YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's bad enough that NYT can be pretty biased on its own, but the comment sections are always full of low-tier thinking that just push whatever narrative is currently in the Overton window.
What I find distressing is how people remark that a telecom and advertising giant acting as a de facto government over the public square isn't a violation of free speech principles because they're a "private business", as if that's an original thought that's profound. Funny how people say "it's a private business" when it suits their own political interests.
We wouldn't blindly allow company-owned cities or states to pass laws, especially vague or undefined ones, that potentially violate our rights, so why do we allow "states" in cyberspace to be run in such a way?
Ban people promoting violence? Sure, why not. I'm as against hate and violence as the next person. But not only is censoring "hate speech" becoming a slippery slope at the company level, it's bad for the public in general because it sets a greater precedent for what the big corporations that run our everyday lives can tell us what we can or cannot do, and with no forgiveness. I don't find it hard to imagine a world where individuals can be instantly and permanently banned from doing everyday things, just like they are on YouTube, because they said or did something off the platform.
They worked so hard to research and create a 2000 word article that accurately reflects the world (in accordance to their editorial guidelines) using their good name - and then let fReEtHiNkErChAd and 2020BloodInTheStreets chime in at the end.
It would be OK if they strictly moderated the comments, but few sites seem to do that.
I find this laughable. Many recent articles I've seen are designed to get clicks and have nothing to do with good journalism or research beyond what someone can get from behind a keyboard.
I'm not sure which news sites you read but most of the ones I've seen count only as journalism in a very vague and abstract sense. The information is thin, the writing poor, and major important questions go unanswered and ignored. If there is indeed any point to following the news on a daily basis (and there is good evidence to suggest there is not), the quality of most new sources is atrocious enough that none of it is worth my time.
(The exception here is the occasional piece of very well done investigative journalism.)
But, in regard to comments, they do it for the same reason that Hacker News or any other site has a comments section: community engagement. This is not necessary a bad thing but it comes with the responsibility to _moderate_ the resulting community and almost every site drops the ball on this.
I'm pretty sure a big part of the reason the Guardian stopped opening comments on most stories was the cost of 'moderation', except the reason their moderation costs were so high is that their moderators would routinely plough through comments by hand to remove people pointing out mistakes or absurd statements by the journalists, and as the Guardian changed over the years the articles became ever more extremist, so that started to be most comments. That is, they defined making their own staff look bad as abuse (regardless of whether it was written in vitriolic style).
Even now if you go read one of the few open threads they have, you can find commenters pointing out logical or factual problems with the column.
Sometimes, to some degree, and sometimes not. The level and consistency of accuracy varies per organization, per individual reporter, per story, and per person doing the judgement of "accuracy".
Authors of articles are generally more informed than their pieces suggest, but their editors step in and make the story "pop" for readers in order to generate clicks. This often involves removing nuance. I believe that most major news organizations make an honest effort to be factual, but there's a lot of room within the facts to be misleading.
A commentator that is an expert in the field is not constrained by an editor, and can in a few paragraphs give a more realistic and accurate assessment of the phenomenon.
When I read articles about things in which I'm not knowledgeable, I don't trust the conclusions until I see high quality comments(or tweets) that confirm the thesis of the article.
I have no idea how it is in other countries but in Germany the comment sections in every single newspaper is _horrible_, especially when it is articles about refugees, climate change and similar topics.
* Self-moderating: Such conversations require a certain level of decorum, since these are presumably people you interact with every day. The likelihood of calling your desk mate a Nazi, racist, race traitor, etc. to their face are astronomically smaller than when it's cloaked in anonymity, since there may be consequences to your commentary.
* Self-authenticating: It reduces the efficacy of message amplification, since the real world serves as an out-of-band identity authentication mechanism.
* Self-regulating: It's easier, cheaper, and less risky for the hosting site, since they no longer have any enforcement role to play in the discussion itself (beyond the original slant when presenting the information, e.g. by news organizations).
Of course, this doesn't address the problems of sites which are inherently designed to do one-to-many broadcasting and discussion, such as Youtube or Reddit. How would these sites look without comments at all, or with a very strict attestation/vouching system?
Although HN follows a similar model vis-à-vis discussion and broadcasting, the active HN moderation is pretty good, at least good enough to maintain a relatively high-quality discourse and removing very low-quality discussion. However, this is difficult to scale and relatively expensive.
Now you could argue that Donald Trump expertly exploited exceptions to the "equal-time rule" in order to get much more coverage than his competition, but that's more to do with the structure of the law than the spirit of what it's trying to accomplish.
Youtube, or any other site uses no public property in that way so they are not, and should not be beholden to the same rules.
YouTube is just asking to be regulated in such a way as the phone companies. And it should be regulated to follow the First Amendment as a mass communication platform, even though it is a private company.
TY for reading my comment
Well, it turns out I had an over-optimistic view of people.
It's hard to admit that dichotomy, because when we realize that the top 1% or .01% can still be so ignorant, we also gradually realize that we are all probably in for a lot of trouble moving forward, particularly if and when resource wars become a bit more widespread than they are now.
Edit: As a clarification, while I still tend toward a preference for representative democracy, I now acknowledge that it is possible for a fruitful and productive society to flourish in systems that some may label as an "oppressive dictatorship".
One of the things I'll give the US is as crappy as the leaders get, the system still remains cohesive rather than suffering a bloody coup every four years.
Completely agree. I'm just speaking from an American perspective. There are plenty of other countries that are similarly stable (perhaps even moreso thanks to having more than two diametrically opposed parties).
The "general agreement to operate within the framework" bit was what I was getting at with "good people". I'm not sure how stable it would be against a concerted effort to disrupt/distort it. But I haven't looked into its governance in much depth, either, thus my original question.
Pretty much every system in the world has that feature. Heck, that's a standard of quality so low North Korea’s government passes with honors.
And indeed what we see is that oppressive dictatorships never have high quality people running them. They're always overrun with corruption, absurd ideas, forged statistics, pseudo-intellectual waffle (see: the books and political thinking created by the leaders of the USSR) and to the extent they may seem more intelligent or erudite than the working classes it's only because they craft their image so carefully.
You say you now acknowledge it's possible for a "fruitful and productive society to flourish" in an oppressive dictatorship, but what on earth are you thinking of here? Surely not China, which has thrown millions of its own citizens into concentration camps, trashed its environment, routinely seems to report false GDP numbers, relies on capital controls to keep the rich Chinese from leaving, is famous throughout the world for IP theft, has practically disconnected itself from the global internet and has radically misallocated resources in many well documented ways? That fruitful and productive society?
The important point, though, is that "dichotomy" not the same as "contradiction". The contradiction between your estimate of the high intelligence of HN commenters and the, let's say, less-than-intelligent ideas sometimes expressed here can be explained by noticing that being somewhat smart doesn't make someone immune to having stupid ideas.
What, after all, is the minimal IQ beyond which one will never make a mistake?
I'd argue 0, in that a being completely incapable of even attempting thought would be unable to have an incorrect thought. But that's a bit of a reductio ad absurdum
If this were true, I would have lost whatever little faith in humanity I had left. But I very much doubt it, being good at some "hackery" thing is completely orthogonal to being intelligent/smart in any normal meaning of the word.
In reality I doubt the average HN user is above the 75th percentile
If a community has a topic and the majority of users are interested in discussing that topic, then when someone veers off-topic to rant about their favorite conspiracy theory, you don't have to be a judge of the validity of his viewpoint. You just gently point out that's not what people are there to talk about and that they're welcome to discuss said conspiracy theory over on yonder conspiracy theory aficionado forum (and ban them if they continue trying to detract from the conversation).
This then removes moderators as judges of what is Right and True (the problem facing moderators on Facebook/YouTube/other anything-goes platforms) and positions them in the much more manageable role of, well, moderating a conversation.
It's a place the public visit not a piece of public infrastructure. Repeating "public square" over and over again does not make it so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
(I can see political pressure now and in the future to say that some platforms should have some kind of neutrality and/or transparency obligation in order to get this immunity -- but under current U.S. law, they don't.)
It's closer to pamphlets than newspapers, in that regular people can make and distribute pamphlets, whereas regular people have never been able to put whatever they want in newspapers. We would be rightly upset if either the government or common carriers refused service to political groups distributing pamphlets.
Because to use your analagy, to send out your pamphlets you must know your audience already.
Yes, but the analogy with traditional delivery services breaks down because people don't ask the delivery service to find new content for them. Preferring certain people's videos in search and recommendations based upon their political content is a deliberate reduction in the ability of the penalized people to meaningfully participate in the political conversation, which is what we should be trying to prevent. It's dangerous. Less dangerous than banning them altogether, perhaps, but still dangerous.
Google and Facebook et al built very successful products that a lot of people enjoy using. But I don't think very many people think that should entitle them to shape the political conversation. The people being shut out to varying degrees will certainly not see it that way.
Yes of course those two things are different, but YouTube does both of them and both of them are necessary for meaningful participation in the public political debate.
>but recommendations/search fall under curation and curation is very much back in the realm of TV/newspapers where the proprieter exercises control.
When users search somewhere like YouTube or Google, or look at their recommendations, they are typically not expecting to get content ranked by how well it falls in line with the proprietor's political outlook. They're trying to get content that matches what they searched for, or in the case of recommendations looking for content the service thinks they might be interested in, not content that the proprietor thinks they should be seeing to further their own political goals. Search, and to an extent recommendations, fall under discovery. People don't go to YouTube or Google or Facebook or Twitter to see content curated by those companies. If they want curated content, they go to a specific channel or page or account, or to a website like the NYT.
>I think that does entitle them to shape the political conversation, although I could see some argument for a great deal of transparency in exactly what they're doing in that regard.
I'm curious if you would you say that if they were hiding content you agree with and promoting content you disagree with, or what you would say if there was an election coming up and they were hiding content in favor of your preferred candidate and pushing content in favor of the opponent.
And do you think they remove that content without any regard for their own political leanings? That their opinion of what is "offensive" or "dangerous" is not influenced by their own political ideology?
>I distinctly believe that a right to free speech is not a right to have an audience provided to you.
What is the point in free speech, in your opinion? Why is it something we should care to guarantee?
>If you want to build such a community on your own site then by all means, that's your prerogative and that's the freedom the web gives you.
A) The actual fact of the matter is that the majority of the public political debate which normal people engage in on the internet occurs on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, and perhaps a couple of other giant corporate-owned web properties that all have essentially identical policies. Telling people to go elsewhere is essentially telling them to go piss up a rope. It's not a real alternative.
B) The daily stormer would like a word with you.
Which of these cases is Youtube more like? It's already hard to tell, and it's continuing to change. I expect the legal status of online forums to evolve over the next several decades, just like the legal status of brick-and-mortar spaces has evolved over time.
Even then, it does not mean that those malls should allow anyone to sell wares. What it means it allows people to visit without discrimination on basis of legally protected classes like gender and race. YouTube banning a channel does not ban individual from watching videos, it prevents them from uploading videos which is akin to setting up stores.
No, the "public square" designation specifically allows people to do things like come to the mall and set up political protests and whatnot. It's not about _access_ to the mall; it's about speech protections.
Is uploading videos more akin to setting up a store at the mall, or more akin to standing on a soapbox at the mall and giving a political speech? It probably really depends on the video, on whether the video is being monetized, etc.
In particular, I feel there is an important distinction between demonetization and removal here, from an ethical/moral perspective. I can't speak to the legal perspective; I am not a lawyer.
That said, I'm not quite sure I understand your point. A speaker in physical space can pretty easily take their speech elsewhere; most obviously to the nearest public street corner. So moving away from a private venue typically does not require anything nearly as drastic as "moving to another state/region".
I'd really like to understand your point and how it applies to both the mall and youtube situations, though, and would appreciate you explaining it if you have the time.
I think there's a difference between "you can speak" and "you can speak in such a way that interested people can hear". The former is not very useful in terms of the right people usually think of as "freedom of speech"; the limiting case of it in the physical world is "you can speak, but only in your own home". So what, if anything, makes for an online version of the public square, where one can go to present speech for consideration by others?
Also, I think online speech is more similar to physical-world speech than you make it out to be. You can't speak online without "imposing" on your hosting provider, their ISP, etc. If you self-host, you "impose" on your own ISP (and probably violate their ToS, if you have a residential connection). You "impose" on your domain registrar. These are all private entities, so you have the same sorts of issues as you allude to for the physical world. And these private entities have been known to restrict the speech of people relying on their services, so this is not a hypothetical risk.
The extent to which someone is entitled to an audience is of course more difficult to judge.
That's the idea those absurd behind "free speech zones" off in a remote corner.
Free speech means free speech in every public space.
Personally I fear the future where the government (or monopoly/oligopoly) in power isolates all opposition in a remote corner where no one can hear.
If a mall did that they likely be accused of discrimination. The demonstrators don't demand to be promoted, but simply be treated as anyone else.
What if you set up a booth in a shopping mall in the spring of 2016 in California or Massachusetts and gave away pro-Trump stickers? I assure you there are plenty of people out there in both states, many of them likely working on YouTube, who view that as equivalent to your hypothetical. I know a number of them personally.
Trust me, I'm not a fan of the sort of rhetoric you describe. But I also don't like slippery slopes with no guardrails. I expect we'll end up with guardrails here in the end, after a few decades and a bunch of court cases, but it's going to take a while.
Now very likely Youtube plans to do extremely selective enforcement. I'm not sure that over-broad rules with ensuing very selective enforcement, applied only against the powerless and unpopular, is the right direction to head in, but that's what I see going on here.
I think the truth is that big platforms that are conceivably open to anyone eventually become abused, unevenly enforced, and end up being a gamble when it comes to business. YouTube, Google play, Apple's app store and many more are all examples of this.
Also, I couldn't care less whether things are a gamble when it comes to business. I do care about public discourse and control thereof.
We need an Internet Bill of Rights to ensure free speech on any platform of this scale. Yes, that means speech you don't like; may I suggest not watching it?
Following more modern censoring in Sweden, should Youtube allow videos that include tobacco, alcohol and gambling? if not why not?
I think a key insight in discussions like this is realising that “public square” is as more of a function rather than a state of ownership.
IMO if your company becomes big enough to obtain the function as a public square, you should be prepared to be required to act as one.
Legislation isn’t there yet, but just like privacy and data-ownership is getting more legislative attention these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if things like this are subject to regulation within 5-10 years.
As this infinitely repeated discussion shows, it’s clearly a problem which needs to be solved.
The public square argument at this point isn't deniable, it's more about what the company that maintains that public square gets to define as trash.
If your cell company prevented you from calling your crazy uncle on Christmas eve because he believed aliens built the pyramids, that would be considered a violation of your right to free speech AND free association, and it would be very creepy.
I do disagree with your private business comment though. It is a private business and they can do what they want to an extent. You don't tell a news paper who they have to let write articles. But I think the problem is that youtube is so large and the service so imporant that it might as well be a government deciding rights. It's not just youtube there are a lot of tech giants that powerful. I think when it's obvious they are that powerful and important it's time to break them up. I mean hell the bread company my step dad works at even had to go through a process to see if they would be too big with a recent purchase. But yet tech companies have been getting away with this sort of unchecked growth. They are global powers with dwindling competition. Break them up. Reintroduce competition.
Foregoing vaccination imposes an as-yet-unaccounted externality on the community; you put everyone at risk by not vaccinating yourself or your kids, and there's no way for the vulnerable (those relying on herd immunity) to know who around them will put them at risk.
It goes way beyond an individual choice, to vaccinate or not. That decision has impacts far beyond the individual's life.
How far are you willing to go when it comes to oppressing individuals in the name of the common good? Force women to have children to repopulate aging countries (or, alternatively, force sterilize them in overpopulated countries)?
Vaccination, for those who can be vaccinated (not everyone can), is a trade-off for participating in a society free from disease. Taxation is the price you pay for buying a society and traffic controls are a price you pay for access to a ubiquitous and generally safe road network.
All of coexisting with others is a balance of trade-offs; labeling all of those trade-offs as oppression renders the word meaningless, as much as referring to any kind of coercion as violence.
As for how far am I willing to go? Mandatory vaccines are a good trade-off, and I am willing to stand by the position (one which is growing increasingly popular, as preventable diseases are returning in force).
Forcing women to have children? I have never heard, outside fiction, of a society that forces women to give birth; certainly it's been encouraged, lionized even, but you're proposing something from the realm of fiction as a what-if. Not helpful.
We will never have absolute safety in life. I prefer to have freedom to make the choice because the government will always end up abusing any power we give it.
You are OK with banning the idea? It's one thing to make it criminal to endanger your children's health. It's another to put a blanket ban on the speech because you don't like the idea or you think it's "dangerous". The point of free speech is that you don't get individuals deciding who gets to be in charge of what is morally right to say. Society as a whole decides through civil discourse and rigorous debate. But you can't have that if you go around suppressing the other side.
Start banning free speech and you start banning democracy. There is really no two ways about it. This is not a debate about the physical choices people make. Those are either made illegal or not. This is a debate about whether or not people have the right to talk about their ideas. But you are here trying to use a ridiculously nearly undefendable action to spin the argument of some actions are bad or dangerous. Yes they are, but the speech and discussion can only enlighten the public so long as reasonable minds have a chance to speak up against unreasonable ideas. Humanity's resilience comes from the fact that we get to try so many ideas at once out. But if you let a single entity decide what ideas will be allowed you introduce a dangerous weak point into society. The inability to speak your mind only ever brings suffering violence and death. Yes free speech has its problems but it's the best we got.
I don't know if breaking up these massive "tech" companies is a good approach, but something has to be done at some point, and there needs to be rules over how YouTube can regulate its platform. At the very least, YouTube needs to be forced to make all of its rules explicit and to not insta-ban entire channels while deleting all their data.
I'll admit though. I'm not so sure what the effect of breaking them up will be. How many services would be lost, how many sites would go down because of lost services, how much money would be lost due to search ranking being ineffective or businesses needing to buy ads from multiple companies. It would hurt a lot of people at least temporarily. But I think long term the Internet and business would thrive after a short term pain. It would definitely have to happen in stages though. Each part of the business broken up into a few.
But yeah I agree, the escape velocity companies you mentioned need to be put in check somehow.
>The thing about an online comment section is that the guy who really likes pedophilia is going to start posting on every thread about sexual minorities “I’m glad those sexual minorities have their rights! Now it’s time to start arguing for pedophile rights!” followed by a ten thousand word manifesto. This person won’t use any racial slurs, won’t be a bot, and can probably reach the same standards of politeness and reasonable-soundingness as anyone else. Any fair moderation policy won’t provide the moderator with any excuse to delete him. But it will be very embarrassing for to New York Times to have anybody who visits their website see pro-pedophilia manifestos a bunch of the time.
“So they should deal with it! That’s the bargain they made when deciding to host the national conversation!”
No, you don’t understand. It’s not just the predictable and natural reputational consequences of having some embarrassing material in a branded space. It’s enemy action.
Every Twitter influencer who wants to profit off of outrage culture is going to be posting 24-7 about how the New York Times endorses pedophilia. Breitbart or some other group that doesn’t like the Times for some reason will publish article after article on New York Times‘ secret pro-pedophile agenda. Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you, people who hate everybody and will take whatever targets of opportunity present themselves, and a thousand self-appointed moral crusaders and protectors of the public virtue. It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section. Finally, it will make up 100% of what people associate with you and your brand. The Chinese Robber Fallacy is a harsh master; all you need is a tiny number of cringeworthy comments, and your political enemies, power-hungry opportunists, and 4channers just in it for the lulz can convince everyone that your entire brand is about being pro-pedophile, catering to the pedophilia demographic, and providing a platform for pedophile supporters. And if you ban the pedophiles, they’ll do the same thing for the next-most-offensive opinion in your comments, and then the next-most-offensive, until you’ve censored everything except “Our benevolent leadership really is doing a great job today, aren’t they?” and the comment section becomes a mockery of its original goal.
[...]
>Fourth, I want anybody else trying to host “the national conversation” to have a clear idea of the risks. If you plan to be anything less than maximally censorious, consider keeping your identity anonymous, and think about potential weak links in your chain (ie hosts, advertisers, payment processors, etc). I’m not saying you necessarily need to go full darknet arms merchant. Just keep in mind that lots of people will try to stop you, and they’ve had a really high success rate so far.
The right of free speech is that you can say what you want without violent repercussions, such as fines, prison time, or capital punishment. Corporations and individuals already aren't allowed to do any of that, so no additional protection is needed. Governments are singled out specifically because they do not follow the same rules as everyone else—asserting that violence is a "legitimate" means of achieving arbitrary goals.
This is merely one view of free speech; many people actively disagree with this view.
You can't take a contested human-defined concept like freedom of speech and say "this only means X, case closed." I mean, you can, but nobody has to agree with you.
Three people walk into a Hotel. A priest, a advocate for the left, and a advocate for the right. Each three talks about the groups they define as "us", and how bad those "others" are. Can the hotel owner deny hosting and ban one of them based on the identity and vies of the person?
You say these consequences are trivial, but they may not be trivial for every individual. A number of individuals have been banned from multiple platforms, including their revenue streams and parts of the financial system, seriously damaging them financially. Even when I disagree with the individuals being banned, something about this strikes me as wrong. It should not be possible to mount a coordinated attack on an individual's financial stability like this. The boogeyman of the moment is the right, but this will surely be turned against individuals on the left the next time we go to war, or perhaps the next time left-populism seems to be gaining serious ground.
But corporations' ability to decide what to host is guaranteed by freedom of speech. Remember, freedom of speech is not just freedom to say what you want it's also freedom from compelled speech. It's the freedom from the government telling you to make or host speech. Mandating that corporations host speech they don't want is not protecting freedom of speech, it is violating freedom of speech.
Actual states have a monopoly on violence, and can deprive me of life, liberty, and property. So I want them to have as few excuses to do that as possible. These "states" in cyberspace can do none of that, so it's significantly less of a problem if they don't embrace freedom of speech as an ideal.
(I guess it depends somewhat on whether you see free speech as an inherent virtue or as a safety valve against government oppression. I've been leaning towards the latter personally.)
FWIIW this censorious crap cost them $70b in market cap last quarter. Looking forward to next quarter.
No comments, likes, dislikes, and no recommendations on the sidebar. It can still be viewed if you accept the risk, and can be found using the search bar or by scrolling through the channel.
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2. There's not going to be a fair judge of what counts as "censorable content" when two opposite sites of the debate are each arguing in favor of their side. It's like why referees exist in sports. Of course Team A will say "No way! That wasn't a foul, I didn't touch them!", while Team B says "It was definitely a foul, I got hit!". To anyone who's heard "boos or cheers" from the crowd at a sports game, it's not a shocker the response centers around which calls benefits their team.
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3. With regards to the "freedom of speech" rights and personal liberties - how much of a shit does a monopoly-level, multi-national corporation give about strictly adhering to government-defined "rights"? What is the business cost of vehemently adhering to potentially-gray-area covenants vs. saying "Yeahh.. fuck that shit it's too much effort". Finagling laws to suit business needs is what huge companies pay teams of people to do already.
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4. YouTube is like a factory farm. The more users are bunched into YouTube, the more money Google makes from advertising. It's all a numbers game. Google has no incentive to change the setup of the farm, so to speak, when what they have has been paying off to keep the service free and hold market share. Unless someone has a particularly large audience, the main solution to complaints from random, non-paying users is: "Deal with it".
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5. Ban specific items that are violent, devious, or dangerous? Sure. Banning "DIY drinking bleach cures autism" is not the same as banning something more nuanced like "trailer trash ride dirt bikes on the interstate" on the grounds a specific subgroup has a problem. As customer service will show you, people will always find something to complain about. If Google came out with, "We will ban whatever we feel like based on what disagrees with our superior, self-selected ideology", that would be a very different story. That's not much better than a dictatorship banning anything that disagrees with the State.
We would say, these private companies have a duty not to radicalise our children. That our children are being led away from god and into sinful lifestyles like homosexuality.
Some of us would welcome our views being censored by a few execs in silicon valley because we would see them defending the moral values of the status-quo...
Surely I'm not the only one who feels it might be a little short sighted to give a handful of billionaires like Zuckerberg control over what we can and can't express in the 21st century?
If we're so concerned and don't want to see content we morally disagree with, why can't we have family friendly modes?
I for one am glad we were all radicalised to support the "homosexual agenda". I'm glad we were radicalised by people like MLK to resist racism. And sure, there were some extremists along the way who took it upon themselves to commit acts of terrorism for the "greater good", but we understood these people were rare and this was the unfortunate, but necessary cost of liberty.
So before we continue too far down this road, are we certain we have all the answers now? If someone can be banned from social media sites for stating biological (but perhaps unfortunate) facts such as, "trans women aren't women" are we completely sure we'll get mass censorship right this time?
It might be worth remembering vast majority of us hold one or two "extreme views" that others find morally offensive.
Edit: Not that I should have to, but for those who are suspicious of my motives, I'm a left-wing, pro-LGBT, anti-racist type of guy.
Racists are not a protected class of people. They aren't afforded those same rights. And on some grounds their disruption of society actually puts an onus on you as a platform to restrict their access.
"Protected class" basically means politically favored group, and as GP points out, that changes.
This isn't my bias speaking here, this is a contextual reality, the world has constraints and there isn't any iteration of what we have that would allow this reality to evolve.
The only wiggle room you have here is on free speech grounds but we have already figured out, that this does not apply here.
To quote the EU court: "the Court held that "A fair balance of personal rights made it necessary to accept that others’ thought should be subject to a minimum of influence, otherwise the result would be a "strange society of silent animals that [would] think but ... not express themselves, that [would] talk but ... not communicate, and that [would] exist but ... not coexist."
It basically comes down to the idea that people have a freedom to express a religion or belief, and its the later word which has in the courts view a much larger scope as it also covers ideology and philosophy. A belief can be anything from the view that men are more violent than women, or that immigrants are more violent than natively born.
The US has generally a much narrower definition for protected classes, but there are three states that consider political affiliation as protected class. California, D.C., and New York, where the later protect against discrimination because of political activity. (https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/political-aff...)
All that said, protected class is unlikely going to work on a youtube video. If youtube wanted to ban all non-white non-christian people they likely could do so, as people in videos are not employees of youtube and thus are not covered by the anti-discrimination protection.
I think this is an outdated belief. Many officers earn 6 figure salaries in the US.
That is more than basically anyone I know personally outside of software, and I'm not in a low COL area.
They rank 15th. Electrical Engineers, loggers, fishermen, etc all have more dangerous jobs.
By this logic, shouldn't neo-Nazi rallies or protests be "causing violence" as well because they influence people to commit violent acts later the same way neo-Nazi videos influence people? Yet that is the very thing the officers in GP's comment are protecting.
Police carry weapons that can kill, and have jails that can lock you up for a long time.
Youtube has none of those negative things. They have positive things: great technology and a huge audience. The worst they can do is deny you access to those.
In general, you're not owed an audience. The police won't bring you an audience for your protest, and Youtube won't bring you an audience for your videos unless they want to.
I’ve decided that your comment causes violence towards people inclined to believe in freedom.
And so does Antifa, BLM, third wave feminists.
When do we start banning them? And are you “ok” with having someone else randomly labelling your speech as something “causing violence”?
No? Then if it’s not ok to do to you, why is it ok to do upon others?
You're also welcome to take your business elsewhere, if you wish YouTube had more Nazis on it.
It’s that leftists are increasingly categorising reasonable discourse and arguments they don’t agree with as “extremist right wing propaganda” (or just Nazis), and based on that get accounts defunded or banned.
The left is widening their already rampant use of censorship.
Allowing one side to dictate what the other is allowed to say is generally not good for a democracy.
YouTube has already decided that academic software vulnerability exploitation proof-of-concept videos are "dangerous content", which results in video removal and a strike on your account.
This seems like another example of containment, but it's scary because what's normal today might be an extreme view tomorrow... and what's extreme today could be normal tomorrow. As much as I detest the idea of ideas like white supremecy spreading, I'm not sure I like the idea of fighting it by hiding it from view.
Yesterday was the anniversary of Tiananmen square. China avoided democracy by hiding all evidence of this terrible event. I think most people can agree the government hiding the truth is wrong, but if social media is the new public square (which the supreme court in a way ruled to be true when it ruled Trump can't block his tweets), I think these ideals of not hiding information still applies. The 1st amendment, and what it stands for is truely in jeopody with these actions.
The platform should shoulder as much or more blame than the content in this case. Free speech man. This is not ok.
"In addition to tightening its hate speech rules, YouTube announced it would also tweak its recommendation algorithm, the automated software that shows users videos based on their interests and past viewing habits. This algorithm is responsible for more than 70 percent of overall time spent on YouTube, and has been a major engine for the platform’s growth. But it has also drawn accusations of leading users down rabbit holes filled with extreme and divisive content, in an attempt to keep them watching and drive up the site’s usage numbers."
Err, how do you know that the algorithm does this? And also, how do you know that people are not exposed to other views outside of YouTube. And lastly, why do you think its the job of an entertainment platform to "challenge" views?
Youtube optimizes for watch time. Most people don't want to spend their afternoons having their views challenged.
Any algorithm that properly optimizes for watch time of the masses will learn to validate views.
What about my statement is speculation?
• Youtube themselves state that they optimize for watch time.
• I don't want to go and search for papers on this, but I don't think the idea that people prefer to have their views validated instead of challenged is in any way controversial or speculation.
• It's also not speculation to state that people want to spend their time doing things that gives them positive emotions.
You clearly won't get "objective proof" on this, because the only way to actually proof this would be to do a formal study on it. And why would anyone to a study on such an obvious non-controversial topic?
Also, I said I want "some objective proof". You twisted that into "complete proof". Its funny that you are doing the exact thing you're accusing me of.
I didn’t do the same thing as you because I didn’t post around multiple times asking for the same thing from multiple people and acting sort of obtuse like they are saying something isolated.
Well, now that its clear that it is simply an assumption/speculation, then I have no problem with anything you say. Your original comment seemed to imply that this is a demonstrable fact.
>It’s not the platforms job to challenge one’s views, rather one’s views are naturally challenged when in an open marketplace of ideas.
And you counter extreme ideas, with better ideas of your own - in this same open marketplace of ideas.
>YouTube isn’t an open marketplace of ideas.
Right, because YouTube seems to think that some ideas are verboten, and simply should not exist which is why they are removing those videos. Are you in favor of removing these videos?
Or, at any rate, if that's the outcome, then it might be time to regulate said platform.
Anyone capable of doing so is clearly capable of heading a Unicorn start up which isn't overvalued.
Large tech companies frequently receive demands for the literally impossible like backdoors which don't compromise security.
So you are saying YouTube should actively recommend people stuff they disagree with? Like, if you are religious it should recommend atheist and skeptic videos? And if you are vegetarian it should recommend meat smoking videos?
I'm pretty should people would hate that
YouTube should actively try to prevent people from being drawn into racist rabbit holes. If your rabbit hole ends with "and that's why we should exterminate Jews", probably not a good idea to encourage viewers down that path.
Regarding the censoring of extreme views, what I don't understand is why YouTube gave the likes of Alex Jones such a long run. I suspect that for a while it was working out well for YouTube having people watch his rants as well as the 9/11 conspiracy theory stuff.
This defied common sense, his garbage was being recommended to people that weren't looking for it. I think these Google people get a bit too clever for their own good without taking time out to just ask if things are common sense.
I think we should all have the option to seek out views differing to our own, for instance I do care to find out what the likes of Timothy McVeigh actually thought. It doesn't mean I believe in them or what they have done. I don't want some BBC journalist to interpret that for me, I want to hear it for myself.
Recently the Iran state broadcaster Press TV got banned from YouTube with no explanation given. They did not have many views, however, now they are gone, how is anyone supposed to 'see' what Iran thinks of the world? There was no hate speech on their channel, it was just banished. Press TV is positively benign compared to recent UK/US leaders and I don't believe I am controversial in saying that. Something is deeply wrong with the censorship landscape.
Main points:
>Removing more hateful and supremacist content from YouTube
I think this is great, I see nothing of value being lost from channels whose whole schtick is to marginalize people's of a target group.
>Reducing borderline content and raising up authoritative voices
I do like attempts to curtail outright scams and misinformation, but don't like YouTube choosing "top channels" as voices of authority.
>Continuing to reward trusted creators and enforce our monetization policies
I think this shows what drives YouTube and many other platforms, what is and isn't advertiser friendly. Principles only go as far as the bottomline.
> I think this is great, I see nothing of value being lost from channels whose whole schtick is to marginalize people's of a target group.
Who gets to pick what's 'hateful' and 'supremacist' though? Did you think of that?
Hint: If they go the Facebook route it will be various 'anti-hate' orgs which have openly called people like Trump and Ben Shapiro Nazis.
1 rich republican Google employee donating $500K vs 100 middle class democrat Google employees donating $4K will yield those results you posted, yet the demographics would indicate 1% republican.
I wonder if things like the Freedom From Religion Foundation would qualify for a ban. Or a church that preaches that their god is the correct one.
You can't choose your age, gender (mostly), race, caste, sexual orientation, or veteran status, but religion is malleable and public discourse about those topics where one person argues that their view is superior to others is pretty important to society.
It's not clear if YouTube is going to remove anything that asserts some religious beliefs are indeed superior to others.
Or preachers telling the world that gays are evil sinners that need to be saved by conversion therapy? That's discriminatory.
Or feminist groups that advocate for women-only programs and institutions? Dividing the world into groups with different treatment is certainly segregation.
What this announcement actually means is that YouTube is going to become more politically active in their content curation. This is what a subset of their employees, as well as influential bluechecked Twitterati, have been lobbying for. As a progressive/neo-liberal institution, it will apply exactly the sort of differential policy enforcement that one might expect.
I won't delve into the details of how that applies to your examples because it would quickly become too controversial for HN.
Just imagine how the median Bay Area tech-person would parse out the details and you'll have the answers.
The slippery slope argument works both ways.
A wholesale expunction from one end of the spectrum is hard not to interpret as politically charged censorship. Let's see how many Antifa and BLM videos get taken down.
Yes we are.
You are implying equivalence where there is none. Black Lives Matter and Antifa are not equivalent to white supremacists.
Just watch how many radical left videos get removed, irrespective of what group posted them.
not only are they not calling for expelling whites (the "reverse" of what a lot of white nationalists call for), what they are asking for is that people of color be treated by the state enforcement mechanism at parity with white people.
You may find that distasteful, but it is difficult to see what aspect of that is hateful.
From their own website: "We are working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically targeted for demise."
https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/
I'm only writing all this because it's very important not to let rhetoric like "white nationalists and Black Lives Matter are equivalent"; they're not and it's disingenuous or dishonest to conflate them.
I find it interesting that conservatives want to protect genocidal racists, but there isn't an equivalent on the progressive side of things. If there was, progressives would want that noise shut down faster than anyone else.
Not to mention lots of pro-weed and pro-sexworker stuff being banned.
1) Good. Hateful content spreads hate and causes it to multiply. We should not allow it to proliferate on the internet.
2) This is censorship. It it is the fault of the individuals watching/reading the hateful media who are to blame for number of views the videos/articles get.
So I wonder: is it really an either/or decision? Is there no third option here? It seems like a classic ethical antinomy. Authority influences people but, at the same time, the authority always needs to be recognized as authoritative by the people who are influenced by it.
It’s not only about it being our most important right. We also expect our communications platforms have morality, and criticize them when they do immoral things.
Many think belief in free speech is an important moral - doubly important for communications companies like Youtube/Google.
> because it became the de facto place most of non tech-savy people go to to see videos online. They have a huge monopoly on our time and attention
Society has a vested interest in either regulating or breaking up monopolies. Our rights don't magically stop at property borders. It needs to be checked on a case-by-case basis, whether the right to free speech or youtube's right to do what they please with their property is more important.
Actually that's almost exactly what "property" means. Famously, "Your right to swing your fist stops at the end of my nose." Or in less flowery language: Your rights end where others' property begins.
If you think YouTube has a "monopoly", the right way to address it would be to start up a competing site. There are no significant barriers to entry in starting a video streaming site. They're a dime a dozen these days. Google will even sell you the server capacity and bandwidth, or you can host it on one of their competitors' cloud platforms or rent space in a datacenter somewhere. Your main concern will be dealing with the inevitable DMCA complaints related to user-submitted content.
Of course, you should be prepared to deal with the fact that your site will mainly be populated with all the videos YouTube doesn't want to host, often for very good reasons.
So your rights do not end where other's property begins. What they actually might do is be in conflict with the rights of the owner. But only in a country where capitalism is driven to cynical extremes would the rights of the owner win per default. I know of no such country.
> There are no significant barriers to entry in starting a video streaming site.
Of course there are and you even state one of them three sentences later. Online platforms with user content are very similar to natural monopolies. While anyone can start a video streaming site, it is obviously extremely hard if not impossible to actually compete with Youtube. I mean even google tried and failed. But I'm sure you aware of that. What I don't know is why you bring up the straw-man of "starting a video streaming site", knowing full well that starting such a site will not change anything about youtube's monopoly.
> If you think YouTube has a "monopoly", the right way to address it would be to start up a competing site.
So, no – the right way to address it is to handle it as we handle all the other monopolies and regulate it or break it up.
Just the one right, actually: The right to decide how the property is used. That's both necessary and sufficient. There are no obligations beyond reciprocation, respecting that same right when it comes to others' property.
> Your nose is not your property by the way, because the rights you have towards your own body are very different (and a lot stronger) than the ones you have towards your property.
No, they're exactly the same. Your body is your property. The only difference is that you can't give up ownership of your body as a whole (it's inalienable), and that's simply because there is no practical way for you to relinquish control over your body to anyone else short of your death. Even if you agreed to it you would still remain in control, which would render any such agreement void. Certain individual parts, of course, are a different matter. In every other respect your body is just like any other kind of property.
> What they actually might do is be in conflict with the rights of the owner.
Any use of others' property against their wishes conflicts with the right(s) of the owner. This is a distinction without a difference.
>> There are no significant barriers to entry in starting a video streaming site.
> Of course there are and you even state one of them three sentences later.
DMCA complaints are a problem created by the government. If you want to do away with copyright, I have no objections. However, this is not a significant barrier to entry because it only starts to become a burden at scale. Small sites with user-submitted content regularly deal with such matters manually, while large ones have had time to implement the needed infrastructure for automating the process.
> ... starting such a site will not change anything about youtube's monopoly.
Because YouTube doesn't have a monopoly. What it has is popularity. Anyone can start up a site that does what YouTube does, but that won't automatically make it popular. The responsibility for that is 100% on the prospective competitor.
Popularity is fickle. Sites everyone turned to yesterday may be deserted wastelands tomorrow. (E.g.: MySpace) If your site is actually better at giving people what they want, it will win. Your problem is that YouTube actually is giving most people what they want. If you broke it up you'd end up with a bunch of YouTube-clones with basically the same policies, because they're trying to attract the same audience YouTube has now. You want to change what people want, which is naturally unpopular and likely doomed to fail.
In short, despite your complaints about "natural monopolies" and the difficulties of competing, you don't really want to compete with YouTube, just leverage its existing popularity to push your own agenda. The problem with this is that its popularity is a product of its audience-pleasing policies, not any sort of monopoly, natural or otherwise. If you did manage to force YouTube to follow your preferred policies it would become less and less popular until it was eventually be replaced by a competitor that looks more like the YouTube of today. So breaking it up wouldn't help you at all. Regulating it and actively preventing competition, or regulating all such sites the same way regardless of "monopoly" status, would better serve your purpose, but that's just exchanging one (non-)monopoly for a much larger monopoly, namely the government.
There is a very big difference between your rights ending or being in conflict.
> Popularity is fickle.
The only examples I know for this are myspace and digg. I don't think popularity is that fickle once you have the content.
> Because YouTube doesn't have a monopoly. [...] If your site is actually better at giving people what they want, it will win. Your problem is that YouTube actually is giving most people what they want.
So how exactly is youtube now not a monopoly and it is possible to successfully compete with it?
> You want to change what people want, which is naturally unpopular and likely doomed to fail.
I want none of these things, I was explaining how rights to free speech relate to someone else's property.
> In short, despite your complaints about "natural monopolies" and the difficulties of competing, you don't really want to compete with YouTube, just leverage its existing popularity to push your own agenda.
Where is this even coming from?
> The problem with this is that its popularity is a product of its audience-pleasing policies, not any sort of monopoly, natural or otherwise. If you did manage to force YouTube to follow your preferred policies it would become less and less popular until it was eventually be replaced by a competitor that looks more like the YouTube of today.
I highly question your theory that Youtube's popularity is a product of it allowing extremist content.
> but that's just exchanging one (non-)monopoly for a much larger monopoly, namely the government.
Now you're just trying to be clever with words, but I'll bite. As I wrote before
> Society has a vested interest in either regulating or breaking up monopolies.
The government is democratically elected by society and highly regulated.
There is established case law and legislation in the US, though pretty variable by state in terms of details, that people can in fact have free speech rights on private property when the private property de-facto functions as a public square. The devil is, as usual, in the details, and the details are, as usual, not time-invariant here.
Well, I think everyone in this thread can at least agree that nothing should stop anyone from being able to oppose the idea.
Also, the rights given an individual are distinct from the rights given to a company, and IMO are distinct from the rights a company deserves (i.e. a company has no inherent right to exist).
I think most agree that Government needs to be prevented from preventing our speech not that our neighbors must allow us to grandstand upon their property even if their property is listed as a public place to grandstand. They have been given rights over the venue and we're supposed to be intelligent enough to recognize government activity vs private activity.
Why can't the voice actor of mickey mouse say fuck more often? iTs hIs pHiloSoPhicAl rIGhT!!! Sure, he can say fuck and then get fucking fired.
Platforms like YouTube have basically become the public square. A lot of political engagement happens on platforms like YouTube. Perhaps we should expect them to offer free speech as well? They already have more rights than you and I, perhaps they should get some responsibility too?
Yes but still they have theirs also. That's what people don't seem to connect between the two. You have no right to my property and all the right to say what the hell you like. Just because I offer my property as a place to speak doesn't mean I have to offer my property without restrictions, how about bearing arms? Why then could a church or school prevent my being armed?
If an individual can change the terms of our property use agreement by saying anything he wants on my property when I object then cannot I change terms by kicking him and his "publication/broadcast" off of my property? Seems a pretty straight forward contract dispute to me. You may enjoy your rights on your property.
A publisher is a person or company that prepares and issues books, journals, music, or other works.
Their site literally prepares recordings and streams for issue over the public(?) network.
Since YouTube has a monopoly on video content on the internet, it may be reasonable to require YouTube to take on responsibilities normally handled by the government, such as ensuring the freedom of speech on their platform.
There is a finite amount of land in a town, so a monopoly can exclude people. This is not true of video hosting - there can be as many video hosts as people care to build, and they are all equally usable from anywhere on the internet.
> Since YouTube has a monopoly on video content on the internet
They don't.
Now, if ISPs started censoring particular political viewpoints, that would be different IMO. It's much harder to get a different ISP (at least where I live) than it is to browse to a different web site.
There is a limited number of viewers, and content creators. YouTube has the monopoly on those two limited resources.
I'd also contend that "equally usable" is also not true, especially with HD videos. Most of the world can't stream 4k videos across a L3 provider (which YouTube does not have do).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouTub...
None of the top channels are political. Do you have any evidence to support the idea that YouTube is so important to politics that the government should step in to regulate it?
Young people eventually grow up to vote. Are you suggesting that their impressionable young minds are uninfluenced by what they see on YouTube?
>but also because most of the content on YouTube is not political content.
OK, but there is still a whole lot of political content on there.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouTub....
The second to most subscribed channel is not political as its main function, but there is most definitely political content on there.
>Do you have any evidence to support the idea that YouTube is so important to politics that the government should step in to regulate it?
Do you have any evidence to support the idea that people speaking on soapboxes are so important to politics that the government should step in to prevent municipalities from regulating their messages? There are billions of views of political videos on YouTube. It's a place where many millions go to consume political content. People get angry when political content they agree with gets censored.
They will be influenced by hundreds of factors, YouTube perhaps among them, but YouTube is not of any particular our outsized importance.
> OK, but there is still a whole lot of political content on there.
And? Political content exists on the bathroom stall as well, that doesn't mean it's important.
> The second to most subscribed channel is not political as its main function, but there is most definitely political content on there.
PewDiePie is not a political channel and is completely irrelevant with regard to politics.
> Do you have any evidence to support the idea that people speaking on soapboxes are so important to politics that the government should step in to prevent municipalities from regulating their messages?
What?
Outsized in comparison with what?
>And? Political content exists on the bathroom stall as well, that doesn't mean it's important.
Political videos on youtube have billions of views.
>PewDiePie is not a political channel and is completely irrelevant with regard to politics.
Like I said, not the main function of the channel, but there is certainly politically oriented content. Do you think his politically oriented content has no impact on the politics of his ~100 million audience?
I believe you're either acting in bad faith on this topic, or are unaware of https://www.newsweek.com/pewdiepie-christchurch-shooting-mos...
With any of the other hundreds of platforms that cater to political discussion.
> Political videos on youtube have billions of views
So what? I'm not suggesting that YouTube isn't popular, I'm saying that just because its popular doesn't mean YouTube should be prohibited from curating it's own platform.
> Do you think his politically oriented content has no impact on the politics of his ~100 million audience?
The impact is negligible. Nobody cares what PewDiePie thinks when they enter the voting booth. And even if they did, it's YouTube's prerogative to kick off whoever they want, and if they decided to kick off PewDiePie... who cares? YouTube drama isn't important.
Which platforms in particular are you referring to?
>So what? I'm not suggesting that YouTube isn't popular, I'm saying that just because its popular doesn't mean YouTube should be prohibited from curating it's own platform.
I'm not saying that either. I'm saying it should be prohibited from curating its own platform because it's popular and because it's where a substantial part of the public political debate takes place.
>The impact is negligible.
Maybe, but he's only one person.
>Nobody cares what PewDiePie thinks when they enter the voting booth.
You could say that about just about anyone that isn't a cult leader, because that person isn't the only one the voter is listening to.
>it's YouTube's prerogative to kick off whoever they want
It is now, sure.
HN, reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram, voat, snapchat, tumblr, livejournal, gab, vimeo, dailymotion, metacafe and many others.
> because it's where a substantial part of the public political debate takes place.
Define "substantial part". I would argue that it is not at all substantial and the evidence is on my side.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-viewed_YouTube_vi...
Good joke. First of all, this site actively tries to ban political discussion. Second, it's tiny in comparison to YouTube.
Maybe. Definitely far up there, and a good candidate for being regulated.
>twitter, facebook
Agreed, should be regulated like youtube.
Very little political content from what I know, but I don't know much about it.
>voat
Ya, OK. Smaller than HN.
>tumblr, livejournal
Small compared to YouTube/Facebook/Twitter
>gab
Funny
>vimeo, dailymotion
YouTube Alexa rating: 2 Vimeo Alexa rating: 125 DailyMation Alexa rating: 133
>Define "substantial part".
90% of all views of some particular type of political media, e.g. videos produced by people not associated with corporate owned media outlets. So if YouTube serves 40% of those views, and Facebook serves 30%, and Twitter serves 20%, then regulate those three.
> I would argue that it is not at all substantial and the evidence is on my side.
You keep suggesting that the amount of non-political content on YouTube somehow reduces the effect of the political content on YouTube. What is your reasoning behind that bizarre suggestion?
Yet here we are. Are you banned yet? YouTube also bans certain types of political discussion as you are well aware... so what?
> . Second, it's tiny in comparison to YouTube.
So you think the uninformed conversations occurring in a video entertainment cesspool are more impactful than the discourse between the engineers, founders and investors that actually built, maintain, understand and operate these platforms on a day to day basis? That's totally absurd. You're so hung up on popularity that you seem to have lost sight of relevance.
> ...
So in summary, if the site isn't a top 10 alexa ranking you regard it as politically unimportant. Popularity != political relevance. League of Legends is the most popular online game in the world, there are millions of people having political discussions on that platform every day, should Riot be prohibited from banning people?
> You keep suggesting that the amount of non-political content on YouTube somehow reduces the effect of the political content on YouTube.
No, I'm demonstrating that YouTube is primarily and overwhelmingly an entertainment platform and your attempts to suggest that it's so important to the fabric of political discourse that YouTube should not be allowed to ban people is not supported by the evidence of the activity on the platform.
Who, me? Never.
>So you think the uninformed conversations occurring in a video entertainment cesspool are more impactful than the discourse between the engineers, founders and investors that actually built, maintain, understand and operate these platforms on a day to day? That's totally absurd. You're so hung up on popularity that you seem to have lost sight of relevance.
Each of those people engaging in uninformed conversations gets a vote that matters just as much as the vote of the people that built these platforms. I don't think many people are overwhelmingly concerned with making sure their message reaches the tiny number of people on this site.
>So in summary, if the site isn't a top 10 alexa ranking you regard it as politically unimportant.
I regard websites as being unimportant as far as this topic goes if they're not one of the most popular sites for people to participate in the public political debate. Banning an ideology from being espoused on HN isn't going to make people that subscribe to that ideology feel like they're being prevented from peacefully advocating for their interests. Banning that ideology from YouTube, or Facebook, or Twitter might. Banning it from all three almost certainly will.
>No, I'm demonstrating that YouTube is primarily and overwhelmingly an entertainment platform
What I'm trying to tell you is that I don't disagree with that statement, but that it doesn't matter.
>and your attempts to suggest that it's so important to the fabric of political discourse that YouTube should not be allowed to ban people is not supported by the evidence of the activity on the platform.
I've explained what I mean by substantial/important, and why I think YouTube qualifies. You keep saying it doesn't qualify because there are other videos on there and/or because the quality of discussion is low, but that doesn't address my argument.
I agree. Getting banned from YouTube doesn't prevent you from voting. YouTube is wholly irrelevant to the civic imperative, it's just a video sharing site, yes, the most popular video sharing site on the web where people also happen to discuss politics, but its popularity doesn't change its fundamental nature.
> I don't think many people are overwhelmingly concerned with making sure their message reaches the tiny number of people on this site.
Right. Exactly my point. That's a mistake. Despite being orders of magnitude less popular than YouTube, this site has catered to an audience that is wealthy and well-connected relative to the YouTube audience and the political discussions on this site have a ripple effect in the tech community and thus the tech industry and people's livelihoods. My only point here is to illustrate that "popular" doesn't necessarily mean "important".
> it doesn't matter.
It does matter. The primary function of the site is a business built around video entertainment, just because some fraction of the site's users decided to have political discussions on YouTube doesn't mean that the fundamental nature of YouTube has changed into something that should now be owned by the commons. The creators and owners of YouTube still have rights to, and creative control over the product they created, even if that control resulted in a blatantly partisan culling of political content. If YouTube's behavior displeases the people they should seek redress with the platform's owners or abandon it. The reasoning you describe is a strange kind of mob tyranny where a corporation becomes obligated to give up creative control over its products because a bunch of people decided to start squatting political banners on the front lawn.
YouTube is not a political forum, it's a place where people shoot the shit about every topic under the sun, and there are plenty of places to do that on the internet.
Right, it prevents you from taking part in the public political debate that tens of millions of voters are participating in.
It's like telling someone "You can't talk about your political message on this popular street corner where there are actually people to hear you. You are welcome to go stand on the street corners way outside of town, though, where practically no one is listening. Those other people are fine to spread their message on this street corner, though, because I agree with them."
There are very good reasons why we don't allow that sort of thing on street corners. The very same reasons apply to the major social media platforms.
>this site has catered to an audience that is wealthy and well-connected relative to the YouTube audience and the political discussions on this site have a ripple effect in the tech community and thus the tech industry and people's livelihoods.
Ah, so middle/low class people should grovel to the elites that gather here, even though those people don't share their interests, and hope that they somehow convince elites to act against their own interests, and do some ripple effect thing on behalf of people that have interests opposed to theirs.
>My only point here is to illustrate that "popular" doesn't necessarily mean "important".
And you've forgotten not everyone has the same interests. If some low skilled workers feel that some policy is driving down their wages, they're not going to go grovel to a bunch of engineers who probably want their wages to go down so they get cheaper vegetables.
People want to be heard by people that have, or may have, similar interests to them.
>The primary function of the site is a business built around video entertainment,
So? The primary function of sidewalks is so people can walk on them.
>just because some fraction of the site's users decided to have political discussions on YouTube doesn't mean that the fundamental nature of YouTube has changed into something that should now be owned by the commons.
Right, it's the fact that said fraction represents a huge number of people.
>The creators and owners of YouTube still have rights to, and creative control over the product they created, even if that control resulted in a blatantly partisan culling of political content.
Subject to the limits that the government puts on that control.
>If YouTube's behavior displeases the people they should seek redress with the platform's owners or abandon it.
"Feel free to go talk on that street corner a mile outside of town. Only people who say things we like can talk on this one."
You really think that's going to be satisfactory?
>The reasoning you describe is a strange kind of mob tyranny where a corporation becomes obligated to give up creative control over its products because a bunch of people decided to start squatting political banners on the front lawn.
When you become "the commons", you lose some of your "creative control". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
I don't think that's true, but even if you could prove it, it doesn't matter. You should not be entitled to use YouTube just because its popular and people discuss politics there.
> You can't talk about your political message on this popular street corner where there are actually people to hear you
Bad analogy. YouTube is not a public street corner, it's a private business and platform that you don't pay to use. It's more like saying you can't talk about your political message inside a popular tavern because the owners have decided they are not friendly to the political message. That is not a violation of your rights, that is how private property works. I get that you don't like it, but its their property and its a non-essential service, even if its very popular.
> Ah, so middle/low class people should grovel to the elites that gather here
Wow. That's a very disingenuous reading of what I wrote. I didn't say anything resembling that, AT ALL, I even explicitly stated that my only point there was to demonstrate that the popularity of a site doesn't necessary correlate with its political importance, but you still managed to twist it into a completely ridiculous strawman. Since you're arguing in bad faith I see no reason to continue wasting my time trying to have a conversation.
Have a nice day.
You don't think tens of millions of voters and future voters are have watched political videos on YouTube?
>but even if you could prove it, it doesn't matter.
You keep saying it doesn't matter without actually addressing my argument.
>You should not be entitled to use YouTube just because its popular and people discuss politics there.
Says who? You?
>YouTube is not a public street corner, it's a private business and platform that you don't pay to use.
The point of analogies is not that the two things are identical, but that they are similar in some particular important way.
>It's more like saying you can't talk about your political message inside a popular tavern because the owners have decided they are not friendly to the political message.
A popular tavern with tens of millions of people in it, maybe.
>That is not a violation of your rights
Depends on who you ask. Rights aren't written anywhere in the stars. People make them up.
>that is how private property works.
Private property rights are not absolute.
>Wow. That's a very disingenuous reading of what I wrote.
Actually you revealed a lot about your opinion from what you wrote. You said it's a mistake for people to value being able to post political content on YouTube more highly than they value being able to post political content on HN, because HN is filled with elites who do some ripple effect thing, whereas YouTube is filled with poor uninformed simpletons. In other words, they should value being able to beg the elites to do the ripple effect thing for them more than they should value being able to spread their message directly to like-minded people. Poor uninformed simpletons can't make changes on their own, they need elites to do it for them.
The problem is that the elites want cheap vegetables, so they don't want the poor simpletons to get paid more.
Imagine that the electricity company providing electricity policed what kind of devices you can use inside your home (you are allowed to connect a Samsung washer but not a Bosh washer). There would be a lot of outcry.
You mean that you willingly give them control over your time and attention.
It sounds like you're saying that they either have to host absolutely any video anyone uploads, or else stand behind every video as if they made it themselves.
I don't see how a video platform could exist on those terms.
YouTube doesn't have "a strong grip on societal discourse", it's a glorified video sharing site that's widely regarded as a cesspool in terms of discourse.
But it still sounds to me like you're demanding that, after removing illegal videos, a site should either be 100% curated or 0% curated.
https://www.tubefilter.com/2019/05/07/number-hours-video-upl... says:
> The platform’s users upload more than 500 hours of fresh video per minute, YouTube revealed at recent press events.
100% curation is unrealistic in that case. They could crowd source the work, but it's hard to see how they can be legally accountable for what users mark as OK.
But 0% curation would mean that they're forced to host videos they consider repugnant. Imagine starting a video sharing platform, having your business grow, and one day being told "well now you're big enough that you no longer get any say in what your site hosts."
I don't like the sound of government interference at all, trust me. However when people are being silenced and demonetized because they hold political views that YouTube doesn't like I feel that it's necessary in order to uphold the users constitutional rights. Many experts have speculated that YouTube operates at a loss - is it fair that they gain market dominance this way and then flex their power to remove ideas they don't like?
User's have no constitutional right to political speech on a private platform. Their rights are not being violated.
Why do you think a nation of free speaking individuals is patently not entitled to say what they want on a platform specifically created to allow people to say whatever they want?
To be absolutely clear on my position, I am not saying YouTube is acting outside their rights to censor content. But I am very much saying people have a right to be peeved about the bait and switch.
Further to my point. People being concerned about who and what specifically will be caught up in this is well, well within reason to bring into question given their current approach to takedowns which consistently missflag videos inappropriately.
"It's their business they can do what they want" isn't a valid argument against any of these questions, you're just stating a fact that doesn't answer or even acknowledge the potentially problematic situation at hand.
That's obviously not true. A list of banned content has been place for most of its existence, e.g porn and illegal content.
And you're right, it has always restricted illegal content. And that's a good line to draw.
So..
What's illegal about this new content?
Or what has changed that they now think they're ready to judge what is extreme and hateful?
Or what has changed that they now think they even should?
Edit. I looked at the way back on YouTube’s tou from when the site was a dating site and it’s always disallowed hateful content regarding race or other things. This seems like a clarification on that provision.
And re your edit, it's not a clarification it's a redefinition and that's what scares people.
from the original tou as far back as it went on archive.org:
> You may not post, upload or transmit to the Site, or to the YouTube servers, any communications, text, graphics or other information or Materials that: (1) is unlawful, obscene, fraudulent, indecent or that defames, abuses, harasses, or threatens others, or is hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable; (2) contains any software viruses, Trojan horses, worms, bombs, or any other computer code, files or programs designed to interrupt, destroy or limit the functionality of any computer software or hardware or telecommunications equipment or that may damage, detrimentally interfere with, surreptitiously intercept, or expropriate any system, data, or personal information; (3) advocates or encourages any illegal activity; (4) infringes on the copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, right of publicity or other intellectual property, proprietary, contracted, personal or other right of any third party; (5) violates the privacy of inpiduals, including other users of the Site; or (6) violates any applicable local, state, national or international law. You agree not to use bots, spiders or intelligent agent software (or other methods) for any purpose other than accessing publicly posted portions of the Site and then only for the purposes consistent with the limited license hereunder and these Terms of Use. You agree not to, or attempt to, circumvent any access or use restrictions, data encryption or content protection related to the Site; not to data mine the Site and not to in any way cause harm to or burden the Site. You agree that you will not post on or transmit through the Site any advertising or commercial solicitation of any kind whatsoever, including, without limitation, via e-mail or chat, without YouTube's express prior written approval and, if then, solely in accordance with the terms and conditions imposed by YouTube with respect thereto. You further agree not to use the Site, or any element or portion thereof (including, without limitation, e-mail addresses of users), for any commercial purpose whatsoever.
specifically the first part: (1) is unlawful, obscene, fraudulent, indecent or that defames, abuses, harasses, or threatens others, or is hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;
heading from their blog post:
> Removing more hateful and supremacist content from YouTube
where they go on to clarify what is meant by hateful.
Redefinition.
It's moving from an ad hoc approach to a more definite, clarified criteria. Before some of these videos were being removed and some not but now there's more of a clear framework by which to judge offending content.
you can squabble over definitions of words all you like but they've always been against hateful content. they are just clarifying what is hateful.
I am saying they are clarifying what they mean by repeating them selves and changing the definition.
Has their TOS actually changed here? If so, in what way? Does it now include more specifics?
That said, there is nothing stopping people from creating their own sites, or putting taboo / extreme videos on chan sites, forums, etc... and plonk it down behind Cloudflare or Akamai. i.e. 4chan, 8chan, I mean, you won't find more extreme videos that what get posted there every 90 seconds. In this case, I am not linking to the examples.
They’re a private company and are entitled to have a curatorial viewpoint—and for my particular beliefs culling white suprematists and borderline pedophilic content is a Good Thing.
You’re entitled to say whatever you want in this country, but I’m not obligated to broadcast it for you.
They've often claimed in court to be an open / neutral platform, because that comes with legal protections against what your users post - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/02/facebook-...
Publishers (like Forbes when people blog on there) on the other hand are responsible for their user posts. I think Facebook / Youtube is more like the Forbe here, so they should be treated legally as a publisher.
Its because Youtube would rather be legally categorized as a service rather than as a publisher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
Back during the late 90s all of us working on public websites knew that allowing user-contributed content was a great way to build both community and to increase the sheer amount of content, which increased advertising revenues. But there's a catch to user-contributed content... in order to avoid legal responsibility as a site owner for the user content posted on the site you can't moderate that content directly. The reason for this is the "common carrier" rule.
Common carrier essentially states that as a communications platform you are not liable for the legal implications of the communications that occur on your platform as long as you do not choose to engage in editing or moderating that content. AT&T, for example, was not legally liable for a conversation that occurred on their telephone network even if the conversation involved the commission of a crime (we're plotting a terror attack, a bank robbery, etc.) The reason they were not liable was because they did not monitor the communications on their network and did not cut off a phone call if it sounded like you were planning something illegal, evil, whatever.
The minute you, as the carrier, begin actively moderating the content (as opposed to setting up common universal rules such as site karma or user driven moderation), you are responsible for ALL of that content. You managed to remove 99.99% of all illegal communication? Too bad, you're still on the hook for that 0.01% that you missed.
This does not mean that content may never be removed by the company, it's just that they must do it under the order of a court or applicable government entity... in the same way that AT&T could not tap your phones absent a court order.
Many sites opted not to have user-contributed content due to the potential concerns regarding advertisers or their own brand reputation. Others did allow such content and later removed things such as comments and the like due to the conflict between violating common carrier and the problems that arose with advertisers and/or their brand (see Yahoo Finance comments circa 2002 or so).
That should be happening, but isn't - not to the degree it naturally would. Debanking. Payment processors have been very busy weeding out potential competitors to the big names in SV. I almost want to laugh at the fact that the early cryptocurrency proponents experienced the exact same treatment while building the very thing that would protect those presently being targeted by Visa/Mastercard. I'm still banned from two major banks...
This youtube censorship stuff is going to pale in comparison to the coming wave of debanking. There is a very freaked out class of people who have their hands on the wheel at the moment (especially true at Mastercard), so you can't rely on traditional profit motives to predict behavior - anything is possible. My financial adviser suggested, with a straight face, that I consider a portfolio built around some new social equity index... my account has been self directed ever since.
YouTube generates revenue, youtube shares that revenue, contributors with tons of views are making money directly from YT.
This is simply not the same as Twitter, etc. Twitter may make money off of eyeballs. I may somehow make money by becoming twitter famous. But my money is not coming as a share of twitter revenue.
The incentives are all screwed up. YT benefits financially the more 'shocking' my vid can be, and I benefit financially if YT does.
How many ad dollars did Google make off these videos?
And how much damage did hosting those videos do?
People you might like to remove from your experience will tend to congregate on certain instances favorable to that kind of thinking. You have the power to block that instance at an individual level. There isn't the same impetus to deplatform them because you can just break the link.
I have many (but not all) "free speech" instances blocked because they're packed with users who try to force that perspective on me by (for example) removing content warnings when replying. I don't have to appeal to any authority to enforce my boundaries. Only the owners can decide who has the power to make those decisions on centralized social media sites. That seems to be outsourced moderators with little or no understanding of niche or marginalized communities.
All it would take is a law that compels public internet services to behave as if they're public services once they start reaching >33% of citizens.
The problem seems to be that a large percentage of citizens don't grasp that important freedoms often have a high price tag. Anyone can see this with the response to second and fourth amendment issues, and the same is becoming true of the first amendment.
Free societies have an inherent amount of chaos. That chaos is the price you pay. People desiring to live in a fully ordered society are unwittingly asking to live in a prison.
Google isn't in the video business because it wants people to be able to share videos with each other. Google is in the video business to sell ads. Censoring the illiberal is the way to get to get liberals to support censorship. Announcing manual control over the suggestions is a way to justify steering viewers away from any content, starving it of revenue, and getting it off the platform.
During all of that time, driving the cost to persist and broadcast information down has been a good thing. The cheaper the better, because it gives more brains access to useful information. I think because of that, we assumed the ideal cost is zero.
In the past several years, I believe we are slowly, painfully, realizing that we were wrong. The web has driven that cost down to practically zero. Any rando can write anything and it will be served on the web to all and sundry in perpetuity.
The problem with that is that it makes it equally easy to broadcast mis-information. What humans need to prosper is access to good information — true facts and useful ideas. Information that helps us take actions that help people.
When there's a non-zero maintainance cost for info, someone has to periodically choose to pay that cost. The scribe has to decide what book to copy. The printer has to decide which pamphlets to re-print. The public access channel has to decide which shows to schedule.
If someone can't be motivated to care about some piece of information enough to do that, it naturally decays and disappears. Like evolution, there's a natural selection process where some memes die. Now, granted, even with a non-zero cost, bad or misinformed actors may choose to further bad information. But I think that happens way more often when the cost to doing so is nil.
So, when you have a non-zero cost, it encourages a certain amount of selection where useful information tends to last longer. At the same time, you don't want the cost too high. When that happens, only the powerful are able to decide what information persists and they choose only information that furthers their own power. Driving the cost down has been, I think, one of the major engines of democracy.
But I do think we've overshot the mark now. In the next several years, it's going to be up to us as a culture to figure out how to effectively deal with the hurricane of misinformation constantly roaring around us. It is, I think, the biggest threat facing human society today.
(You might argue that climate change is a bigger threat. But note that a primary reason we're failing to take sufficient action on climate change is because of misinformation.)
Mind you this isn't an attempt to defend YouTube at all given what they did yesterday but rather that I've always seen the battles over free speech and the bias on HN as being incredibly lopsided.
Even their own rules written by them is never enough for censors. They have to invent stuff like "brush up" to extend censorship even further, even when recognizing there's no violation of their own policies, that they themselves wrote. Talk about slippery slope...
Nope, we're talking about "videos and channels that advocate for neo-Nazism, white supremacy and other bigoted ideologies".
As much as I don't like censorship, views that advocate for extermination of other people can rightly fuck off.
I think that this will be bad for the platform overall -- an increase in censorship is never good.
From the YouTube blog post:
> We’ve been taking a close look at our approach towards hateful content in consultation with dozens of experts in subjects like violent extremism, supremacism, civil rights, and free speech.
So at the very least they claim to understand that it should not be a random decision.
People against (limited) censorship usually react very quickly once it's their group that's being attacked (as some very famous subreddit does)
Consider a discussion forum that never banned any users or removed any spam. It quickly becomes very difficult to have a meaningful discussion when a third of the posts are "CHEEP ROLE X bUY NOW" and another third are racial hatred.
Increases in curation (private censorship of one’s own offering) are very frequently good.
Whether the paying customers are consumers or advertisers, quality of curation is typically on of the main things they are paying for in content platforms. It’s true that there has been some effort to substitute algorithmic recommendation engines providing a consumer-specific view in place of curation, but it's also pretty clear that even the best of those is not viewed as an adequate solution by significant segments of the market.
That's not specific enough. What about people who want to preserve European culture but don't think its "superior" to any other culture?
Views that were nominally conservative not long ago (and were actually also held by a lot of democrats) get recast as “Nazi!!1!1” in today’s environment. Weird historical inflection point we’re at.
"But what about..."
NO. We're talking about people who want to exterminate other people. We know that because the last time they got power, we had mass executions (Holocaust), lynchings, and a century of extreme segregation.
This isn't a 'what-if'. We know what happened the last time.
Never again.
If half of the US is described as extreme, then we can justify shutting down their voices.
Directly as you quoted, "videos and channels that advocate for neo-Nazism, white supremacy and other bigoted ideologies", those are three separate things and there are a whole range of ideologies there.
The person I replied to specifically called that last one into question, because of the fact that it is so broad.
We we both able to point out other kinds of views that people consider to be bigotry and you literally just directly equated those examples with Nazis. This is exactly why people can't be given this kind of broad censorship power. You proved it in one comment. Congratulations.
What I don’t agree with is conflating that with being un-PC. Or having s difference of opinion on contentious social topics, even if they can be personally offensive.
For example, for some, abortion is seen as pro-death. For others denying asylum is tantamount to a death sentence and thus is also death and hate. Or saying “f the police”. Police will say that is calling for hate, etc.
Today it feels like the PMRC was just a few decades too early. Would music be better without misogyny, violence, yes, in many respects but also we would deny a voice to those who feel oppressed and need an outlet to voice against the mainstream understanding.
> The tension was evident on Tuesday, when YouTube said that a prominent right-wing creator who used racial language and homophobic slurs to harass a journalist in videos on YouTube did not violate its policies. The decision set off a firestorm online, including accusations that YouTube was giving a free pass to some of its popular creators.
For context: https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/4/18653088/youtube-steven-cr...
I'm sure that YouTube would say that they don't play favorites but even if that were true, as we have seen there are organizations all the way up to nation states that are hell-bent on corrupting platforms like YouTube for their own ends. And they don't require much corrupting.
Moderation is key. Sites like Hacker News work only because of strict moderation by humans. Similar sites without such moderation quickly become a haven for trolls and spam. Automatic systems can always be gamed - what is needed is a strong editorial hand.
I don't want YouTube to end - there are thousands of hours of great content. But if it is to survive it needs to make a choice of what kind of site they want to be. Letting itself be anything its users want is turning it into a cesspit.
However, they SHOULD NOT be able to have it both ways where they censor posts they don't like (like a publisher would do) but enjoy protections afforded to actual open / neutral platforms.
Once you start censoring things that aren't breaking any laws, you're now a PUBLISHER and not an OPEN PLATFORM, so you are responsible for what's posted on your site.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communica...
> The court upheld AOL's immunity from liability for defamation. AOL's agreement with the contractor allowing AOL to modify or remove such content did not make AOL the "information content provider" because the content was created by an independent contractor. The Court noted that Congress made a policy choice by "providing immunity even where the interactive service provider has an active, even aggressive role in making available content prepared by others."
AOL in the case you mentioned was being looked at as an open / neutral platform.
I'm saying that clearly Facebook / Youtube no longer fit that definition due to the censorship mentioned in OP.
The CDA basically grants publishers the ability to have their cake and eat it too, so you’d need to change the law.
What one wants and what is are not always the same.
Regarding what views I may have that are “extreme”, I’m well aware of the growing threat poised by this to myself...
What does this mean? I don't understand at all.
Just follow the link and look up the various legal cases if you want to know more.
That way if somebody publishes false information or doxxes me, I can sue the pants off of Facebook and I'll win.
They are desperate for this _not_ to happen. It would literally put them out of business.
Publishers are responsible for the content that they put out. The New York Times can't publish some of the things that people put on Facebook without legal repercussions. When the government wants to stop some behavior happening on Facebook, Facebook says "we're not a publisher, we're a platform".
But as a platform there are certain consumer protection laws that apply to these companies. In some regard, they are responsible to their users/customers. Except when people try to exercise their rights there, Facebook says "we're not a platform, we're a publisher. We're responsible for the content we publish and we can't publish that."
They really shouldn't be able to have it both ways.
To an extent, so are governments.
They have so far managed to shirk responsibility for PUBLISHING hateful content while being amazingly on-the-ball when dealing with copyrighted material.
I am sure YouTube wouldn't put it in these terms, but from the outside it looks like every day they make the editorial decision to enforce copyrights while pushing hate speech. I am sure this makes sense financially.
If enough people get upset, things could change, but notable it is primarily the lack of censorship that is upsetting people, so it appears the status quo of YouTube being an open platform with some censorship (Section 230 style) will continue.
It's possible their hands are tied here. The copyright strike thing is out of hand, too, but in that case the blame is also on the (often scummy) copyright owners/enforcers. (That isn't to say they don't benefit from keeping advertisers happy, or that their platform/brand won't suffer the consequences of this approach)
They've demonetized Crowder.
> Update on our continued review–we have suspended this channel’s monetization. We came to this decision because a pattern of egregious actions has harmed the broader community and is against our YouTube Partner Program policies.
Then they've made some additional confusion by talking about how they'll remonetize him when he removes shirts from the shop (they've presented it as the only requirement to reinstate monetization). At the end, they've doubled down on the first thing they've said:
> Again, this channel is demonetized due to continued egregious actions that have harmed the broader community. To be reinstated, he will need to address all of the issues with his channel.
YouTube already tries to transcribe videos to text. Is it within the state of the art to recognize common false statements and superimpose a crawl with counterarguments? One thing you have going for you is that the nuts aren't that original. If you had a classifier that could pick up the 100 best known nutty statements, you could do this.
Is there a startup in this?
Edit: I don't agree that advertisers should be in charge, I just think they will ultimately decide the line between edgy and extreme.
Is this going to include videos that mention "white privilege" (which one could argue alleges superiority of white people) in which white people are asked to "check their privilege" in some way (which one could argue is an attempt to justify exclusion)?
I will happily allege that people who aren’t racist are superior, and that racists should be discriminated against, segregated, and excluded wherever possible. Is that video permitted?
YouTube is going too far. This will either be the biggest footgun due to unintended blast radius, or will be selectively enforced so that they have an excuse to editorialize and shut down stuff they or their advertisers personally find icky (entirely subjectively) while ignoring other stuff that breaks these rules.
Pretty sure it'll be the latter. Selective enforcement seems to be the name of the game in SV, and IMO that's going to bite them in the ass eventually. (this isn't to say that selective enforcement is avoidable with the ruleset they've chosen, because it's probably not, but instead that policies that minimize the opportunity for selective enforcement should be used)
If you can make the case, maybe. I mean, it sounds like a kind of insane case to make to me. Who's being excluded, and from what, merely by having their assumptions challenged in a discussion context?
The groups actually being targetted are ones that tend to advocate for the status of the US as an inherently white nation. Sort of an easier sell to my mind.
https://www.pewhispanic.org/2019/06/03/facts-on-u-s-immigran...
It belongs to them just as much as it does to people whose ancestors planted flags a handful of centuries ago.
How else should the country they were born in, and are citizens of, be referred to? Without making it US specific, as my point is not limited to the US.
And please don't put words in my mouth - I did not 'frame' immigration as an invasion, or as anything else - my statement was as dry as possible. If you can offer a more neutral phrasing that captures the same meaning, I'd be grateful.
Good question, so why are we removing all this content?
Be real, here. What kind of snowflake logic is it that buckets "check your privilege" in with white nationalism?
What if the group is a political party alleging they are morally superior in order to justify "intolerance of intolerance" and "bigotry of bigotry" as a tactic to decry, discriminate, and exclude political opponents?
This isn't an issue with easy, clearcut answers.
That trans women are women isn't a "small part" of the discussion. It's kind of the whole point.
That comment was in reference to this story, it looks like I got the quote wrong: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/journalist-sues-twitter-...
I think there's a difference between how we should recognise someone socially and the reality of an individual's biology. What's worrying here is that stating a biological fact can be viewed as too extreme if it goes against a certain political ideology.
But there are plenty of examples like this. I know people have been kick off of social media for suggesting the Prophet Muhammad was a pedophile, or for discussing racial crime stats. And many of the examples I've seen of this don't appear to be in bad faith either, in fact most seem to be in the interest of honest dialogue. They just had the wrong opinions.
N.B: what somebody says they are banned for and what they were actually banned for often differ.
Based on our experience at HN (not that it generalizes) I'd even say they usually differ.
Don't forget things like androgen insensitivity syndrome, infertile women, etc.
If we want a simple inclusive definition, you can't beat that.
My problem isn't with your definition, it's with your implied assertion that we should "we want a simple inclusive definition," which is clearly not the case, as the differing priorities in definition are literally central to the debate.
I believe trans women are "real women" in just about every way that matters. I only make an exception when I absolutely have to. For example, in sports, or in a medical context.
It might help to remember the word "women" is just a label we assign to people who share a certain common set of social and biological traits. And the majority of these traits trans women share, however in the case of trans women there are some exceptions. But it's not just trans people who don't fit cleanly into these groups, there are similar difficulties to be had with intersex people for example.
There are no easy answers here. Life isn't black and white. It's silly to think we can cleanly divide the whole of society into to clear categories.
The way I read it is that it's taken over 50 years for "gender" and "sex" to become different things. It's still a word that's transitioning (ok, some pun intended), but essentially we're past the tipping point now and you'll offend people if you use gender words incorrectly.
The WHO has the progressive definition that you want to be using: https://www.who.int/gender-equity-rights/understanding/gende...
This is in contrast with the dictionary definition from Google, which still uses biological sex: https://www.google.com/search?q=define+gender
It does feel a little bit like when "literally" changed meaning to "figuratively", but this distinction is really important to an ever growing group of people.
It's also worth noting that it applies to gender words like "man" or "woman" which are different than sex words like "male" and "female".
I still don't understand how non-binary people fit into this, but if you embrace the "singular they", you'll probably not offend anyone.
It's not a matter of "my side has facts and your side has opinions." It's that we disagree on what the facts are. You can find a lot of scientists from a few centuries ago confidently asserting that black people are subhuman. It doesn't magically make them not-racist because they believed it to be a true fact.
They were wrong, and you are wrong.
I find the trend of "this fact/data is not to be discussed" to be particularly disturbing.
Muhammed being a pedophile/child molester by modern definitions is pretty damn clear in the Quran. Saying we can't discuss it is very odd.
There are significant differences in racial crime and academic stats in the US. The causes can be debated - the existence of a difference less so.
And for a less controversial parallel to the previous... there are major differences in gendered crime stats in the US. Again, the causes can be debated - but a difference most definitely exists.
Under what standard is "racial crime differences are a forbidden discussion" reasonable where "gendered crime differences are a forbidden discussion" is not? What level of fact are we willing to memoryhole if it ends up politically inconvenient?
If a trans-man is given medicine in doses as a man, and not a woman, they have a much higher risk of overdosing because of differences in how the body metabolizes drugs for each gender [0] [1]. It isn't transphobic to identify them as a woman and give them the proper dosage for their gender. I'd prefer to be given the correct amount of medicine than to pretend there aren't important gender differences and that my actual gender and the gender I would prefer to identify and portray myself as differs [2].
Then you get into the mess of trans-women competing (and usually one-sidingly dominating) in women's sports because lo' and behold there are still gender differences between men and women regardless of how they choose to identify.
I'm becoming accustomed to being told how I should think. Must be my internalized transphobia speaking for me though and not that political correctness is going to cost someone their life one day and that that person could be me.
[0] https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/the-drug-dose-gend...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=lindsey%20w%2C%20se...
https://www.bustle.com/articles/144447-what-is-concern-troll...
Do you know how trans people on HRT respond to Ambien, as your first link brings up? I sure don't. Depends on why the drug works differently.
If you're scared that you'll die because your doctor thinks you're cis, tell them you're trans.
That doesn't mean you have to tell your doctor "I'm really a man, despite being a trans woman, and it's definitely important for you to store an M in your records because you might suddenly forget that I'm trans and also I'm sure my reaction to medicine is the same as a cis man's."
Just be an adult and talk with your doctor honestly.
I'm more scared that my doctor will know I'm trans but not give me proper treatment as a result of being scared of losing their career to backlash from the politically correct. It's a far more realistic fear than my doctor not knowing my gender and it isn't something that would be brought up because it is a taboo to ask someone their "real gender".
I'm happy to expand on this if necessary, but this fear of social backlash has already caused problems in other fields of work such as policing certain minority groups in the U.K. It isn't too large a stretch to see it impacting healthcare.
This is all a bit besides the point though. The point is there are many physiological differences between trans-women and women and that trying to conflate the two as being equal actively harms both groups. It's a social feel-good statement said by people who's identity is more important to them than reality and any of the negative externalities caused when adhering to their view of the world.
As far as I am concerned, letting trans-women compete in any physical sport against cis-women is harmful to women and the concept of women's sports. There are biological reasons many sports are segregated by gender. I don't care if this hurts any feelings because it's reality and it is harmful to people to ignore reality just to avoid hurting some feelings.
Of course, we should treat them as humans in any case.
If you don't like this outcome, argue for more humanities and social science classes in primary and secondary education to educate society in evaluating claims and the other aspects of information and media literacy.
To all the people here who are decrying this as “censorship”, remember that during the early 2010s, Islamic radicals were getting radicalized on YouTube by pretty benign sermons (Ex: Awlaki and his “tour of Paradise” lectures that inspired Boston 2013, fort hood and a bunch of other international attacks). YouTube removed all that out and I think Muslims getting radicalized on YouTube plummeted.
White supremacy is a much bigger deal with a worse tail risk than Islamic extremism. Don’t see why anyone would object to removal of Neo nazi content yet go along with the removal of wahabi sermons.
Which is it? You're contradicting yourself here.
Would be for or against YouTube removing videos that encouraged suicide in depressed individuals?
Suicide / death is as extreme as things get for living organisms.
It's not bigoted to state facts you don't like. Mean, maybe, if I time it right. In fact someone calling you a bigot in this isntance actually makes them a bigot.
Talk about a useless insult.
Wait, so talking about how great heaven is now considered extremism? That's bad news for most Abrahamic religions. I suspect you are trying to pull the narrative in diametrically opposing directions - to show the videos were both very benign and super dangerous - and the narrative just tears up.
> because they were inspiring suicide attacks by teaching pretty mainstream Islamic beliefs like: martyrs go to heaven.
Wait, so if I say that good people go to heaven, and somebody believes it's good to kill infidels, I am now an extremist? I think your narrative is missing something.
Wait... you're saying that white supremacy is worse than islamic extremism? Is you opinion perhaps a manifestation of your perspective? I'm sure there are some people in Syria, Afghanistan, etc... that would disagree with you.
BTW, I'm not saying one is worse than the other, just that they are both bad, both a problem, and both should be removed from social media.
Again, I think that statement is shaped by your perspective. I imagine a lot of Russian, Chinese and Africans would disagree with you about that.
gaogao switch the convo to "racial supremacy". Not to say that it doesn't have something to do with wars of the 20th century.
It might even be seen that by making this switch and excluding non-imperialistic wars, we would be minimizing the atrocities and war crimes committed in Africa and the rest of the third world against native populations.
> Are you seriously denying that Nazis were motivated by ideology of racial supremacy?
I'm not even going to acknowledge this statement. How on earth did you made this cognitive leap?
In absolute terms, more Russians died as a result of Nazi action than any other group.
This is not a matter of perspective. This is what actually happened.
Who's disputing this fact? Not me.
Reckless speculation considering the latter did happen. You're fearmongering in order to drive censorship and oppression of viewpoints you disagree with.
Islamic jihadis do control a few middle eastern nations. But they are quite powerless in front of the west. Even having access to natural resources like oil doesn’t protect the extremists (do I even need to give examples?). The most concerning Islamic state is Pakistan as it has nukes.
But if far right folks take over Austria or Germany again, or other European states or Russia or the US, they will control massive economies, WMDs and have the ability for complete domination in a way never seen before. Let’s just say it is better to be in control of any European nation as opposed to Libya, Syria, Iraq or Iran.
Before Al Queda, the West's biggest fear was domestic white nationalist terrorists like Timothy McVeigh.
EDIT: It's very disturbing that so many people don't understand what the Nazi platform was all about. The supremacy of the "Aryan Race" was literally a platform of the Nazi party from the beginning. The subjugation of Jews was a part of the party platform from the beginning. The use of paramilitary squads to enforce ideological purity was a part of the party from the beginning. And it just got worse from there.
Furthermore, for a "white nationalist" movement they spent a whole lot of time killing and oppressing other "whites".
Fascists gained power in Italy, Germany, and Spain as a direct result of anti-communist sentiment (and in the case of Germany, a failed communist revolution). Mussolini's early writings were directly proposing nationalism as the answer to communism's failures. Everywhere fascism had success it was because it was pitted against the threat of communism. I don't know how the rise of Fascism was anything but reactionary.
But we're talking about the root causes of WWII. And one of the Nazi party's specific goals when invading Poland was to exterminate the Jews and Roma (Gypsy) populations of Europe.
Are you sure about that? Wasn't "the final solution" proposed significantly later?
It's also why it's not easily dispatched by enlightenment thinking... it survived those battles back in the 20th century and ultimately had to be put down with exercises of power (often military, sometimes social, rarely diplomatic).
If that was the case, then why did their policies include the murder of millions of German-speaking Jews, Gypsies, and people with disabilities. What was it about those people that made them not fit the category of "German"?
The answer from clearly documented history is that the Nazis systematized the categorization of humans on their deeply flawed model of the Aryan "race", and singled out those who didn't fit for subjugation or extermination.
Conversely they also planned to further "purify" their own people by planning to subject Scandinavian populations to forced interbreeding programs upon conquering them, and kidnapping "Aryan" children from neighboring countries.
See Generalplan Ost.
Because Jews and Gypsies weren't considered ethnically German. Re: disabilities, it's a mix of rabid utilitarianism (they were called "useless eaters") and a belief that disabilities stemmed from corrupted bloodlines (hence the term mongoloid -- it was a popular theory that retardation was the result of Europeans/Asian intermarriage).
What defined German ethnicity?
Clearly it wasn't the ability to speak the language, or being descended from many generations of ancestors living in Germany, otherwise the Jews and Roma both would have been considered German.
Clearly there was something else attributed to them that didn't fit the definition of "German". It was that they weren't considered racially German. Race is literally what the Nuremberg Laws were about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_policy_of_Nazi_Germany
Given the preponderance of clear historical evidence for the Third Reich's racially based rationale for its actions, one wonders why would anyone try to water it down to the more innocuous seeming rationale of "German ethnicity".
I'm not making that up - it was right there in their laws that I linked to.
Otherwise, why shouldn't people who had been living in Germany for generations, speaking languages closely related to German (Yiddish, German Romani), be considered German?
How can you interpret those laws as being about anything but racial categorization - unless you have an agenda to sidestep and downplay the fact the Nazis repressed and murdered people whom they saw as not being part of their own presumed "race".
Communism is problematic to them because it tries to eliminate social hierarchies deemphasizing national identity. Liberalism (in the classical sense) is problematic to them because of its (perceived) amoral decadence and its ability to empower "undesirable" "outsider" individuals to garner power inside a nation through wealth.
Are you saying that Islamic extremists took over most of the Middle East?
This whole "rah rah whites" stuff is something that people in the U.S. came up with during the Progressive Era, as a supposedly-'unifying' alternative to national/ethnic identities, some of which were quite openly "disfavored" by that time especially wrt. Central Europe. (Again, WW1 was a non-trivial factor there.) People outside the Anglo world generally think of it as quite silly and misguided, not to mention racist.
British people are not French people are not Hungarians are not Greeks are not Italians are not Spanish people.
We're Europeans, but we have very distinct and different cultures and we don't regard ourselves as 'whites' - it's rare (outside radical left circles) for Europeans to speak that way.
The native people of most Mediterranean regions - Spain, Southern France, Italy, Greece and Turkey don't have pale skin - it would be odd to speak of 'whites'.
Both are not advocating any kind of racial supremacy but rather self-interest, and - like them or not - relatively common as judged by recent election results.
Which ones? Both WW were caused by political disputes and nationalist views
Edit, this is an honest question. It's my impression these wars were caused by nationalist movements. The first didn't even involve "whites" until later and it certainly had nothing to do with white supremacy.
The second world war got very white supremacy eventually but again, zero fucks to do with the cause. Hell America turned a blind eye to ALL of it until they got dragged in, that's how little it had to do with anything.
(Not some gun toting denier nazi here, it happened it was disturbing as fuck and it was a big deal, but please don't run around claiming this made up narrative)
I'm not sure this is accurate. Perhaps you could say that racial supremacy justified some of the worst wars of the 20th century, but "germans are better than slavs" barely pattern matches to "white supremacy", and "japanese are better than koreans/chinese/etc" doesn't at all. As for justified vs caused... There's a fine line to be drawn here, but I think it's worth drawing. Would Germany and Japan have gone to war without views of racial superiority? Quite possibly. Both were in rather poor strategic situations in the 1920s, and war was an acceptable way to resolve that at the time. Would they have poked the world's largest powers with a stick without that superiority to fall back on? Perhaps not.
White supremacism is supported by a fraction of a percentage of white Europeans. Support for Islamic fundamentalism is substantially higher in the Muslim world.
(Plenty of Europeans are opposed to large scale immigration, but you’re not conflating that with white supremicism are you?)
Second Word War, as we all know, has been mostly led by Nazis, who were, among other things, undoubtedly very very racist. However, even then they gladly paired with Japanese - most definitely not "white", Arabs - not really considered "white" by most Nazis - to achieve their goals. And they had absolutely no problem suppressing and massacring Eastern Europeans (very "white") when it suited them. Their goal was, ultimately, world domination under the aegis of the Nazi party, and their "white supremacy" was mostly "Nazi supremacy" - if you were white but not agreeing with Nazis, you were dead. So it was a standard totalitarian approach, which is no different in any totalitarian regime, racism notwithstanding. Nazis where definitely racial supremacists (though just "white" didn't go nearly far enough for them) but even if they weren't, it would end up in the same way.
And as history teaches us, totalitarian regimes like to expand, if they can, and cause wars, if they have resources for it (fortunately, North Korea has none, but even then they are trying to provoke something constantly).
> A white nationalist uprising in Europe would be deadlier
There is no white nationalist movement in Europe even close to pulling something like this off. In fact, I don't think there's even one serious "white" nationalist movement in Europe at all - most nationalist parties are specifically "nationally" nationalists - e.g. French nationalists, British nationalists, Hungarian nationalists, etc. and they couldn't care less about other "whites" as soon as they aren't French, British or Hungarian. Of course, racial movements exist too, but again - they are minuscule compared to nation-based movements.
OTOH, ISIS has already pulled off a major war in Middle East, and while it fortunately looks like they're ending up on the losing side now, it already cost major loss in life and economic damage, and it is very far from the end. Taliban in Afghanistan is far from being beaten too. They are massively in force right now, while "white nationalist uprising" is nothing but an extremely unlikely hypothetical.
Then what do you call actual radical islam that preaches death to all infidels, women honor killings and unending war-on-the-west, among other equally grotesque actions?
But do be aware that white supremacist have committed more acts of violence in the US than Muslim extremist. And this not counting lynching which is a systematic form of terrorism that lasted more than a century.
The same people who cheer blocking Al Qaeda now claim that blocking neo-nazis is suppressing conservative views, so right-wing extremism has been and is far more tolerated and prevalent than other violent extremism.
Do you have anything to support that assertion?
You can argue that whatever your local xenophobic hatreds you have going on aren't technically white supremacy, because you have different historical and cultural understandings of race etc, but at the end of the day, your hating haters sure seem to hate basically the same people as our hating haters, so I'm not sure why it's worth arguing about the distinction between the two groups.
I suspect this is because carving France back up into kingdoms at that point would have left Germany the sole uncontested power of Europe. Wars and nations were just getting too big to fail. When this fear materialized with Germany and Austria-Hungary teamed up to try to take over Europe again, while Austria-Hungary were divided into their constituent nation-states, Germany was expected to pay war reparations and so was kept largely intact so wealth could be extracted.
These war reparations are ultimately what drove WW2, by breaking the backs of the Germans, making them extremely receptive to populist politics.
Not so! There is significant, though not watertight evidence that Hitler intended the Holocaust to be followed by mass extermination and enslavement of Slavic peoples (so-called Generalplan Ost), whom Nazi Germans regarded as an "inferior" race according to their racial ideology, and surely not "Aryan" - despite, y'know, Slavic languages sharing a common ancestry with both Germanic languages and Indo-Iranic ones! Nazi German attitudes to the "supremacy" of race, culture and the like were a lot weirder than people are usually ready to admit these days; while they may have been rooted in some sorts of shared vocabulary from the early 20th-century, to a far greater extent they were just "Nazi Germany and the friends of Nazi Germany good, everyone else bad!" Of course, this is the story of supremacist ideologies everywhere; but the point is that we should not grow complacent and reassure ourselves that there's anything especially peculiar about white-supremacist nationalism; it's just one of many, many ideologies with broad similarities in their appeal to hateful sentiment.
If today's white supremacists found power, they'd look exactly like Nazis. The enemy might be different, but the mindset of fighting that enemy would be exactly the same, and the white supremacist suddenly finding power would find no other example to take heed of than the Nazis, so we can pretty much almost assume that that's what would happen.
Sure, but it's important to realize that this is true about any supremacist ideology. There's nothing exclusive about either Nazism or white supremacism. ISIL's Islamofascism is the same old crap for example, and it too has a line of historical descent from, e.g. early-20th-c. anti-Semitism. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a raging anti-Semite who met Adolf Hitler and ardently supported his most heinous atrocities.
Have you never heard of Lebensraum? Generalplan Ost?
Hi. If you downvote factual statements, please leave a comment. It's annoying if you're using downvotes and flags as "I don't like that somebody says this". Write an argument, don't abuse moderation tools.
Half the bloody point of white supremacy is that the supremacist is the one who chooses who is white enough to be in the in-group, and who is not.
The definition of white changes, based on who the supremacist wants to kill, displace, or enslave.
Meh, removing any value from descriptive terms doesn't help.
> The definition of white changes, based on who the supremacist wants to kill, displace, or enslave.
Or it's just not white supremacy, which it never was with the Nazis.
Nazism was absolutely white supremacy. That it excluded ethnic groups that you consider to be white, or stack-ranked various white ethnic groups has nothing to do whether or not it was about white supremacy. Please, pray tell, what exact role were non-whites expected to play in Hitler's Brave New World?
You are using an incredibly narrow definition of the term, to try to make.. What point, exactly?
Nationalism however is the fundamental basis behind modern sovereignty. It's an identity based on shared geography rather than appearances. Nationalism ultimately prevents the people in the nation from getting conquered by other nations. You don't want the sentiments running away on you, but a certain amount of national pride is good for a people.
Nazism hid racism behind nationalism, in order to meld the two political forces together to form a ruling coalition. This was fundamental to its success. You cannot merely say the Nazis were racist, to turn them into the bogeyman, without acknowledging that the rest of the world had a role to play in bringing them to power.
The West, collectively, brought about World War 2. We didn't listen to the lessons learned over a thousand years of grappling with warfare on the continent, we did not do what was needed at the end of World War 1. It was so obvious that Germany was going to rearm and try again that France immediately went to considerable expense to fortify their eastern border.
We left an enormous power vacuum in Germany in the name of greed. We would not make that same mistake again at the end of WW2, though honestly the spectre of nuclear war had a lot more to do with it than moral imperative.
It's amazing how many people actually think this, and how discussions like this bring them out of the woodwork. A couple of years ago I got into a pointless discussion with someone on HN who went so far as to say that Hitler wasn't a racist. (No, really.)
This is why white supremacy is dangerous. The history of WWII and the rise of the Nazis is rapidly being forgotten, and a surprisingly large number of people have a massively inaccurate conception of it.
It historically and factually was not.
It played a role.
It was not the cause.
Nobody is saying Hitler wasn't a racist (wtf.)
I doubt you can point to any reputable historian of World War II who denies that the Nazi's racist ideology, and its expansionist tendencies, played a major role in the outbreak of WWII. Think Sudetenland.
And again, nobody here is denying Nazis were racist.
How can you say it played a major role in the outbreak of war when you can't even say it without tacking on the real causes with an "and" all while ignoring the USA turned a blind eye to the lot of it until Japan got involved?
Nobody here has said it didn't play a role. And it did play a major role later on in WW2 but that's not what this thread is about is it?
Did white supremacy cause WW1 and WW2. No.
Did it play a part? Yes. Why are we talking about this? Because AP minced their words and should have just said nationalist racism.
This is clearly what the comment suggests. It is playing down Nazi racism by suggesting that the Nazis just pretended to be racists when it suited their purposes. (Note the inclusion of “even Jews”, as if to suggest that even the Holocaust was not racially motivated.)
>without tacking on the real causes with an "and"
The expansionism and the racism were intimately linked. Lebensraum.
I just think it seems overly simplistic to the point of being almost nonsensical to say that WW2 was caused by white supremacism. White supremacism certainly didn't make Japan invade China. While I'm no expert, at the very least I can say that the Wikipedia article for "Causes of World War II" seems in agreement with what I said— while racism played a role, facism/militarism and plain old nationalist expansionism were much bigger factors.
It's particularly the mention of Jews here that makes it clear that in your view, the Nazis' racism was merely a matter of expedience, not conviction.
After all, would it not have been "convenient for the cause" for the Nazis to make all of Europe's Jews "honorary Aryans", and thus save themselves the trouble of murdering six million of them? The reason that they didn't do this is - obviously - that racism and anti-Semitism were a core part of their cause.
>White supremacism certainly didn't make Japan invade China.
A red herring, surely. We're talking about the cause of the war in Europe in this context. But in any case, there was certainly a racist component to Japanese nationalism too.
>nationalist expansionism
The Nazis' nationalist expansionism was intimately connected to their racism. Hitler invaded Poland so that racially inferior slavs could be replaced by racially superior "Aryans".
I'm surprised you didn't point to colonialism instead, which would be a better argument.
You can argue that the use of the term "white supremacy" is anachronistic in this context (as the Nazis were technically "Aryan supremacists" rather than white supremacists). But the current white supremacy movement has evolved in significant part from Nazi ideology. Take a look at the Wikipedia article on David Duke, for example, and you'll find such statements as "Picketing and holding parties on the anniversary of Hitler's birth, he became known on the LSU campus for wearing a Nazi uniform."
In short, if we're talking about racist movements within the US and Europe that are directly inspired by Nazi ideology, then whatever quibbles you might make about terminology, you can't deny that it's reasonable to project the dangers of the latter onto the former.
You can generalize to ethno-national supremacy. Which covers Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and US White Supremacists.
Go ahead and read that article on Paul Manafort. That's just one, mundane article—you could pick any. Understand that, true or false, it doesn't matter anymore—this is a narrative and a set of facts that around 100 million people in the United States now subscribe to.
We are way, way, way, way past removing a few thousand YouTube videos. That might have been marginally effective ten years ago. But there's been a decade of rhetoric now about how "they" control the media and will try and censor it. Sometimes it's "they" and sometimes it's (((they))).
Jews control the media, shadow governments, deep state, extreme hate against muslims, gays, etc.. This stuff is mainstream. Patrick Little ran for Senate in California, of all places, as an actual nazi and got 1.2% of the vote. That's 50,000+ people who went out of their way to vote for someone who was relatively unknown, all because his platform was based on removing Jews from the United States.
I don't know what the solution is, I really don't. But I DO know that removing videos from YouTube won't make it better. It may make it worse.
I think you're right, and I have some first-hand knowledge on the matter. I've debated QAnon types and flat earthers alike. In both cases, they often see an absence of information as some overarching conspiracy. I'm not really sure who is worse (the flat earthers are a subset of a broader "government-is-hiding-things" conspiracy), but they both follow a cult-like structure in that if you disagree with them, you're not "one of us" and are either not smart enough to understand the implications of their beliefs or are willfully blind to their "truth." I doubt YT would ever remove QAnon or flat earth videos, but if they did, I suspect the fallout would be far worse than just leaving them alone. In some cases, it's helpful to cite their own predictions (and have something to cite) to dismantle their argument! Admittedly, this isn't useful in direct debate, because they're forever moving the goalpost, but it can be helpful for illustrating deficiencies to third parties that might be sympathetic to their views but are still open to the idea that there are problems with the opposition's argument[1].
Now, I say this as a conservative with some libertarian leanings. I don't like censorship, and I think it's harmful to shield people from ideas they don't like. However, I think moderation within a community is incredibly important to its survival provided it is applied equally. Nothing is worse for reasonable discourse than having someone jump in and start slinging pejoratives, insults, and abuse for no other reason than they don't like what you've said. As an example, I've personally had someone stalk my admittedly limited social media presence across various sites in order to post screenshots "proving" some inane belief they had about me supporting some ridiculous conspiracy. They then repeatedly posted insults and diatribes across numerous unrelated comments until I blocked them. That type of behavior should be an immediate--and permanent--ban.
[1] We might be passed this point, because the number of undecided people with regards to any particular conspiracy (for or against) is diminishing. I used to think the flat earth groups were largely trolling, but I've spoken with some people who have encountered them in real life or have friends who have been duped into believing the conspiracy. I also know a small handful of people who believe QAnon. No amount of evidence is going to sway either party. And no, I don't know what the best solution is other than to continue engaging where appropriate and banning where there's abuse.
But now? Too late.
There's no winning this battle of censorship, it will never be enough for the mob. While the other half is saying it's too far. And a small percentage of crazies becomes even more convinced of a global conspiracy. And the actual extremists will use their banning to justify why they were right to be extremist in the first place.
They should have stopped at people promoting violence, spam, and other obvious illegal stuff. Jumping into being the central body that moderates what is 'acceptable speech' online is minefield riddled crazy town with very little real ROI. Which will hopefully quicken Facebook's decline.
Deplatforming just removes it from the view of people who don’t want to see it anyway.
That's probably just because banning radical Islamists isn't very controversial.
>What you mean by "white supremacy"? If you mean actual people that think White race (whatever the hell that is) is supreme and are willing to take action to ensure its power - it is demonstrably false, the number of these people are tiny, and they could never pull off even one hundredth of what ISIS has been pulling off for years.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/03/world/white-e...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/homegrown-...
What about other 92% of overall attacks and 2/3 of US attacks? Would it be insane to suggest that 92% of attacks deserve a bit more attention than 8% of attacks?
Also:
We examined attacks perpetrated by anti-immigrant extremists, anti-Muslim extremists, neo-Nazi extremists, right-wing extremists, anti-Semitic extremists, neo-fascists, white extremists, anti-Arab extremists, the Ku Klux Klan, anti-Sikh extremists and incel extremists.
This lists all anti-Semites as "white supremacists" even though there is a lot of anti-Semitic extremists who have nothing to do with white supremacy movements (Hamas and Hezbollah would be "white supremacists" by that definition!). To add on top of that, it also for some reason puts incels into the pile, which have nothing to do with racial angle at all. Moreover:
For episodes in which the identity of the perpetrator was unknown, we made a determination about ideology based on the target or through further research. We excluded episodes with insufficient evidence of ideological motivation.
That looks like it means each time a target who has been frequent target of racist extremists in the past was attacked, and the reason for attack is not known, it was assumed it's "white supremacists", if the researches themselves deemed the motivation "sufficient", by some unknown criteria. That is a good recipe for seriously biased results. For example, a string of Jewish centre bombing threats has been proven recently to be a work of one distubred Israeli teen. Has it not been known by now, it would be listed as "white supremacist" attacks, as it's clearly would be obvious that somebody who bombs a Jewish center must be a Nazi.
And with all that, it's still 8%. Is this getting only 8% of the press attention and other coverage and assigned 8% importance compared to other violent threats?
You'd have to see how big the other categories were to draw any conclusions.
In recent years, it's been widely reported that white supremicists have been responsible for more violence in the USA than Islamist extremists. See e.g.
https://www.jta.org/2019/01/24/opinion/right-wing-extremist-...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/homegrown-...
My point, though, was not that white supremacy is necessarily more of a danger than Islamist extremism, but that you were massively understating the danger it poses in your original comment ("they could never pull off even one hundredth of what ISIS has been pulling off for years").
> This lists all anti-Semites as "white supremacists" even though there is a lot of anti-Semitic extremists who have nothing to do with white supremacy movements (Hamas and Hezbollah would be "white supremacists" by that definition!)
I think you're pulling a bit of a "no true white supremacist" move here. If you want to get into that kind of thing, we could also pick over the question of just how much "Islamic" terrorism is really Islamic in its motivation.
> Is this getting only 8% of the press attention and other coverage and assigned 8% importance compared to other violent threats?
I think so (?)
I don't have figures, and I'm not sure where one would obtain them. But I'd say that Islamist terror attacks certainly get more press coverage than white supremacist terrorism.
And I switched the "latter" and "former" but it's too late to edit... Duh.
"The term Radical (from the Latin radix meaning root), during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, identified proponents of democratic reform, in what subsequently became the parliamentary Radical Movement."
"The term political radicalism (in political science known as radicalism) denotes political principles focused on altering social structures through revolutionary or other means and changing value systems in fundamental ways. "
And of course the classic Rules for Radicals book about community organizing and starting grassroots movements.
Let's not label all radical things bad, it can become a way to suppress dissent and societal change.
Setting aside the fact that this culling has nothing to do with Neo nazi content... maybe islamic extremism is a greater threat because we've had decades to implement countermeasures to a resurgence of white supremacy, whereas islamic terrorists exploit existing gaps in our society's trust model? I'm confident that had the KKK employed trucks of peace in the 50s, civil engineers wouldn't have assumed that nobody would be insane enough to drive down a pedestrian thoroughfare at full speed.
Now back to the issue at hand. This is a purge of alternative media at the behest of Vox Media, of which Comcast is the majority shareholder. This has been going on for well over a year now, the old media making demands for Youtube deplatformings and policy changes. I started listing them, but the list of crybullies is effectively a list of all media companies founded before Youtube. It is really amazing how stupid Google has been in all this, because it seems that they don't understand who their competitors are in the attention market, and how those competitors have effectively transformed them from a relatively low maintenance and legally protected platform - into a legally exposed publisher full of upset content providers. Youtube has been a loss leader for a long time, which might explain the leadership selection and the lack of corrective action for laughably stupid executive decisions... but it is well beyond the point of just being a money hole - it is in the precedent setting legal liability zone at this point. They aren't even subtle about being a publisher anymore, selectively editorializing user generated content with editor's notes under the guise of fighting disinformation.
Regardless of the effects, this was also wrong, IMHO.
If you are a supporter of radically free expression, sometimes you have to allow radicals to express themselves too.
Edit: I know there will be a contingent that disagrees with this. For many people, the ends justify the means, regardless of the corrosive effect to civil liberties. In my opinion this is a myopic view.
What a wretched, demoralizing 118-comment subthread. A white supremacy vs. Islamic extremism cage match was the last thing we needed, and of course it hopped via WWII and Nazis to capitalism vs. communism—the mother of generic ideological flamewars, whither all return. None of this is good discussion for Hacker News; it's predictable, nasty, and the essence of what we're trying to avoid. To the extent it proliferates like this here, we might as well just shut the damn place down.
Everyone: please don't.
That's not close to true. How people arrive at these generalities is beyond me!
I think we should keep politics out of HN at this point, I don't want it to become reddit.
I have no doubt that there are some terrible awful racist videos in that lot but you have to wonder how many times this is ALSO used as a mean to censor pretty much any video that the youtube execs don't like. Censorship is getting worse
Edit: Replacing "Censorship is coming back" with "Censorship is getting worse"
Might be something newer, of course, in which case I didn't see it and can't comment on it.
This is way more than the few cases that float up into your attention. It's been going on for years across all these big silos. People who fully endorse actual censorship know they can abuse automated systems to silence marginalized people.
Very true. This statement is neutral with regards to both the left-right axis and authoritarian/anti-authoritarian axis. In order to have a society in which people can speak truth to power, in 2019, we have to be on the lookout for new forms that censorious power can take.
Technology is a double edged sword here. New tech introduces ways of circumventing censorship, but also introduces new forms of censorship not covered by old laws.
You won't get large companies to officially make value calls and say "no, it's okay if this user says that because they are part of a special group", they will be too vulnerable to public/media/political pressure, especially in a culture that is generally pro free speech.
A free society has costs, including tolerating speech you find deplorable. To support censorship because it aligns with your current political leanings makes you no different than the politics you take issue with.
Will you complain if Google mass fires left leaning employees? It's entirely within their right to do. You could even start a competitor to hire those people!
I also think it’s grotesque to quote an anti nazi poem in defense of nazis.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance#Tolerance...
Then you should understand that when "threatening speech" is used to censor people on false pretexts, then this dilutes reasonable concerns about threatening speech. If one is really concerned about truly threatening speech, one should be actively calling out such abuses from one's own side. Also, what naturally goes with that, is the calling out of actual violence from one's own side.
This is also why civility is useful for the public discourse. It acts as a sort of "DMZ" wherein actual hostility is more readily visible. (And certain people on all sides of the public discourse should be called out in this regard.)
Sounds circular but you do you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijection,_injection_and_surje...
Or to put it in very simplistic terms so that there is no misunderstanding, I am more worried about people who want to promote or engage in genocidal behavior than I am about missing out on possible future contributions to society from genocide enthusiasts who had difficulty reaching a sufficiently wide audience.
It's funny how right-wing people, who argue so hard for capitalism, fundamentally don't understand capitalism.
No. It's funny how people refuse to acknowledge the fact that Free Speech in the Public Square is held as more important than property rights.
The fact of the matter is that places like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are where a substantial amount of the public political debate takes place. Users banned from there are significantly less able to participate in the political debate, and so significantly less able to peacefully advocate for what they see as their interests.
If you find those people so deplorable that you don't want them to be able to advocate for their own interests, don't be surprised when they return the sentiment with fast moving lead.
Nevertheless, there is big difference between the way violence is advocated for between moderates and extremists in terms of severity, frequency, and justification.
I didn't ask you who advocates for violence, I asked you why you thought the unrestricted public speech of extremists leads to peace.
I've already explained why I think restricting political speech results in increased real world violence. People are going to advocate for what they perceive as their interests, and if they can't do it peacefully, they're going to do it violently.
People advocate for their interests peacefully by participating in the public political debate.
If their ability to participate in the public political debate is substantially reduced, then their attempts to peacefully advocate for their interests are a waste of their time.
If your YouTube video gets taken down, you can re-upload something that is better reasoned and less prone to inciting violence. If you can't do this, then you message is inherently violent, and there was never any peaceful outcome in the first place.
Either way, I'd still rather have extremists arming themselves than spending their lives convincing others to take up violence on their behalf.
Could you word this another way? I do not understand what you're saying.
>then you message is inherently violent
Can you please be specific and give an example of a political ideology that is inherently violent, and also one that is not inherently violent, other than pure pacifism?
>Either way, I'd still rather have extremists arming themselves than spending their lives convincing others to take up violence on their behalf.
Because you are worried that people are going to buy what they're selling? Why are you worried about that, specifically?
I do not find this hypothetical YouTuber to be a peaceful advocate for anybody's interests.
No, I'm not. First, the people driven to violence are not necessarily going to be the content producers. The audience can also be driven to violence by seeing the message they agree with censored. Second, the point is that there are no other equivalent platforms to YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, in terms of their reach.
>It is not.
What are the other platforms where people can meaningfully participate in the public political debate?
>You could even return to YouTube with moderated content.
It's up to YouTube to decide what counts as "moderated content". They are currently under no obligation to act in good faith.
I don't think the world becomes more violent because people defend themselves and others. And if it does, it's still worth it compared to surrendering to every would-be tyrant without a fight.
Is this supposed to threaten me?
I don't know where you're from but here in Germany there is a difference between public spaces and private spaces. You can suppress free speech in private spaces. You don't even have to allow access to private spaces while it's the other way around in public spaces. There are laws for that.
The amount of people does not matter. You can't display swastikas in a Bundesliga stadium just because there are plenty people there. The owner would throw you out and probably even report you to the police.
Censorship is something the state forces upon you. It restricts things in public spaces. There is no place left you can go in a state with censorship present to challenge that.
Misusing "censorship" for moderation of private spaces plays down the word. It wears it out and it ridicules people who really suffer under true censorship.
And please...spare me the drama. I grew up in a state with true censorship and I've been online long enough to see this ridiculous whining as what it is...
I'm not sure what that would mean in this context.
>You can suppress free speech in private spaces. You don't even have to allow access to private spaces while it's the other way around in public spaces. There are laws for that.
The point I'm making is that it's probably not a good idea to allow certain private spaces to suppress free speech.
>You can't display swastikas in a Bundesliga stadium just because there are plenty people there.
As I understand, you can't display them anywhere in your country, because your country has more restrictions on political speech than some other parts of the world, e.g. the US. Regardless, I am not suggesting that stadium owners should be forced to allow political demonstrations on their private property. I'm suggesting that certain key internet websites where a significant portion of the public political debate takes place should not be given carte blanche to reduce the ability of people to spread political ideas which the owners of those sites do not like.
>The amount of people does not matter.
What matters is whether people feel as though they have lost their ability to peacefully and meaningfully advocate for their interests.
>Censorship is something the state forces upon you. It restricts things in public spaces. There is no place left you can go in a state with censorship present to challenge that.
I'm not interested in debating your strange and highly restricted meaning of the word. I'm interested in the real world consequences of the actions that these mega-corporations are taking.
>It wears it out and it ridicules people who really suffer under true censorship.
The people you mean to refer to are not my concern.
And it's a good idea to force private spaces to allow everything on their spaces or declaring it public spaces even if they are not? What about the implications? If your private space becomes a public space, does it make you some kind of government?
> As I understand, you can't display them anywhere in your country
Sure you can. You can have as many swastikas in your living room as you wish. You can also have them on public spaces or on TV if they are part of some artistic performance for example. But that's derailing the actual argument. The amount of people present on a private property do not take away the owners rights.
> What matters is whether people feel as though they have lost their ability to peacefully and meaningfully advocate for their interests.
Nobody takes that away from them. They can still express themselves elsewhere. Those places exist.
> I'm not interested in debating your strange and highly restricted meaning of the word.
And I guess this is the core of the problem. You just chose to blindly ignore that in favor of the use of the phrase to advertise your point which is based upon a misunderstanding of private vs. public.
> The people you mean to refer to are not my concern.
But they should. Especially if you want concern for your own position. This is how a healthy society works.
It's a good idea to force some of them to allow some things. You don't believe private property rights are somehow absolute, do you? You understand that there can be competing concerns that are more important than property rights is some cases, surely.
>If your private space becomes a public space, does it make you some kind of government?
I'm not sure what that means. Plenty of private companies are heavily regulated, such as utilities. They're not governments.
>The amount of people present on a private property do not take away the owners rights.
Tell that to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
>Nobody takes that away from them. They can still express themselves elsewhere. Those places exist.
Anyone can express himself in his own living room. But that doesn't do him any good. Telling certain people that they can't express themselves somewhere that it matters, while letting other people express other political viewpoints in that same place, and justifying that by telling them they are free to express themselves in a dark room, is not going to be particularly satisfying to them. Sure, anyone can go put his videos on a website of his own creation, but if no one is on that website, it's not going to do any good. And people know that. Your alternatives are not real alternatives, because they don't solve the problem those people are trying to solve.
>And I guess this is the core of the problem.
Your problem, perhaps. Not mine.
>based upon a misunderstanding of private vs. public.
What do you think I'm misunderstanding? I know what you mean by censorship, and I don't care to make you feel otherwise about the meaning of that word. I don't care if what YouTube is doing meets your definition of censorship. I care if people think YouTube should be stopped from doing what it is doing, regardless of what word is used to describe it.
>But they should. Especially if you want concern for your own position. This is how a healthy society works.
You're referring to people in different countries, where there is what you call real censorship. I don't live in a place that qualifies under your definition, so I'm not part of their society. And I'm not looking for sympathy from them.
You become "some kind of government" by being more powerful than a single citizen should have. A kind of undemocratic, illegitimate government.
With that line of argument, there is no possibility for censorship anywhere, ever. You can always create your own country someplace else.
Also note: YouTube is already a heavily moderated platform, see pornography.
It is a private company doing the censorship but this is 100% in the definition of censorship.
censor verb censored; censoring\ ˈsen(t)- sə- riŋ , ˈsen(t)s- riŋ \
Definition of censor (Entry 2 of 2)
transitive verb : to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable censor the news also : to suppress or delete as objectionable censor out indecent passages
Censorship is bad for the platform as a whole.
The only reason there is a press release for this particular event is for the inevitable positive press and media attention it will garner.
Censorship never left. What's changing is who controls the Censorship and those few people are wielding very very powerful weapons of mass surveillance that will ultimately "disrupt" civilization as we know it.
Conspiracy theorists and/or political extremists (on both sides) should have to seek out their extreme content with prejudice. No more marketing birther theories alongside CSPAN videos on YouTube, or click-bait "TOP 10 UNEXPLAINED PHENOMENON" when someone looks for academic material. It shouldn't be possible to "stumble" onto a video that promotes falsehoods like vaccines causing autism or holistic medicine alongside legitimate medical content. It's damaging our society because not everyone has the acumen to know when they're being gaslit.
If these content creators were doing this as satire and advertised as such it wouldn't be an issue. What we have are content creators creating deliberately misleading content and then pushing it deliberately to the most gullible audience they can.
The first amendment shouldn't be used as a weapon to trick stupid people. It's diluting real political discourse and creating factions of people who don't have substantial opinions, just a bunch of inaccurate facts and unscrupulous sources for information.
The fact is that YouTube has become one of the primary places (along with Facebook and Twitter) where people not rich enough to own a newspaper or television station engage in political speech. Preventing people from meaningful participation in the public political debate is a precursor to real world violence, because you leave people with little other choice to advocate for what they view as their interests.
YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and all other corporate entities attempting to regulate political discourse are driving us toward a civil war. There is no good reason for us to allow them to do that.
YouTube has always been free to remove any content they'd like for any reason. When they more specifically define the content that they will be removing, it somehow now becomes controversial? This surrounds the argument with uncomfortable undertones. The idea that your message deserves equal treatment despite the content seems to be a value promoted by racists.
Also, Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, etc, don't owe anyone a platform. If this were not true, I don't quite understand how corporations could reasonably comply.
Tolerating extreme views is okay as the price for freedom of speech. It does not mean large platforms are obligated to give them megaphones. Some kinds of speech do cause harm far beyond someone getting angry at someone else's views.
FTA: "... and videos denying that violent incidents occurred"
This one seems perfectly tailored to match with the Chinese Govt. negationism about Tiananmen Square events, so that would be generally A-OK for us, but what about videos or comments by police officers denying violent behaviour of their colleagues? Would their videos/comments be axed the same way? Then what about governments lying about civil deaths figures or use of banned weapons in military attacks?
100 Euros and a beer that the rule will be heavily bent case by case.
Yes I am concerned that these dragnets will delete a lot of content that doesn't even match the stated criteria. In my experience Google/YouTube's evaluation of content for compliance is not very deep or well considered. It's generally performed by underpaid overworked folks that lack any domain expertise.
This is part of why I am a data packrat. If something is really interesting I snarf it and store it on my personal NAS. Easy to do and means I'll have backups of things that get "disappeared" and can share them with others if needed. If more people did this I think we'd have less of an issue with this.
Are there any public online social platforms? There literally isn't the equivalent of a "public space" online so many view it as a de facto public space.
I'm sure those policies will shift stealthily until everything except Baby Shark videos is banned.
Left, right or center politically? But a little too spicy for your average 8-year-old? Banned. Gotta keep the Coca-Cola ad execs happy.
It's a curious hyper-puritanical yet simultaneously secular social order we find ourselves in today. I'm sure this won't lead to any social unrest or civilization-wrecking upheaval.
Good luck trying to monetize that. Good luck getting viral traction with that. (I will be happy if someone succeeds, because that will be the end of the YouTube monopoly on video commentary.)