Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

There's a bug that we haven't fixed yet, the workaround for which is to restart the server after renaming an account. I must have forgotten to do that.

There was a huge thread earlier about the rank of this thread and related ones relative to others, which you'll find somewhere in these pages.

It’s not profitable.

Nowhere near as many people would donate money/time/edits/content to Wikipedia if it wasn’t a registered non-profit - nor would they receive donated/subsidised hosting services from their providers - and if it’s for-profit they would need to run ads - and there’s no money in generic ads so they have to be either content-based ads (which immediately creates a perverse incentive for articles to be edited or biased in favour of the advertiser, which devalues the content of the encyclopaedia - or behavioural/tracking ads, which won’t be here for long due to expected incoming changes in browser handling of cookies and cross-site content) - which leaves behind only paywalling the encyclopaedia - and we saw how well that worked-out for Britannica, Collier’s, and Encarta.

Wikipedia has a high-value because it’s a non-profit - as contradictory as that sounds.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.

You may be thinking of the various wiki brands run by the Wikimedia Foundation, which doesn't aspire to be any of these things, either, but at least entertains the aspiration of being a better Google News with WikiNews. (But do not confuse WikiNews with WikiTribune, the latter of which is a non-WMF project of Jimmy Wales, originally aspiring to be news, now aspiring to be a social network).

It never really did, and this would only be more apparent if we tried to re-institute such a doctrine today.

Why would we expect to be able to force Google to host speech they disagree with?

But in terms of network effect... YouTube has two billion users.

I'm as pro-democracy as they come, but the belief that the government is somehow (and always) more accountable than companies strains credulity. Companies are accountable to Wall Street, which implies they're accountable to their consumers too. Shake Shack did not have to return the funds they received recently, but they did, because of media attention.

If 1.5B Chinese people totally democratically voted to ban particular words from usage worldwide, and were very serious at enforcing their decision, would you conform?

I'd very much appreciate if no society ever chooses things for me, as long as the choice is not of a conflicted shared resource that needs to be handled uniformly to even work (like property laws or traffic rules).

Almost anything is better at safeguarding freedom than allowing people to vote on what counts as freedom.

Boeing was not punished severely enough, because of two things - American nationalism would prevent it from drowning(helloo rescue package ;) ) and belief that they could fix it fast enough. But as a person holding Airbus stock for a long time, I disagree that Boeing wan't punished at all. Boeing's price dropped by 75%, while Airbus lost only 50%

I'm not claiming they are incapable, but with a constantly re-elected congress that's on an upward trend and just now hitting 30% approval rating it seems they don't serve their constituents effectively.

...but ideally, we would have multiple YouTube competitors, that would allow content creators vote with their choice to use Google.

Or imagine YouTube were to split into two; YouTube the distribution platform and YouTube the recommendation engine. Imagine Youtube the platform had to license content publicly. Now it is much more likely to have competition emerging and end users benefiting from it.

You would almost certainly need something like the Paramount Consent Decrees to structure the marketplace correctly and to foster the kind of competition that would prevent a single player from being in such a vulnerable position.

The British (or Dutch) India Companies had a stranglehold over shipping -- and thus over communication -- to colonial holdings for much of their existence.

but fairly certain that a monopoly on permissible communication/speech was and is still held (in title at least) by the Crown

this is pretty much precisely what the 1nd amendment is about and why it was so radical at the time.

I recommend the biography of Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson

If it were easy, I'd have my server not serve anyone using an adblock... and instead present them with a paywall... Which you would probably bitch about.

They dominate the software ecosystem. Although it's not difficult to load 3rd party applications, it's certainly not common. Their removal of the Podcast Addicts app is a great example. Also you cannot interface with things like Android Auto without getting Google's golden approval (so no Android Auto for F-Drop apps)

I did a full post on all the gripes I had with Android a few years back, and I think they all still apply: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/android-fragmentation/

If Google were to block search results to DuckDuckGo for example, that would be monopolistic and warrant antitrust action. As it is now, Google isn't blocking competition, consumers are choosing to use Google despite the privacy-oriented preferences here on HN.

Usually I consider terms like “control” to be hotheaded but if you substitute “is in control of Which results are returned” you can see the consequence could be nefarious. This understanding informed antitrust theory up to the 1980s.

I don’t use Google for anything myself except for communicating with my gf’s kids’ scout troop. That doesn’t mean I think they have a bunch of evil geniuses cackling and rubbing their hands in building 42. The rehetoric makes me think some people do think this.

Google censors information relating to that 10% for everyone else. They don't care enough to switch.

Centralization is an issue _a priori_. It's giving power to a single entity that we have no reason to trust will act in everyone's best interests.

It the same monopoly that a town center has in term of political activities. Anyone could easily choose to switch to hold demonstrations somewhere else, but the result of holding it where only 8% of people will see it will make that less of a choice for the ones organizing the event.

As a society where I live we recognize the benefit of political diversity, and we acknowledge that the disruption that such political activity bring is usually minor. As long it does not cause prolong and significant disruption to everything else then the benefit of giving everyone equal right to demonstrate in the town square is a benefit.

I do agree however that Browsers are more similar to regular monopolies worries. One company in control of the market will increase prices, decrease innovation and create perverse market incentives.

No, "controls" means decides the rules and what is happening on that part of the market. Any number that is not 100% automatically implies it's not a perfect monopoly and it's possible to switch, but once you are within the area controlled by Google, it's Google's rules. Including removal any content Google doesn't like for any reason, blocking any action Google doesn't like for any reason, etc. So for 91% of the searches, Google decides what you can and can't see.

Google hasn't leveraged their ownership of the browser to enact censorship (frequently on behalf of most vile dictatorships) yet as far as I know (surveillance is another mater) but it certainly did and is using its control over search, advertising, video hosting, etc. markets to do that.

Because people are conditioned by defaults. Google knows this, and so does every other business. Google had a good product, but Google also bought market share by bundling their products with random software (like adobes flash player, which later they unsurprisingly tried to kill), making a deal with Dell to bundle their software/toolbar, etc. Yes anyone in theory can switch, but its not really how people think. People are not as informed as we think they are, or aware of the pros and cons of various competing services and products. That includes most people, even people on this site, so its really not an elitist thing.

All available search engines run on ads and offer roughly the same service. There is no competition in the market from the perspective of the consumer. How is this healthy?

Who believes this crap? You might as well have linked to a Facebook comment.

My point is just if you pay for something, you are less likely to be gamed for advertising cash.

For search you should be paying for the indexes in some way, or for the algorithms in your company.

I am just presenting this as a philosophy. Not trying to solve the world's problems on a forum.

Similarly, the Fairness Doctrine was overruled because requiring companies to air opinions they disagreed with was found to infringe free speech.

I have come to define the magnitude of need to represent how far out of your internal value system and the law are you willing to ago to satisfy a "need." I'm not sure what the units are, desperation perhaps.

For example, I "need" to eat to live but at the present time my need is modest because I have enough money to buy food to eat. At my current level I wouldn't steal food (go outside the law), or misrepresent my state of poverty to a food bank (go outside my internal values) in order to acquire food. So the magnitude of that need is "small."

However, if I was unemployed, out of savings, and behind on my bills, the calculus changes. I really need to eat, and in that situation might do things I would not normally do (like rummage around in trash cans for discarded food).

It is clear to me that Google, like every company, needs revenue in order to survive. The stronger the need for that revenue, the more willing they become to compromise the user experience, the law, and/or their internal values.

To me, their actions of the last few years appear to directly contradict what at one time were core internal values. Whether its the level of monetization of their own properties, or their willingness to cooperate with an authoritarian state to keep information away from their population. I see their taking of these steps as an outcome of their great need for revenue.

China is the second largest economy on the planet, and Google does not appear to be willing to hold true to their values and forego the revenue that economy could potentially produce for them. That is the reasoning by which I come to the conclusion that Google needs China.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23225522

This sounds like an awful lot of assumptions.

No, they did not. They looked they were creating environments in which inevitable conflict was common, and in which the discussion of that conflict sometimes lead to helpful resolutions and improvements, and sometimes did not.

And fwiw, blocking these subs (and subs like r/trumpforpresident! You can block both sides this way) made me completely forget about them until this comment, which I think also shows that self moderation is a perfectly acceptable answer. Why can't everyone make their own bubble? Why do we have to let other people decide how our bubble looks?

If anything, the issue with social media is that it's too vast and anonymous. Things still work just fine in the physical world.

It seems like the only point of disagreement between you and "them" is who should be targeted.

Alternatively, YouTube needs to put more emphasis and responsibility on the reputation of content creators and make it such that their reputation gains them visibility over time. A creator with 20 years of community determined honest reporting, should be featured more prominently than a channel that is new or has a controversial history.

Is good actor good because they use truth?

What is good/bad actor?

Can "actors" be neatly divided into "good" and "bad"? Who decides who is a "good actor" and who is a "bad actor"? Your judgement of who is "good" and "bad" may well differ from mine.

They should delete your post for sure right?

The one and only place this falls over is with the concept of “obscenity”. But if that’s the only place you have to make exceptions, they are much, much easier to define.

Sounds like the real issue is scale and anonymity then. What solution do you propose?

That doesn't seem unreasonable. They could hide filtered comments from chinese users. This would allow the rest of the world to be unaffected by chinese regulation and "allowed" speech between chinese and foreigners.

So Balkanized rulesets might work for some countries but not others. China is well known for exercising their market size to make companies jump for them, the US is as well.

At which point Google should decide on what countries they operate in. If they operate in a country where political affiliation is a protected class, go ahead and hide those comments to users in that country. But don't export that country's values to mine.

Difficult. Yet commonly done. (With respect to protected classes, I mean.)

> Then to project that to the world is harder

This is not a requirement. My beef is with Google exporting China's censorship regime to New Yorkers like me. I'm not thrilled with China censoring what its people see. But that's a different category of problem.

This is hard. But it's a different category of hard from the problem Google has chosen for itself.

Let's assume California has a protected class that New York doesn't. China has protected classes the U.K. doesn't. That could mean a comment visible in New York isn't in California. Or it could mean something else.

This isn't an easy problem. One needs to map comments to various protected classes and then measure "hatefulness" according to local constructs. One needs to decide what to do with content so flagged. But that's objectively easier than doing all of that plus coming up with the definitions for protected classes.

Viewed through this framework, deleting a comment, as Google is doing here, is almost always wrong.

> it essentially legalizes political persecution

The First Amendment is supposed to protect against this. Protected classes govern private actors.

Not technically but in practice it is difficult.

- What happens if I opt out but you reply with an "offensive" word in the thread I'm in?

- If two people are discussing and one uses "offensive" words what do I see? Nothing or one person screaming at the void?

The other problem I see having more confirmation bias. We would have a split in the community between politically correct and incorrect. You'll get deeper in the rabbit hole if you only talk to people that have the same views as you. Regardless of which side of the wall you're at.

Edit: Formatting

That's an extremely low bar, so low as to be utterly useless.

Do you think you can be taken seriously when you say you oppose censorship?

But when compones do it, they will use the lowest bar, because they have a financial interest to keep even the most unreasonable person as a customer.

When you try to eradicate what you think is hate in the way google is you risk also erasing truths. In my opinion only an unwise person would think themselves worthy of eradicating hate because they must think themselves worthy of this self appointed task.

Do you think google is worthy of determining what hate is and eradicating it?

I don’t think one logically follows at all. The more I study it, the more I think the US and China are vastly more similar than anyone likes to think about.

you seem to have forgotten... the entire cold war. (to which these spats with China don't even compare)

Hope for what exactly? Honest question.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-52088167

No. It's a game that was played out long ago by responsible organizations. It's just that the tech industry is stumbling upon it these days.

For example, responsible media outlets don't publish information about rape victims or suicides unless there is a compelling public interest.

Yes, obviously. Nobody is forced to have an absolutist position on censorship just like it's mostly silly to have an absolutist position on anything else.

>Who determines that "pretty clear difference?"

In this case Google, which is a private business. In other cases the government, or the courts. Depends on the issue at hand.

There's nothing contradictory about partial censorship in the same way there's nothing contradictory about having a speed limit.

And to head off the "no, deleting spam is clearly distinct from censorship," imagine you write a book, so we're dealing purely with ideas.

Obviously, for anyone to read it, you have to promote it. If you post it in too many places or are too "hypey", you'll quickly get banned as spamming. You got censored, there's no way around it.

So we've always been in the "what censorship is OK" realm.

To answer your question:

Protecting a whistleblower's identity is in the interest of US society as a whole. It protects the individual somewhat from persecution which in turn encourages people to blow the whistle on illegal activities, thus benefiting society.

2. Leaving that aside, why permanently ban those who make such contributions to Wikipedia?

> Ciaramella, who has been derided by critics as a beta male, is represented by kiddie-porn lawyer Mark Zaid.

Regardless of political leaning, you can't take anything like this seriously, surely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...

I'm not sure that Google has a published set of guidelines. Obviously Hacker News has a different set of guidelines.

Individual corporations are allowed to make their own guidelines. This is what Libertarians call "freedom of association".

>Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data.

On the other hand, they are somewhat limited in scope (though not enough to my taste, see video games) and more importantly, understandable in their very specific context. They were arguably needed in the aftermath of WW2 when denazification didn't go as smoothly and naturally as could have been hoped, if only to remove the social proof that Nazism might not have been entirely defeated.

I just tested it via two methods:

1) VPN'ed into work with Firefox in Private Mode (I posted from Brave)

2) Had a friend test it. He's on Chrome from a different city.

If someone says "Fuck the US government", we allow that on Youtube, don't we?

The 50 Cent Army posts pro-Chinese propaganda on Chinese websites. Do we have any evidence that the 50 Cent Army posts on English websites? I can't imagine it being that difficult to produce given that we traced Russian propaganda. Forgive my snark, but it sounds like you are unwitting propagating rhetoric that designed to dismiss anything that defends China.

If you're interested in what the 50 cent army actually does, Harvard published a paper about it. It turns out that China rarely actually engages in argument, but rather tries to distract people, so they think about other things.

https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf

No. There are plenty of non-Trump supporters[1] who don't care for YouTube censorship. However, the calls for censorship and pressure on social media companies came as a result of the panic-induced from Trump's election and Russian election interference, which does correlate with anti-Trump voices, more specifically Democratic party establishment and their supporters.

Those aren't the only voices to call for censorship. There is also a parallel cultural war that pressures social media companies to censor hate-speech (as defined by supporters). This tends to generate a lot of noise from both sides, but I think it's probably minor in the grand scheme of things. That Democrats in Congress are cracking down on social media is by far a much bigger deal - because they can actually punish these companies through laws and regulation - and they have been threatening to do so.

[1] I supported Hillary in 2016 because, for all her faults and unlikability, she would have been a reasonable and competent leader. So no, I'm not a huge fan of Trump, but I also don't pearl-clutch every time he says something dumb on Twitter or in a press conference. In a similar vein, though I think he should be a one-term president, I don't think it's an existential threat if he gets elected again.

To refute your points: the owner of the platform has all the power in this relationship, since there are essentially zero repercussions for them over-censoring discussions. Most of the users of a platform won't know, won't care, or will accept the "just censoring the evil speech" argument. The audience itself is also not infallible, since there is a such thing as the tyranny of the majority.

*: of course, there is the point where speech itself requires harming another to create, such as child pornography or snuff films. But that is not what is at issue here or anywhere in modern discourse.

I'm a bit confused here:

"YouTube filtering slurs and hateful memes"

"I didn't call it a slur."

"And thus, when the rallying cry is sounded for the non-event of a crude slur being censored..."

Are you calling it a slur or not?

Also, good catch -- above I mistyped "crybaby" when I meant "crybully". I can't stand watching an totalitarian party like the CCP hide its crimes behind this language of anti-bigotry, all this "slurs and hateful memes" business to silence criticism. The oppressor gets to play a victim role, and it all feels topsy-turvy.

Of course, if this ploy backfires and forces the CCP's critics to hone their arguments to the level of discourse you and I both love on HN (and which you seem to think is within reach for YouTube), that's great, everyone wins.

And you're right, "b.s." was a too harsh and probably violates the guidelines. Retracted.

"what I agree is a problem: a government that forces citizens to literally watch their backs after they voice their mind is influencing countries and companies abroad"

It's hard for me not to be hateful and angry about it, as you've recognized. It's hard to know what people can do when no employee at any multinational company, in any jurisdiction, is free to speak out publicly without fear of retaliation. I sympathize with people going around posting this phrase, even if it's low effort and stinks a little of regional prejudice and of less democratic times in Taiwan's history.

I'm curious, what do you think are the best tactics counteract the CCP clout? What could those YouTube posters be doing instead?

The US government though has more power to resist such demands acting as a sovereign equal to the Chinese State.

The only reason I use them is their spam filters are excellent. Otherwise I wouldn't.

Switching would be laborious if you're using @gmail, probably a case of looking at each unique domain name you've received an email from, logging in and switching addresses. Could be relatively methodical about it by taking a backup and then working down your inbox and deleting the emails from those recipients until you have nothing left. Could be a day job.

There is an option in gmail to forward your emails to another address if you wanted to do it over time.

Google might well accept being excluded from China, but I’m assuming that the prospect of being allowed to re-enter that market is periodically dangled in front of them by the ruling party in China, and that consequentially Google has an ongoing motive to somewhat abide by the PRC’s rules.

Also, Google may be excluded from China, but Google also has a lot to lose if relations with China deteriorate, for example, if China somehow interferes with the primacy of Android there and therefore causes a massive dent in platform numbers.