliminating Section 230 & it's ability to let these company's pick what content to host): > Scale is not an excuse. It isn't a defense for bad behavior This crystalizes what I find so terrifying. I've already said I disagree, don't find much of a compelling case for bad behavior. Whether or not scale is an excuse, it misses the obvious truth: the internet has vastly vastly empowered & enabled expression, in ways radically unlike what came before. This planet is vastly more capable. Scale isn't an excuse: it's a fact. One you propose unwinding & turning off. For unspecified spectres of evil & harm, that I think are mostly imagined. I don't see any recognition of the impossibility of the task you demand companys take, when you describe "accountability." Let's take on of the few truly agreeable awful large scale (more than a couple person sized) incidents, Myanmar (largely lain at Facebook (not Youtubes) feet). First up, yes, Facebook should have done more. They did not deplatform enough people fast enough or aggressively enough. But I have sympathys in abundance, rather than merely axes to grind here. The world is extremely difficult to grasp & understand, the case of what's happening on the ground somewhere is complex & actively developing, & there's so much regional contexts that are hard to acquire. Even if we understand the situation with objective clarity, people's creativity makes the task still further impossible: witness China's ever-expanding sea of banned terms used to talk about Tiananmen Square as prime example, or their expanding list of banned euphemisms that portray their leaders in less than sunny light. To let words or ideas be shared is a risk, always could have some covert or secret message, dogwhistle to the followers, that others might not know. In sum, this idea of accountability strongly implies a knowability, and it would be convenient & simple if reality had such clearly cut lines & shapes for us to govern ourselves well by, to impose order with, but the real factual truth is messiness & overflowingness & saturation & mis-order. It's not even techno-mystical thinking to imagine these companies can order & make safe all expression, that they can be fully accountable: it's the scaries worst branches of utopian thinking that we can legislate & insist upon perfection, that only ideas that have been fully vetted may be released & shared with each other. To demand of people who have given such great service, enabled so much to begin, because they cannot do it perfectly, is folly. We have to moderate our own expectations & demands to reasonableness. Hosting content must be possible, somehow, and safe harbor makes sense & is the only legal structure we've had to enable us to allow any user-hosted words online. The Anti-Section 230 brigade seems resolutely unable to back off from absolutism, to show nuance or respect or appreciation for these elementary simple facts. Making company's absolutely responsible/accountable for everything that goes through the network is madness, insanity, utterly impractical short of turning it all off & starting again, in something which very likely will end up very near a Chinese model where the State must govern & check all communications. This thirsty crusade against safe harbor is insanity & cruelty, demands impossible perfection of an imperfect world. It's unclear what the charges are: we are in such hyperemotional hyperreal times, and the cries, your pleas of the Anti-Section 230 brigade- to please make things better, please fix the problems- are emotionally highstrung, go for the weakspot of humanity: our willingness to listen to Fear Uncertainty & Doubt & be goaded in. But these claims re short of a real case. Doubt & sensationalistic hype & media frenzy around new online sites abounds, the world is markedly different & we have someone convenient to blame for all the world's ills- the people who have started letting us share with each other. That bad emerges is unsurprising, but I think the case has been vastly vastly overblown against these companys, that the harm they generate is under the rounding point of significance. The ills are not well defined, they are all in all quite rare. It's hard to really assess honestly. But there's no honest assessment when such simple Fear is how this debate is argued: > less people are slaughtered The Fear is just to sell something dark. There's no balance to these views, no middle ground. The Anti-Section 230 brigade pushes only harsh, brutal insistence of security & safety, at seemingly all & any cost, & seemingly gladly & readily willing to snuff out human expression as we have come to know it, as it has, unquestionably to me, arisen us from much smaller scale people to much more spanning & expansive & involved scale beings. So many people were not possible before, and can find themselves only because they have been able to use the internet, to find & explore & communicate with others. The Anti-Section 230 brigade has no recognition that bad would find other places & forms, that perhaps the massified giant platforms are doing a better job than the vaster seedier underbelly that would spring up if we dismantled the vast platforms, chopped them down in vengeance & anger. > In fact, the only thing 720,000 hours of video a day speaks to is an absolutely unhinged problem This says so much to me. I think this marks well a modern viewpoint, is shared widely by the anti-platform views. I think we need to be very mindful & respectful & appreciative when we consider what 720,000 hours/day of video posted represents. To me, we've made the world alive. The online world is interactable, open for discussion & will accept a diverse range of views, while, ideally, having some moderation guidelines posted to aid in preventing outright harm. Never has the world offered such openness before. Never have we been so able to accept transparency & to communicate so freely & openly, so publicly. The information age is young, it's new, and I still see so much more potential, so much hope that we can keep improving. Please, world, don't let yourself give in to fear.
rektide 4y ago
Parent in full: >> A newspaper is a carefully crafted collection of articles by the editors. 720,000 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube every day. Equating the two is simply not reasonable. YouTube is more like a library or archive, where users themselves decide what to consume. You: > So this comment hinges on a particularly egregious bit of logic: The idea that the fact that 720,000 hours of video get uploaded to it justifies poor curation, because being responsible for it is hard. You're trying to win this one- in part- by covertly asserting your definition of Youtube being a curator. Which directly charges over & ignores exactly what the parent said. Curators operate by tastes. Not by moderation guidelines. If youtube took 1/2 the 720,000 hours of day of video & said, nah, we don't want the rest, you might maybe have a leg to stand on. It's a silly pretense, calling them a "curator," or a "publisher," or whatever other pre-contemporary shoebox of an idea you strive to fit them into. There's simply no parallel. We never could amass information like this before; it physically was not possible. We never could allow so many visitors to an archive of humanity before; it physically was not possible. What's happening now does not mirror the past, it is something new, and doesn't fit the compact tight little vintage models you try shoving it into. You were a librarian, so you might enjoy a reading suggestion on an idea to pool human knowledge & expand it's access. John G Kemeny, Chairman of Math & Astronomy at Dartmouth, wrote "A Library for 2000 A.D." (and 2100 AD), written ~1962, imagining a vast globe-spanning system of teleconnected/replicating microfiche to capture human knowledge & development. It was an epic & expansive proposal, expecting 10,000,000 items (mostly articles, papers, some books) per year added (and increasing in velocity). He writes of high-science-fiction of the day, but today it feels so unbeleivably antiquated, prehistoric. We are unimaginably more empowered, more capable than he could have imagined. Things have changed vastly in 10~20 the past years (20TB hard drives for $450!), and trying to impose old framings to view & understand & govern what we expect or how we regulate is a huge hazard. I think it's imperative that we recognize that there are things without precedent, and be willing to adapt & accept that there are new things. Sites that accept user-content are, to me, a phenomenon begat by possibility. Stores & businesses did not have place for words, short of a bulletin board, before; it wasn't practical & it wouldn't go far. Now that expression has such new potential, we must be willing to face & accept that preliminary fact, rather than regress to using only old patterns to make our decisions.

rektide 4y ago

This seems like a hideous & cruel way to take away a basic right to expression that humanity ought enjoy, given how very cheap & affordable digitalized expression is. Radically raising the barrier to entry to express yourself- turning back the clock to the 1970's level communication systems, or going Full Chinese Authoritarian moderation- does not seem worthy the rather abstract benefit of better regulation. Bits are cheap. Being so very very afraid of them isnt going to progress us through these times. Clutching for such absolute assurity is blanketly infeasible & cavalierly retrogressive.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago
I would recommend tuning your language down from suggesting "holding companies accountable for ensuring their products follow the law" is "hideous and cruel". That seems really detached from the discussion. Similarly, insinuating that YouTube having to follow US or Australian law about published content is "Full Chinese Authoritarian" moderation is also unnecessarily ridiculous. The cost of bits has nothing to do with it. It's about ensuring companies are not causing mass global harm through their actions. Right now, Section 230-powered social media companies have been responsible for genocides, and you suggest that holding them to any sort of accountability would be "hideous and cruel". I think "dude can't spout off whatever defamation he wants unchecked on YouTube, but less people are slaughtered" is a fairly good tradeoff.
- rektide 4y ago
  > * I would recommend tuning your language down from suggesting "holding companies accountable for ensuring their products follow the law" is "hideous and cruel". That seems really detached from the discussion. You've fictitiously made up the link between the first part & the second. I was replying to your absolutely shocking (to me) proposal that we shut down youtube until human moderators can review all incoming content, currently around 720,000 hours/day, and calling the stream of content an "absolutely unhinged problem" (your emphasis). My words might better be expanded into: > [Your demand to human moderate all content/be afraid of/revile against content/sharing] seems like a hideous & cruel way to take away a basic right to expression that humanity ought enjoy, Again I feel "misconstrue" is a generous definition of your other fork here: > Similarly, insinuating that YouTube having to follow US or Australian law about published content is "Full Chinese Authoritarian" moderation is also unnecessarily ridiculous. Once again, I was discussing your proposal, not the law. Perhaps if we do take Australia seriously (hard to do at present), & regard them a publisher, sites hosting user-content have a higher bar to moderation than what they're doing. Perhaps just ongoing legal court cases are the check & balance they need & the system is working; they will refine their tools for filtering content to get better, fulfillent to the law perhaps without ever becoming anything humanity would ever have recognized in any way as a publisher before. Personally, I think that would reflect very poorly on the law, would define government as ignorant stupid & incapable of it's base sovereign duty, be unable to make even a simple grasp of reality, but perhaps modern expression can adapt & survive under such merciless ignorant stupidity anyhow. Alas, most likely, it will only be the very very large, existing companies that can navigate & adapt, wade through this legal hell, develop the complex & careful processes & systems to still accept user-content. I still don't see what you are trying to protect against or how. I don't see great evils about. I don't see these platforms as bad. It's a hard job trying to insure moderation standards are met worldwide. I don't see systematic bad behavior you write about, I see company's trying to do a pretty good job, trying to navigate hard social issues of the say safely (something you propose blowing up by eliminating Section 230 & it's ability to let these company's pick what content to host): > Scale is not an excuse. It isn't a defense for bad behavior This crystalizes what I find so terrifying. I've already said I disagree, don't find much of a compelling case for bad behavior. Whether or not scale is an excuse, it misses the obvious truth: the internet has vastly vastly empowered & enabled expression, in ways radically unlike what came before. This planet is vastly more capable. Scale isn't an excuse: it's a fact. One you propose unwinding & turning off. For unspecified spectres of evil & harm, that I think are mostly imagined. I don't see any recognition of the impossibility of the task you demand companys take, when you describe "accountability." Let's take on of the few truly agreeable awful large scale (more than a couple person sized) incidents, Myanmar (largely lain at Facebook (not Youtubes) feet). First up, yes, Facebook should have done more. They did not deplatform enough people fast enough or aggressively enough. But I have sympathys in abundance, rather than merely axes to grind here. The world is extremely difficult to grasp & understand, the case of what's happening on the ground somewhere is complex & actively developing, & there's so much regional contexts that are hard to acquire. Even if we understand the situation with objective clarity, people's creativity makes the task still further impossible: witness China's ever-expanding sea of banned terms used to talk about Tiananmen Square as prime example, or their expanding list of banned euphemisms that portray their leaders in less than sunny light. To let words or ideas be shared is a risk, always could have some covert or secret message, dogwhistle to the followers, that others might not know. In sum, this idea of accountability strongly implies a knowability, and it would be convenient & simple if reality had such clearly cut lines & shapes for us to govern ourselves well by, to impose order with, but the real factual truth is messiness & overflowingness & saturation & mis-order. It's not even techno-mystical thinking to imagine these companies can order & make safe all expression, that they can be fully accountable: it's the scaries worst branches of utopian thinking that we can legislate & insist upon perfection, that only ideas that have been fully vetted may be released & shared with each other. To demand of people who have given such great service, enabled so much to begin, because they cannot do it perfectly, is folly. We have to moderate our own expectations & demands to reasonableness. Hosting content must be possible, somehow, and safe harbor makes sense & is the only legal structure we've had to enable us to allow any user-hosted words online. The Anti-Section 230 brigade seems resolutely unable to back off from absolutism, to show nuance or respect or appreciation for these elementary simple facts. Making company's absolutely responsible/accountable for everything that goes through the network is madness, insanity, utterly impractical short of turning it all off & starting again, in something which very likely will end up very near a Chinese model where the State must govern & check all communications. This thirsty crusade against safe harbor is insanity & cruelty, demands impossible perfection of an imperfect world. It's unclear what the charges are: we are in such hyperemotional hyperreal times, and the cries, your pleas of the Anti-Section 230 brigade- to please make things better, please fix the problems- are emotionally highstrung, go for the weakspot of humanity: our willingness to listen to Fear Uncertainty & Doubt & be goaded in. But these claims re short of a real case. Doubt & sensationalistic hype & media frenzy around new online sites abounds, the world is markedly different & we have someone convenient to blame for all the world's ills- the people who have started letting us share with each other. That bad emerges is unsurprising, but I think the case has been vastly vastly overblown against these companys, that the harm they generate is under the rounding point of significance. The ills are not well defined, they are all in all quite rare. It's hard to really assess honestly. But there's no honest assessment when such simple Fear is how this debate is argued: > less people are slaughtered The Fear is just to sell something dark. There's no balance to these views, no middle ground. The Anti-Section 230 brigade pushes only harsh, brutal insistence of security & safety, at seemingly all & any cost, & seemingly gladly & readily willing to snuff out human expression as we have come to know it, as it has, unquestionably to me, arisen us from much smaller scale people to much more spanning & expansive & involved scale beings. So many people were not possible before, and can find themselves only because they have been able to use the internet, to find & explore & communicate with others. The Anti-Section 230 brigade has no recognition that bad would find other places & forms, that perhaps the massified giant platforms are doing a better job than the vaster seedier underbelly that would spring up if we dismantled the vast platforms, chopped them down in vengeance & anger. > In fact, the only thing 720,000 hours of video a day speaks to is an absolutely unhinged problem This says so much to me. I think this marks well a modern viewpoint, is shared widely by the anti-platform views. I think we need to be very mindful & respectful & appreciative when we consider what 720,000 hours/day of video posted represents. To me, we've made the world alive. The online world is interactable, open for discussion & will accept a diverse range of views, while, ideally, having some moderation guidelines posted to aid in preventing outright harm. Never has the world offered such openness before. Never have we been so able to accept transparency & to communicate so freely & openly, so publicly. The information age is young, it's new, and I still see so much more potential, so much hope that we can keep improving. Please, world, don't let yourself give in to fear.

rektide 4y ago

Parent in full: >> A newspaper is a carefully crafted collection of articles by the editors. 720,000 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube every day. Equating the two is simply not reasonable. YouTube is more like a library or archive, where users themselves decide what to consume. You: > So this comment hinges on a particularly egregious bit of logic: The idea that the fact that 720,000 hours of video get uploaded to it justifies poor curation, because being responsible for it is hard. You're trying to win this one- in part- by covertly asserting your definition of Youtube being a curator. Which directly charges over & ignores exactly what the parent said. Curators operate by tastes. Not by moderation guidelines. If youtube took 1/2 the 720,000 hours of day of video & said, nah, we don't want the rest, you might maybe have a leg to stand on. It's a silly pretense, calling them a "curator," or a "publisher," or whatever other pre-contemporary shoebox of an idea you strive to fit them into. There's simply no parallel. We never could amass information like this before; it physically was not possible. We never could allow so many visitors to an archive of humanity before; it physically was not possible. What's happening now does not mirror the past, it is something new, and doesn't fit the compact tight little vintage models you try shoving it into. You were a librarian, so you might enjoy a reading suggestion on an idea to pool human knowledge & expand it's access. John G Kemeny, Chairman of Math & Astronomy at Dartmouth, wrote "A Library for 2000 A.D." (and 2100 AD), written ~1962, imagining a vast globe-spanning system of teleconnected/replicating microfiche to capture human knowledge & development. It was an epic & expansive proposal, expecting 10,000,000 items (mostly articles, papers, some books) per year added (and increasing in velocity). He writes of high-science-fiction of the day, but today it feels so unbeleivably antiquated, prehistoric. We are unimaginably more empowered, more capable than he could have imagined. Things have changed vastly in 10~20 the past years (20TB hard drives for $450!), and trying to impose old framings to view & understand & govern what we expect or how we regulate is a huge hazard. I think it's imperative that we recognize that there are things without precedent, and be willing to adapt & accept that there are new things. Sites that accept user-content are, to me, a phenomenon begat by possibility. Stores & businesses did not have place for words, short of a bulletin board, before; it wasn't practical & it wouldn't go far. Now that expression has such new potential, we must be willing to face & accept that preliminary fact, rather than regress to using only old patterns to make our decisions.