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When the platforms starting censoring during the pandemic and last election cycle I remember saying they better get it right 100% of the time because the moment

When the platforms starting censoring during the pandemic and last election cycle I remember saying they better get it right 100% of the time because the moment they get it wrong their credibility is shot. Hear we are. Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly. So you can lose credibility two ways, one by not doing any censorship because people on the internet will be the worst if you let them. Doing too much censorship is also bad because people don't like that either. Of the big causes of censorship currently, I think of things like youtubes copyright claim process and how that is routinely used as a censorship backdoor by anyone - including the police. Sometimes its not even for any good reason and done by unthinking bots. This is banning more perfectly fine content than anything the government has done. I don't understand why there isn't more pushback against that process to punish people for frivolous claims.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  Theres no push back because only the uploader knows it even happened. The millions of other people who did not get to see that video never knew there was anything that was taken from them. Even after you start to hear about an example here & there, it still feels like an isolated and insignificant example. You as a viewer don't have any way to perceive the scale, the mass of what is being blocked and diverted and modified and bowdlerized. I mean to include all the ways creators taylor their stuff and self-censor so that it will get through, not just plain take downs. Everyone knows it happens, but you have no way to see what that really means in it's totality. I think people would push back a lot if they could see that somehow.
  - celdon25 2y ago
    > but you have no way to see what that really means in it's totality. I think people would push back a lot if they could see that somehow. I’ve watched enough Mark Dice videos to know how bad it is, and I regret not taking the blue pill sometimes. He’s shown just about every notable case of it happening (with proof). Though he knows how to game the system to resist being taken offline and you could say it’s part of his brand. You could say that it wouldn’t be worth the risk for others to call it out like he does because it wouldn’t add to the content, and they could slip up. You can disagree with his politics or personality but you probably wont find a leftist channel that covers that kind of censorship. I wish the videos were more categorized, though he doesn’t do it and uses generic video titles because apparently that makes it less likely to get censored.
    - BlueTemplar 2y ago
      Just stop using platforms. For video, use PeerTube (or similar). This was a concern in 2009, but now, 15 years later, people using platforms have only themselves to blame. Stop being part of the problem !
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - celdon25 2y ago
        Did you get that information from Wikipedia?
        shadowgovt 2y ago
        Yes. Is there anything in their summary you would dispute? At least in my book, buying into the "US orchestrated 9/11" story is pretty cut-and-dried; not much room for debate on whether that makes one a conspiracy theorist.
        celdon25 2y ago
        We have confirmation that the Saudis did it, and that the Bush Administration actively suppressed any investigation into the Saudis and invaded Afghanistan instead. Sen. Bob Graham had a lot to say on it. No need to really say anything more than that. I don't think "Bush did it", but the media censorship industrial complex was complicit in suppressing the truth at minimum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQCkTu3n-KY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQCkTu3n-KY A better way to judge if he's a "conspiracy theorist" would be to look at what he says, what he cites as evidence, and judge for yourself if he has any credibility. A more valid disagreement would be his far-right political views. After the Trump shooting he shot down any conspiracy theories that had to do with it being an inside job, said conspiracy didn't make sense without any evidence, and then followed it up with a "simpler explanation: diversity". I consider myself center-right but he's too far to the right even for me (though I'm not a believer in using demographics to make hiring decisions, bias is not a fixable problem). I still think he's done a great job at exposing big tech. Wikipedia probably didn't include the above counter-argument. Disputes on Wikipedia are decided by a vote, and you're crazy if you think there isn't a bias there. I wouldn't trust it as a source for anything political. Even if individual statements are factual, the overall conclusion can't be grounded in truth when facts are cherry-picked.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan The moment you start fighting spam, you’re obliged to make censorship decisions.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  > They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly. If you look at every attempt to create "The Uncensored Free Speech Version Of [ANY_SERVICE]," they all, inevitably turned into a 4chan-like trashfire. You've got to have some kind of moderation.
  - dimitrios1 2y ago
    This is where I really feel my age. Every message board and chatroom (bbs, forums, irc, icq, aol, et all) on the young internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all, yet we all mostly got by. You went to the places you knew to go to. The communities mostly self moderated by kicks/bans. It worked really well. So whats changed? Well, I have my thoughts, but one thing is for sure, as soon as the platform itself tried to start moderating, that's when things really started changing.
    - coolbreezetft24 2y ago
      > virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all > self moderated by kicks/bans Also smaller communities tend to be easier to keep from becoming a cesspool
    - thejazzman 2y ago
      Before literally everyone was aware of the numerous low effort ways to exploit others on the internet Now the moment a vulnerability is known, be it social or system, it is exploited by many actors. The moment a new business idea appears to work, it is an overnight saturated market The internet is now driven by hustlers and monetization all the way down RIP AOL COMOUSERVE PRODIGY GOLDEN ERA
    - thegrim33 2y ago
      The internet used to be primarily used by geekier, smarter, tech people, and it used to not be a good propaganda/manipulation target since only a subset of the population used it. Media/newspapers were still the primary propaganda channel. Now that the entire population uses it, the average IQ involved has plummeted, and the political and social payoff for manipulating it with inauthentic content is huge.
- woooooo 2y ago
  Fighting spam and porn are a different category from censoring political viewpoonts with 25%+ adoption.
  - norir 2y ago
    25% is a completely arbitrary number and context dependent. I can guarantee you can find many communities that have majority views that you find abhorrent and would not want to be a part of your community discourse. The problem is that social media gives the illusion of a broad town square where all opinions are heard, but that is not what happened. Everyone on social media is filtered into silos based on what the algorithms predict they will find engaging. In such an environment, it is not hard at all for malicious actors to propagate incendiary lies and exaggerations that metastasize into political beliefs. A fringe belief can easily become mainstream if it is amplified unchallenged, which is exactly what happens every day on social media.
    - woooooo 2y ago
      Yes, it's arbitrary, 20 would also make the same point, 0.1 would not. If you're saying "we must censor abhorrent viewpoints for the good of society", I'll just counter that your viewpoints are horrible and must be suppressed, while mine are good and must be amplified. For the good of society.
      - shadowgovt 2y ago
        Sounds good. Now build a Facebook and get enough users to rally to your cause, and your opinion on suppression / amplification will have some weight to throw around. People seem to forget that Facebook is where it is because users keep showing up, and users keep showing up because the censorship gives them something they want. It's a feedback loop.
        woooooo 2y ago
        "Might makes right, sit there and take it" might be how the world works in some ways, but it's not exactly a moral cause.
- normalaccess 2y ago
  Commenting on YouTube: Massive content sites like YouTube have a problem, the owners are a vanishingly small minority when compared to the population. If they ever have a proper public outcry they would lose in an instant. The "Algorithm" and "Automated Systems" are put in place by design to create a buffer in the minds of the people between content creators and staff. That's also why the rules are vague and sometimes randomly applied. When content creators don't know all the rules around what will hurt or help them then they are motivated to be as passive as possible via learned helplessness. A system of random punishment and ever changing rewards will keep people guessing what the "algorithm" wants and what causes strikes. How YouTube operates is a master class in mass manipulation. YouTube MUST randomly abuse people to instill a source-less fear to maintain control. Further Reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_bonding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_bonding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_woman_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_woman_syndrome
  - intended 2y ago
    We wish it was that smart. Between engagement driven metrics and the sheer ludicrousness of moderation, any sense of order is swiftly smashed. There are more policy updates and clarifications in a year than there are days. Why assume intelligence where randomness would achieve the same.
- ffsm8 2y ago
  > there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan This is false, because Facebook is bound to your real identity. A completely unmoderated Facebook will never be like every /b/ or /pol/ thread. People aren't quiet as outspoken with derogatory terms and pornography if it their family sees what they've written. Random copy pasted examples: - There are 9 billion people on the planet why don't you nuke china india and africa then get back to us - And? I dont care what race you are, you all need to die. TMD. - To gas glowniggers on-sight? - Hang yourself tranny
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    Real genocides have been coordinated through Facebook in the third world. People are proud to put their real identities and their real names behind all kinds of evil ideas.
  - bri3d 2y ago
    Creating "burner" Facebook accounts is trivial and most public Facebook group discussions are absolutely chock-full of them.
  - mandevil 2y ago
    If only we lived in a world where this was true. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly. It is possible to distinguish between censorship and spam filtering. In the case of censorship, the speaker wants to say something and the listener wants to hear it and the censor prevents this. In the case of spam filtering, the spammer wants to say something and the listener doesn't want to hear it and voluntarily requests that a third party filter it out, with the option to individually disable this filtering. Now, someone could implement censorship and call it a spam filter, e.g. it filters spam and also disfavored facts and people leave it on because there is only a single on/off toggle and they don't want to be deluged with spam. But what this implies is that a "spam filter" with uncorrectable "false positives" is equivalent to censorship.
EasyMark 2y ago
I think better of them for trying to get the fake shit off of their platforms. This backstepping is what bugs me. Facebook got a lot of garbage off there. There’s still plenty left, but I think did a decent job of flushing a bunch of misinformation bots into waste disposal where they belong. Take a look at x.com where for $9 a month you can launch a bot that posts / retweets garbage 24/7 and no matter how many times it’s reported for racism/terrorism/etc it will stay up for a while, when it gets killed they just make a new bot. Go look at the blue “verified” badges on any political news story and look at the drivel spouted by these $9 hucksters. A lot of people think free speech only applies to them, free speech means a platform can also exercise their free speech and shutdown the messages they don’t like. Those accounts are free to spread their lies and fake news on other platforms.
bitcharmer 2y ago
[flagged]
- pphysch 2y ago
  Reddit's value proposition (to shareholders) is astroturfing, for ads and other propaganda. Send us your message and we will make it look organic and popular. That's the service. There's no other way to make boatloads of money from an open, heavily-manipulated forum.
  - bitcharmer 2y ago
    Funny how you hit the name on the head and still getting down-voted. Today I deleted my reddit account and sent a request to get my HN account removed as well. Moved to lemmy and not looking back.
- lasc4r 2y ago
  Hacker News is far worse in terms of disallowed content. Must be full of the most vile and twisted minds on the internet!
Xen9 2y ago
Counterpoint: https://rumble.com/v4e0xw0-tucker-carlson-interviews-mike-benz-the-u.s.-governments-orwellian-mass-cen.html https://rumble.com/v4e0xw0-tucker-carlson-interviews-mike-be...
- Xen9 2y ago
  Comments like this are usually not good, but in this case I believe it's better to give the link than to try to summarize the numerous points about the state of censorship in the United States and Europe that were made in that interview.
hintymad 2y ago
I still remember that so many people cheered when legitimate doctors and scientists were banned from Twitter or Facebook, just for questioning either the lockdown or the effectiveness or risks of the vaccines. The doctors may not be correct, but shouldn't we allow people to question science? Our government can do what it does because the people embolden them.
- sirspacey 2y ago
  This is the proof that the religion of “I believe in science” is not a friend to creating a culture of science appreciation It’s been the struggle for scientific progress, the breakthroughs are the exception not the rule and the reason is the culture of belief around the science of the time The lesson I’ve most learned from science is that the questions are more interesting than the answer and the answers we have are a way to ask new questions
  - Log_out_ 2y ago
    If it feels bad it may contain trace amounts of truth. If it feels bad all of the time for everyone, but puts food on all tables,regardless of beliefsystem,its actually science
  - hintymad 2y ago
    I find "I believe in science" as delivered on social platforms and the mainstream media hysterical in the past few years. I mean, how do we even know if "science" is right without questioning? I can understand that people believe that they are on the right side of the history during the Covid era, for lockdowns, for the efficacy of the vaccines (For those who get angry, I took vaccines by the way, so it's not about my personal assessment here) and etc. But is it by default we are on the right side? Like Government "helped" people believe that Lysenkoism was on the right side of the history? Like people should not challenge social Darwinism or eugenics? Like Chinese people believed that the yield of rice patty could be 100x higher because a top JPL scientist said so and the government "helped" them understand? Like authorities challenged Darwin for his evolution theory? Like people would rather lock up Galileo because his heliocentric model was just plainly wrong? Like Ignaz Semmelweis was obvious crazy to propose the hand hygiene in hospitals? Like Wegener's continental drift was just batshit crazy theory? Like Bolzmann deserved to be shunned from the academic society for his outrageous statistical mechanics? Like those who believed in the existence of irrationals should be drowned by Pythagorean? Since when science can't be challenged, even when the challenge can be outrageously wrong?
purpleblue 2y ago
It's only doomed to fail because we have a strong Supreme Court. All the efforts by the Democrats to undermine this will only make things easier for fascists to take over the US.
- norir 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > My understanding of fascism is that it is a political system that is founded on a story of lost national glory that can only be restored by a purification of the land by a strong leader Fascism strikes me as a historical term more than a political one. Its most-commonly agreed upon definition is something like political economic systems that resemble those of Mussolini's Italy and Nazi Germany. (Both governments embraced revanchism. Both were ideologically incoherent.)
    - didgetmaster 2y ago
      That might be the old definition of fascism; but like many words, it has been completely redefined in today's political climate. The new definition, it seems, is anyone to disagrees with your political viewpoint and makes an effort to push back. Under this definition, it is politically convenient to call your opponent one and be technically right; regardless of where on the political spectrum you find yourself.
  - snickerbockers 2y ago
    At this point "fascist" is more of an insult than an ideology, very few people who get called "fascist" ever actually live up to any reasonable definition of the word.
- unethical_ban 2y ago
  The Democrats are not trying to weaken the integrity of the Supreme Court.
driverdan 2y ago
> Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail. Censorship, as you call it, is a requirement for any platform. It's better to call it moderation. Without it platforms would be 99% spam. I assume you support "censoring" spam so that means you support some level of moderation.
- dilap 2y ago
  Spam is a real problem, but when your platform is doing things like disallowing linking to a NY Post article on the Hunter Biden laptop or mentioning the possibility that COVID originated from a lab-leak, then I think pretty clearly the term "censorship" is more apt than "moderation". Also, to the extent that a platform is surfacing content based on a friend or follow model, then that itself is intrinsically sufficient moderation for the spam problem (because you can simply unfriend or unfollow spam accounts). (Spam friend requests and follows still need to be addressed, however.)
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    Sounds like it's the FBI's credibility that is shot - imagine Facebook had done nothing and it HAD been a Russian propaganda operation ?
    - dilap 2y ago
      I think it's completely reasonable for FB to take the position of "it is not our job to block links to newspapers". Similarly I don't blame FB for failing to block links to the Steele dossier, even though I think it was bogus.
    - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
      > HAD been a Russian propaganda operation But it wasn’t. And everyone who looked the videos of Hunter smoking crack, and his text messages discussing Joe Biden involved in business dealings, and his relationship with his 24yo niece knew it wasn’t “Russian Disinformation”. It was obviously real, and hidden from everyone in order to influence the election. It was censorship at request of the government and election interference. We don’t need the WHAT-IF it wasn’t.
lasc4r 2y ago
Really? Aren't gore videos legal? That's just one example. Also, can we get some common sense here? You're posting on hacker news. You're allowed to post a very narrow set of things here. There are no shitposts and memes, that's half the content of the internet being censored on this platform. Are you not outraged?
chasing 2y ago
> Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail. The opposite. Online communities can't be healthy without moderation. Cf. Twitter.
- dlivingston 2y ago
  There is a strong distinction between moderation, which is the removal of low-effort noise / spam / etc., and censorship, which is the suppression of ideas.
at_a_remove 2y ago
I will step a bit to the side of "censorship" and just talk about "misinformation." The trouble with labeling something "misinformation" is that you also need to be one hundred percent right, forever or you need to be ready to make prominent retractions and groveling mea culpas. With this is mind, one ought to tread lightly on topics such as fast-moving science (especially the softer ones) and matters of policy recommendations. COVID was both of these. Yes, masks! No, don't use masks! Yes, masks. Yes, masks, haha you caught us we just didn't want you to buy up all of the masks. Yes, masks, but they really only prevent you from giving the virus to others. My undergraduate was in the harder sciences, so it is not like I am some anti-science loon. I just think that acting with Total Certainty and If You Don't Agree You Are Killing People, on certain classes of topic, is a recipe for eventually being as believable as the numerous food pyramids which, once taken as gospel, now are simply shrugged aside.
Krssst 2y ago
> better get it right 100% of the time It turns out they were mostly right (at least the decisions were the best possible with the knowledge of the time). Vaccines were effective against infection at the time and became less so with new variants (still a very good idea to reduce illness severity and likelyhood of hospitalization), lockdowns had some side effects but all in all saved lives before we got the vaccine, and the like. Now that misinformation is less harmful than before thanks to most people having some immunity, it's less controlled and more people start believing the misinformation to be the truth.
- logicchains 2y ago
  >lockdowns had some side effects but all in all saved lives before we got the vaccine This just how effective the censorship was; the actual peer-reviewed science shows that lockdowns did not in fact save lives: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737?utm_medium=email&utm_source=substack https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737?ut...
  - LunaSea 2y ago
    Based on an "all cause mortality rate", so not COVID.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago

They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly. So you can lose credibility two ways, one by not doing any censorship because people on the internet will be the worst if you let them. Doing too much censorship is also bad because people don't like that either. Of the big causes of censorship currently, I think of things like youtubes copyright claim process and how that is routinely used as a censorship backdoor by anyone - including the police. Sometimes its not even for any good reason and done by unthinking bots. This is banning more perfectly fine content than anything the government has done. I don't understand why there isn't more pushback against that process to punish people for frivolous claims.

Brian_K_White 2y ago
Theres no push back because only the uploader knows it even happened. The millions of other people who did not get to see that video never knew there was anything that was taken from them. Even after you start to hear about an example here & there, it still feels like an isolated and insignificant example. You as a viewer don't have any way to perceive the scale, the mass of what is being blocked and diverted and modified and bowdlerized. I mean to include all the ways creators taylor their stuff and self-censor so that it will get through, not just plain take downs. Everyone knows it happens, but you have no way to see what that really means in it's totality. I think people would push back a lot if they could see that somehow.
- celdon25 2y ago
  > but you have no way to see what that really means in it's totality. I think people would push back a lot if they could see that somehow. I’ve watched enough Mark Dice videos to know how bad it is, and I regret not taking the blue pill sometimes. He’s shown just about every notable case of it happening (with proof). Though he knows how to game the system to resist being taken offline and you could say it’s part of his brand. You could say that it wouldn’t be worth the risk for others to call it out like he does because it wouldn’t add to the content, and they could slip up. You can disagree with his politics or personality but you probably wont find a leftist channel that covers that kind of censorship. I wish the videos were more categorized, though he doesn’t do it and uses generic video titles because apparently that makes it less likely to get censored.
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    Just stop using platforms. For video, use PeerTube (or similar). This was a concern in 2009, but now, 15 years later, people using platforms have only themselves to blame. Stop being part of the problem !
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - celdon25 2y ago
      Did you get that information from Wikipedia?
      - shadowgovt 2y ago
        Yes. Is there anything in their summary you would dispute? At least in my book, buying into the "US orchestrated 9/11" story is pretty cut-and-dried; not much room for debate on whether that makes one a conspiracy theorist.
        celdon25 2y ago
        We have confirmation that the Saudis did it, and that the Bush Administration actively suppressed any investigation into the Saudis and invaded Afghanistan instead. Sen. Bob Graham had a lot to say on it. No need to really say anything more than that. I don't think "Bush did it", but the media censorship industrial complex was complicit in suppressing the truth at minimum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQCkTu3n-KY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQCkTu3n-KY A better way to judge if he's a "conspiracy theorist" would be to look at what he says, what he cites as evidence, and judge for yourself if he has any credibility. A more valid disagreement would be his far-right political views. After the Trump shooting he shot down any conspiracy theories that had to do with it being an inside job, said conspiracy didn't make sense without any evidence, and then followed it up with a "simpler explanation: diversity". I consider myself center-right but he's too far to the right even for me (though I'm not a believer in using demographics to make hiring decisions, bias is not a fixable problem). I still think he's done a great job at exposing big tech. Wikipedia probably didn't include the above counter-argument. Disputes on Wikipedia are decided by a vote, and you're crazy if you think there isn't a bias there. I wouldn't trust it as a source for anything political. Even if individual statements are factual, the overall conclusion can't be grounded in truth when facts are cherry-picked.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan The moment you start fighting spam, you’re obliged to make censorship decisions.
ryandrake 2y ago
> They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly. If you look at every attempt to create "The Uncensored Free Speech Version Of [ANY_SERVICE]," they all, inevitably turned into a 4chan-like trashfire. You've got to have some kind of moderation.
- dimitrios1 2y ago
  This is where I really feel my age. Every message board and chatroom (bbs, forums, irc, icq, aol, et all) on the young internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all, yet we all mostly got by. You went to the places you knew to go to. The communities mostly self moderated by kicks/bans. It worked really well. So whats changed? Well, I have my thoughts, but one thing is for sure, as soon as the platform itself tried to start moderating, that's when things really started changing.
  - coolbreezetft24 2y ago
    > virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all > self moderated by kicks/bans Also smaller communities tend to be easier to keep from becoming a cesspool
  - thejazzman 2y ago
    Before literally everyone was aware of the numerous low effort ways to exploit others on the internet Now the moment a vulnerability is known, be it social or system, it is exploited by many actors. The moment a new business idea appears to work, it is an overnight saturated market The internet is now driven by hustlers and monetization all the way down RIP AOL COMOUSERVE PRODIGY GOLDEN ERA
  - thegrim33 2y ago
    The internet used to be primarily used by geekier, smarter, tech people, and it used to not be a good propaganda/manipulation target since only a subset of the population used it. Media/newspapers were still the primary propaganda channel. Now that the entire population uses it, the average IQ involved has plummeted, and the political and social payoff for manipulating it with inauthentic content is huge.
woooooo 2y ago
Fighting spam and porn are a different category from censoring political viewpoonts with 25%+ adoption.
- norir 2y ago
  25% is a completely arbitrary number and context dependent. I can guarantee you can find many communities that have majority views that you find abhorrent and would not want to be a part of your community discourse. The problem is that social media gives the illusion of a broad town square where all opinions are heard, but that is not what happened. Everyone on social media is filtered into silos based on what the algorithms predict they will find engaging. In such an environment, it is not hard at all for malicious actors to propagate incendiary lies and exaggerations that metastasize into political beliefs. A fringe belief can easily become mainstream if it is amplified unchallenged, which is exactly what happens every day on social media.
  - woooooo 2y ago
    Yes, it's arbitrary, 20 would also make the same point, 0.1 would not. If you're saying "we must censor abhorrent viewpoints for the good of society", I'll just counter that your viewpoints are horrible and must be suppressed, while mine are good and must be amplified. For the good of society.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      Sounds good. Now build a Facebook and get enough users to rally to your cause, and your opinion on suppression / amplification will have some weight to throw around. People seem to forget that Facebook is where it is because users keep showing up, and users keep showing up because the censorship gives them something they want. It's a feedback loop.
      - woooooo 2y ago
        "Might makes right, sit there and take it" might be how the world works in some ways, but it's not exactly a moral cause.
normalaccess 2y ago
Commenting on YouTube: Massive content sites like YouTube have a problem, the owners are a vanishingly small minority when compared to the population. If they ever have a proper public outcry they would lose in an instant. The "Algorithm" and "Automated Systems" are put in place by design to create a buffer in the minds of the people between content creators and staff. That's also why the rules are vague and sometimes randomly applied. When content creators don't know all the rules around what will hurt or help them then they are motivated to be as passive as possible via learned helplessness. A system of random punishment and ever changing rewards will keep people guessing what the "algorithm" wants and what causes strikes. How YouTube operates is a master class in mass manipulation. YouTube MUST randomly abuse people to instill a source-less fear to maintain control. Further Reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_bonding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_bonding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_woman_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_woman_syndrome
- intended 2y ago
  We wish it was that smart. Between engagement driven metrics and the sheer ludicrousness of moderation, any sense of order is swiftly smashed. There are more policy updates and clarifications in a year than there are days. Why assume intelligence where randomness would achieve the same.
ffsm8 2y ago
> there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan This is false, because Facebook is bound to your real identity. A completely unmoderated Facebook will never be like every /b/ or /pol/ thread. People aren't quiet as outspoken with derogatory terms and pornography if it their family sees what they've written. Random copy pasted examples: - There are 9 billion people on the planet why don't you nuke china india and africa then get back to us - And? I dont care what race you are, you all need to die. TMD. - To gas glowniggers on-sight? - Hang yourself tranny
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  Real genocides have been coordinated through Facebook in the third world. People are proud to put their real identities and their real names behind all kinds of evil ideas.
- bri3d 2y ago
  Creating "burner" Facebook accounts is trivial and most public Facebook group discussions are absolutely chock-full of them.
- mandevil 2y ago
  If only we lived in a world where this was true. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly. It is possible to distinguish between censorship and spam filtering. In the case of censorship, the speaker wants to say something and the listener wants to hear it and the censor prevents this. In the case of spam filtering, the spammer wants to say something and the listener doesn't want to hear it and voluntarily requests that a third party filter it out, with the option to individually disable this filtering. Now, someone could implement censorship and call it a spam filter, e.g. it filters spam and also disfavored facts and people leave it on because there is only a single on/off toggle and they don't want to be deluged with spam. But what this implies is that a "spam filter" with uncorrectable "false positives" is equivalent to censorship.

EasyMark 2y ago

I think better of them for trying to get the fake shit off of their platforms. This backstepping is what bugs me. Facebook got a lot of garbage off there. There’s still plenty left, but I think did a decent job of flushing a bunch of misinformation bots into waste disposal where they belong. Take a look at x.com where for $9 a month you can launch a bot that posts / retweets garbage 24/7 and no matter how many times it’s reported for racism/terrorism/etc it will stay up for a while, when it gets killed they just make a new bot. Go look at the blue “verified” badges on any political news story and look at the drivel spouted by these $9 hucksters. A lot of people think free speech only applies to them, free speech means a platform can also exercise their free speech and shutdown the messages they don’t like. Those accounts are free to spread their lies and fake news on other platforms.

bitcharmer 2y ago

[flagged]

pphysch 2y ago
Reddit's value proposition (to shareholders) is astroturfing, for ads and other propaganda. Send us your message and we will make it look organic and popular. That's the service. There's no other way to make boatloads of money from an open, heavily-manipulated forum.
- bitcharmer 2y ago
  Funny how you hit the name on the head and still getting down-voted. Today I deleted my reddit account and sent a request to get my HN account removed as well. Moved to lemmy and not looking back.
lasc4r 2y ago
Hacker News is far worse in terms of disallowed content. Must be full of the most vile and twisted minds on the internet!

Xen9 2y ago

Counterpoint: https://rumble.com/v4e0xw0-tucker-carlson-interviews-mike-benz-the-u.s.-governments-orwellian-mass-cen.html https://rumble.com/v4e0xw0-tucker-carlson-interviews-mike-be...

Xen9 2y ago
Comments like this are usually not good, but in this case I believe it's better to give the link than to try to summarize the numerous points about the state of censorship in the United States and Europe that were made in that interview.

hintymad 2y ago

I still remember that so many people cheered when legitimate doctors and scientists were banned from Twitter or Facebook, just for questioning either the lockdown or the effectiveness or risks of the vaccines. The doctors may not be correct, but shouldn't we allow people to question science? Our government can do what it does because the people embolden them.

sirspacey 2y ago
This is the proof that the religion of “I believe in science” is not a friend to creating a culture of science appreciation It’s been the struggle for scientific progress, the breakthroughs are the exception not the rule and the reason is the culture of belief around the science of the time The lesson I’ve most learned from science is that the questions are more interesting than the answer and the answers we have are a way to ask new questions
- Log_out_ 2y ago
  If it feels bad it may contain trace amounts of truth. If it feels bad all of the time for everyone, but puts food on all tables,regardless of beliefsystem,its actually science
- hintymad 2y ago
  I find "I believe in science" as delivered on social platforms and the mainstream media hysterical in the past few years. I mean, how do we even know if "science" is right without questioning? I can understand that people believe that they are on the right side of the history during the Covid era, for lockdowns, for the efficacy of the vaccines (For those who get angry, I took vaccines by the way, so it's not about my personal assessment here) and etc. But is it by default we are on the right side? Like Government "helped" people believe that Lysenkoism was on the right side of the history? Like people should not challenge social Darwinism or eugenics? Like Chinese people believed that the yield of rice patty could be 100x higher because a top JPL scientist said so and the government "helped" them understand? Like authorities challenged Darwin for his evolution theory? Like people would rather lock up Galileo because his heliocentric model was just plainly wrong? Like Ignaz Semmelweis was obvious crazy to propose the hand hygiene in hospitals? Like Wegener's continental drift was just batshit crazy theory? Like Bolzmann deserved to be shunned from the academic society for his outrageous statistical mechanics? Like those who believed in the existence of irrationals should be drowned by Pythagorean? Since when science can't be challenged, even when the challenge can be outrageously wrong?

purpleblue 2y ago

It's only doomed to fail because we have a strong Supreme Court. All the efforts by the Democrats to undermine this will only make things easier for fascists to take over the US.

norir 2y ago
[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > My understanding of fascism is that it is a political system that is founded on a story of lost national glory that can only be restored by a purification of the land by a strong leader Fascism strikes me as a historical term more than a political one. Its most-commonly agreed upon definition is something like political economic systems that resemble those of Mussolini's Italy and Nazi Germany. (Both governments embraced revanchism. Both were ideologically incoherent.)
  - didgetmaster 2y ago
    That might be the old definition of fascism; but like many words, it has been completely redefined in today's political climate. The new definition, it seems, is anyone to disagrees with your political viewpoint and makes an effort to push back. Under this definition, it is politically convenient to call your opponent one and be technically right; regardless of where on the political spectrum you find yourself.
- snickerbockers 2y ago
  At this point "fascist" is more of an insult than an ideology, very few people who get called "fascist" ever actually live up to any reasonable definition of the word.
unethical_ban 2y ago
The Democrats are not trying to weaken the integrity of the Supreme Court.

driverdan 2y ago

> Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail. Censorship, as you call it, is a requirement for any platform. It's better to call it moderation. Without it platforms would be 99% spam. I assume you support "censoring" spam so that means you support some level of moderation.

dilap 2y ago
Spam is a real problem, but when your platform is doing things like disallowing linking to a NY Post article on the Hunter Biden laptop or mentioning the possibility that COVID originated from a lab-leak, then I think pretty clearly the term "censorship" is more apt than "moderation". Also, to the extent that a platform is surfacing content based on a friend or follow model, then that itself is intrinsically sufficient moderation for the spam problem (because you can simply unfriend or unfollow spam accounts). (Spam friend requests and follows still need to be addressed, however.)
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  Sounds like it's the FBI's credibility that is shot - imagine Facebook had done nothing and it HAD been a Russian propaganda operation ?
  - dilap 2y ago
    I think it's completely reasonable for FB to take the position of "it is not our job to block links to newspapers". Similarly I don't blame FB for failing to block links to the Steele dossier, even though I think it was bogus.
  - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
    > HAD been a Russian propaganda operation But it wasn’t. And everyone who looked the videos of Hunter smoking crack, and his text messages discussing Joe Biden involved in business dealings, and his relationship with his 24yo niece knew it wasn’t “Russian Disinformation”. It was obviously real, and hidden from everyone in order to influence the election. It was censorship at request of the government and election interference. We don’t need the WHAT-IF it wasn’t.

lasc4r 2y ago

Really? Aren't gore videos legal? That's just one example. Also, can we get some common sense here? You're posting on hacker news. You're allowed to post a very narrow set of things here. There are no shitposts and memes, that's half the content of the internet being censored on this platform. Are you not outraged?

chasing 2y ago

> Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail. The opposite. Online communities can't be healthy without moderation. Cf. Twitter.

dlivingston 2y ago
There is a strong distinction between moderation, which is the removal of low-effort noise / spam / etc., and censorship, which is the suppression of ideas.

at_a_remove 2y ago

I will step a bit to the side of "censorship" and just talk about "misinformation." The trouble with labeling something "misinformation" is that you also need to be one hundred percent right, forever or you need to be ready to make prominent retractions and groveling mea culpas. With this is mind, one ought to tread lightly on topics such as fast-moving science (especially the softer ones) and matters of policy recommendations. COVID was both of these. Yes, masks! No, don't use masks! Yes, masks. Yes, masks, haha you caught us we just didn't want you to buy up all of the masks. Yes, masks, but they really only prevent you from giving the virus to others. My undergraduate was in the harder sciences, so it is not like I am some anti-science loon. I just think that acting with Total Certainty and If You Don't Agree You Are Killing People, on certain classes of topic, is a recipe for eventually being as believable as the numerous food pyramids which, once taken as gospel, now are simply shrugged aside.

Krssst 2y ago

> better get it right 100% of the time It turns out they were mostly right (at least the decisions were the best possible with the knowledge of the time). Vaccines were effective against infection at the time and became less so with new variants (still a very good idea to reduce illness severity and likelyhood of hospitalization), lockdowns had some side effects but all in all saved lives before we got the vaccine, and the like. Now that misinformation is less harmful than before thanks to most people having some immunity, it's less controlled and more people start believing the misinformation to be the truth.

logicchains 2y ago
>lockdowns had some side effects but all in all saved lives before we got the vaccine This just how effective the censorship was; the actual peer-reviewed science shows that lockdowns did not in fact save lives: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737?utm_medium=email&utm_source=substack https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737?ut...
- LunaSea 2y ago
  Based on an "all cause mortality rate", so not COVID.