I'm continually surprised this isn't a major international scandal.
Some Americans don't like google interfering with their discourse and they spend their time using constitutional arguments as to how ok that is or not. International people watching these arguments look on with boredom.
Meanwhile, and american company per default explicitly shapes the dialog of the entire world and people shrug.
The international angle on this is absolutely scandalous and no one cares. Every international government acknowledges the problems of the great firewall of China, but this doesn't matter?
Imagine if humans weren't born with biological mouths, instead synthetic mouths were invented and sold by a company, allowing people to speak. We wouldn't accept the company installing a blacklist of words or phrases to stop people from saying them.
The internet is making online discourse more and more important, perhaps online discourse is already more important than oral discourse.
My metaphor obviously differs in some regards to the article, but I think it elucidates my main point, that Google has become sufficiently large and important that we can't really excuse this type of censorship on the basis that they are a private company.
For example the list clearly shows that Google is pro-choice, with phrases such as "abortion is wrong" appearing on the blacklist. This is not up to Google to decide for others. If Google, or its employees, want to voice their perspective, that is fine. It is not fine to try to manipulate people through their software while pretending to be a neutral party.
>The internet is making online discourse more and more important, perhaps online discourse is already more important than oral discourse.
It's an Eternal September[0] problem, though, in the fact that any discourse has effectively been quashed by setting up "us versus them" factions, yeah?
In our bubble (on HN), sure, we can have respectable (or maybe not so much) discourse but we all come not holding our fingers in our ears, stamping our feet because we think 'x' person is in 'y' camp.
You don't see the festering problems that have affected other platforms (yet) and I think it's very telling that we recognise that discourse is important - but we seem to be in the minority (in this sense of openness to exchange).
The problem with YouTube, however, is that discourse hasn't been a principle part of YoutTube for quite some time. Someone makes a video. If we're lucky someone else might make a "My Response To..." video and, if we're luckier, a further response might be made, "My Response to the Response To...".
However, all one needs to do is look at the cesspool that has become YouTube comments and they will see that discourse isn't a fundamentally important principle there (anymore).
The likewise goes with places like Reddit, which has divided itself into "us versus them" camps about almost everything under the sun.
So, I agree that (online) discourse is important - but it seems to be a bygone idea that a select few of us (present company included) are desperately trying to hold on to.
I'm conflicted as to whether that should give me a feeling of hope or an immense sadness.
You aren't wrong, but some of us have been here for 10 years or more. I have a very different measure of the cost / benefit of the increase in churn of online discourse as that which I would presume to find on YouTube
>Imagine if humans weren't born with biological mouths, instead synthetic mouths were invented and sold by a company, allowing people to speak. We wouldn't accept the company installing a blacklist of words or phrases to stop people from saying them.
But we already have that in European countries. Why do we accept this from the government instead?
What I find the most interesting about this saga is not the leak itself but swat team and bomb squad that showed up at the leakers house during a psychological wellness call made in connection with the leaking.
The most insidious thing social platforms do is secretly ban and filter content to give the impression it is published when it is not. In any other situation, de-ranking, "shadow banning," and other opaque filtering while giving the impression of being public would be fraud. It's designed to steal the posters time and effort. Their platform their rules, except it could become difficult to justify using a platform to actively defraud people of their time and effort. Attracting peoples content with the promise of publicity only to sabotage it is straight bait and switch. I'm sure it's all very narrowly legal, but post-election lawsuits in 2022 will be ones to watch.
I'm glad this stuff is coming out, but there are viable youtube alternatives for sharing video. If they want stuff off their platform, just say so, and people will use new platforms.
I still believe this behaviour by social media companies will yield new platforms. The kids learning to code now are realizing there is a network of people using "censorship," to actively manage a simulation of a world with a manufactured consensus they find acceptable. We're barely a decade past the winner-take-all pattern of platforms, and a totally new dominant platform is less than 5 years away. I'm still optimistic that these platforms are the AOL, Compuserve, and Myspace of today.
>Attracting peoples content with the promise of publicity only to sabotage it is straight bait and switch. I'm sure it's all very narrowly legal, but post-election lawsuits in 2022 will be ones to watch.
Youtube doesn't promise anyone publicity. Any ranking algorithm or suggested content list by its very design "deranks" everything else, and most content on the platform is probably never watched, or barely watched.
Youtube's current default of biasing recommendations towards extremist content "deranks" less extremist content, yet that doesn't appear to be a problem for people who are suddenly up in arms that the site is changing the bias of an already biased system.
There is no bait-and-switch here, nor is there sabotage.
Warren Buffett has mentioned the irony of the fact that the internet took us from a world with thousands of successful money-making newspapers to a world with just two that are likely to be around for long (WSJ, NYT).
And Youtube appears to be taking over in the broadcast TV world.
Youtube has to have content controls. But it's unconscionable that these controls are not open source, not created through a public process, not auditable, nor appeallable.
It would be so easy to do this in an open and positive way, and Google has decided to do it on the cheap in an ugly, biased, and destructive way, one that is harming their brand and creating regulatory scrutiny.
You're not treating them like they are truth. You're a video hosting site and it's a video. Just let the videos rank how they will. Stupid videos being promoted and trending will let more people know they are stupid. When more people learn about who Alex Jones is, and he becomes a household name for being an idiot, when a gullible lad stumbles across him they are likely to be like "oh this dude is the idiot I heard about", rather than thinking they found some secret censored truth.
Except we can see that's not how it works, and Alex Jones became incredibly successful all the way up to slandering the parents of murdered children. It turns out that's where the line is.
People do treat Google search results like truth. There's not a great deal google can do about that, and it's irresponsible for google to feed people lies.
This problem is solved by better education, not censorship. I know for a fact we currently don't teach people how to tell whether a youtube video is bullshit in school or not, teach it. People are agents, not pawns to be controlled into thinking what you want. There will always be bad apples.
>This problem is solved by better education, not censorship.
Education is censorship. If it's unacceptable for Youtube to derank lies and extremism, it must also be unacceptable to teach children that lies and extremism are incorrect. If we can't trust one one arbiter of truth, then surely we can't trust any.
The free speech solution would be to treat all ideas equally, regardless of their merit, and allow the marketplace of ideas to educate people and let everyone decide for themselves what truth is. But that just leads us to where we are now, with social media being overrun by cancer, and ever more people believing QAnon and Alex Jones and anti-vaxxers and flat earth.
The inconvenient truth is that education sometimes works, but often doesn't. Censorship sometimes works, but often doesn't. Context matters (not all speech is equally valid, not all attempts at censorship inevitably lead to Orwellian dystopia) and the problem is more complex and nuanced than heated internet debates will allow.
That's your intuition, but in practice we find that this is not how it goes down. The truth is these videos work on many impressionable people that can't see past the (thin) veil.
This "blacklist" comes from James O'Keefe's Project Veritas. They have a long history of staged "expose"s around the current Republican "bad guy of the day"; ACORN, voter fraud, etc. Regardless of whether this is legit, I'm surprised it showed up on HN.
It changes the likelihood of the veracity of the document. If HN has done some sort of vetting, great. But there is no reason to take at face value anything that comes from Veritas.
A discussion on censorship is a great thing to have. Just not starting with this guy.
...As opposed to all of the other media outlets with their stellar records of truth-telling.
The "publication of record" ship has sailed and we're left with competing agendas and increased need for personal vetting, which many have done on this leak--a fact which is easily searchable.
I get why certain keywords (e.g. "crisis actors") are ranked down, YouTube has rightfully been under fire for actively promoting this crap.
What I don't get is why the author whines about rating content by source. Anyone basing a statement on Alex Jones, Breitbart or RT should be removed from any promotion (i.e. search, "next video") features, there can only be crap as a result of relying on these "sources". As long as Youtube doesn't remove the videos outright there is no censorship and frankly I wouldn't have any problems with removing them either.
Social media platforms need to wake up and realize they have a responsibility to society - just like "classic" media - and that is to further democratic discourse instead of helping to destroy it. Allowing lies and propaganda fabrications to spread is nothing less than destruction of democracy.
Google is not a public service. They are a for profit company. They are not our friends, their youtube ranking algo is not designed to be fair and improve the life of human kind. It's designed to make money.
I don't get the outrage: we warned people for 15 years this would happen. Now people put all their eggs in the same basket and cry when things go wrong.
> As long as Youtube doesn't remove the videos outright there is no censorship
As long as protests are limited to designated "free speech zones", there's no censorship either, right?
Yes yes one is private and the other is public property, but the effect is the exact same. Worse, in fact - at least when you're herded into a free speech zone, you know your speech is being restricted. But when your video doesn't get many views, you have no idea.
How is it "democratic discourse" to ignore statements of certain people? Last time I read a dictionary, democracy did not make a difference between citizens.
> Last time I read a dictionary, democracy did not make a difference between citizens.
To quote Karl Popper: "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
Democracy needs provable facts to work, it ceases to work when the electorate gets flooded by destructive lies.
Yes, that's his point. Tolerating "Jews should not be able to vote" as an opinion will ironically lead to a less tolerant society. You must be intolerant with the intolerant.
You literally just said "Jews should not be able to vote" and the world did not explode. Words are much more nuanced than you seem to want to believe. We are not equipped to properly censor them without doing much more damage than we do good.
I’m OK with this if Google takes full responsibility for the veracity of its search results and liability for any consequences of someone being misled.
They won’t do that of course, they want the power without the responsibility.
The biggest problem we have over Fake new and "lies" is too many people associate opinions and feelings with facts, and if anyone opposes those opinions or feelings then they are "Denying their reality" or "Their Truth"
Further even factual "truth" should always questioned, debated, and explored, no one gave Google the power to say what is "Truth" and then to expel any other idea that challenges said "Truth" that is dangerous for society
Of course truths should be debated, there is a difference between useful debate and shouting or deceit.
To paraphrase Asimov, we should well remember that democracy does not mean that Alan's ignorance is equal to Bob's truth.
It has been well demonstrated that trolls can easily and consistently derail even sound scientific discussions, destroying the discussion and even the forum, if allowed. One only need to look her at HN to see how much filtering & moderation work is required to maintain a valid discussion.
Individuals have better discussions than mobs. There is no basis to think that large scale discussions need less filtering & moderation than tight communities, yet even this obvious concept is fought here...
There's no democratic principle that forces you to listen to all opinions#. They just ensure you're free to have a voice (within the limits of the law) but they won't force anyone to listen to that voice or to amplify it.
YouTube is an amplifier and while they give anyone a voice they're not forced by any law lo amplify its reach. Just like you won't go share my opinion with all your discussion partners.
#is it anti-democratic if someone flags or downvotes a comment on HN? Are you or HN acting in an anti-democratic fashion by hiding and censoring that opinion? (obvious answer: no) Freedom and democracy are seriously misinterpreted these days.
But discriminating certain videos negatively by removing them from certain features (such as search results) is still amplification, just with a factor < 1.
How so? The video is there and it can be viewed. That is 1. That is your voice. It just gets no amplification while other voices do.
Did you ever see Breitbart putting an anti-Breitbart opinion on the front page? Are they being anti-democratic by doing this?
So I'll ask again, if you downvoted/flagged my comment thus making it less readable (factor < 1) did you act in an anti-democratic way? And if so how do you reconcile your actions with your words?
> So I'll ask again, if you downvoted/flagged my comment thus making it less readable (factor < 1) did you act in an anti-democratic way? And if so how do you reconcile your actions with your words?
No, because I only have a limited amount of power in this regard. If I was HN the platform and I systematically silenced your comments simply on the basis that they were coming from you (and you were not rude and/or an obvious spammer), then I would be censoring you. While this is not necessarily anti-democratic since HN is not a government institution, it does get unsavoury rather quickly. And like it or not, it is more unsavoury the larger the entity (in terms of audience) doing it.
Agreed, it's not anti-democratic (I guess we're actually talking about freedom of speech) to ignore or refuse to amplify someone's opinion.
> because I only have a limited amount of power
That only changes the scale. You and a few other users are enough to completely censor someone's opinion and you do it all the time. A moderator can wipe a comment, a submission, or a user without any suspicion that they are anti-democratic. And whether it's unsavory or not is a matter of taste.
> HN is not a government institution
Indeed, private companies have no legal duty to let your voice be heard at all. It is not my right to post on HN or YouTube.
People overestimate what "freedom" means: you are allowed to say your piece but your freedom ends where someone else's freedom begins. YouTube doesn't have to promote your opinion more than you have to promote mine.
Let's put it another way. What's a good example of a "democratic" site, paper, etc. that you know of? Together we will ask them to publish something that goes against every value they hold dear to test out your theory.
Yes, but scale is important. After all, the only difference between a government and a corporation is scale. The scale of power, the scale of leverage, the scale of trust that people put in it.
I'm of the opinion that a large platform like Youtube should not be allowed to police the content hosted there completely according to its own arbitrary whim precisely because of scale.
> the only difference between a government and a corporation is scale
Far from it and I'm surprised anyone would see it this way. In a democracy the government is the people's representative looking out for all of their interests from a unique position of power. A corporation is one of the many private entities that provide a product or service. I have a say in who is leading my country but once the decision is made I have no choice but to live under it. I have no say in who is leading your company but I can always choose the services of another.
> Youtube should not be allowed
You're suggesting that size should be the difference between getting to enjoy the benefits of freedom and democracy or not. Should wealth be treated the same way? Or general influence of social media influencers with millions of people hanging on their every word? You're negotiating when and to whom should freedom and democracy apply.
Then again maybe there is a way to regulate this in a fair way. Then again even if hate speech laws exist they are more or less only enforced by platforms who don't want their image associated with that. If private entities weren't tasked with enforcing laws maybe the pressure would be relieved.
> There's no democratic principle that forces you to listen to all opinions
Not listening to an opinion, and declaring it invalid without actually addressing it, are two very different things. Reducing the visibility for others so they don't even get to make up their mind is a step beyond even that.
> To hold different opinions and to be aware that other people think differently on the same issue shields us from Godlike certainty which stops all discussion and reduces social relationships to those of an ant heap. A unanimous public opinion tends to eliminate bodily those who differ, for mass unanimity is not the result of agreement, but an expression of fanaticism and hysteria.
HN is (like Reddit) US-dominated, and with it comes that most of the users follow an absolutist version of "free speech" that is totally ridiculous for people coming from Europe who have learned from the Nazi regime where absolute limitless free speech can and inevitably will end.
Weimar Germany did not have limitless free speech. Newspapers were continually confiscated in Germany pre-1933, editors taken to court, and promulgators of hate speech arrested. [1]
It didn't work. So what's the argument for them now?
Interestingly, the American roots of free speech come from across the Atlantic. Milton's Areopagitica, J. S. Mill, and Voltaire all contributed to the American foundations on this topic. The Constitution was written in light of centuries of European powers using speech restrictions to punish dissent. After the revolution, Americans continued to be influenced by European thinkers, like Kafka and Sartre, or Émile Zola who was punished with criminal libel for exposing antisemitism. We followed with sadness and hope the emergence of samizdat, the attempt to share ideas under yet another authoritarian European regime.
These European thinkers have not always aligned with European policy. You cite Nazi Germany as the result of free speech, but it is an odd example. The Gestapo arrested people for things like "listening to the BBC" or "attending a party where someone made a stray remark about the course of the war."
I take your perspective as, "we must stop Nazis early before they come to power, and limiting public speech is an effective tool to do so."
You probably think of governments restricting speech more along the lines of Germany restricting holocaust denial, but Poland uses the same framework to restrict the acknowledgement of the Polish role during the holocaust.
The US perspective is just that inevitably you're going to get some bad governments, and they will use speech restrictions to suppress counter-speech that is necessary to bring things back to normal. And that driving speech underground isn't really an effective way to stop it.
The question for us is not, "is there some speech you would like to restrict?" But "would you like to allow your political opponents to control your speech?"
You're right that there's a difference in perspective. I know this debate can be frustrating from either side, it draws on intense conviction. But if you're passionate about it, it's worth understanding the roots of it, and knowing that Europe has not been monolithic on this issue.
Wait until the Nazis end up in power anyway and have the powers of censorship you gave them. It'll be game over then, I'm glad to be in America and know I have the right to speak out against a fascist president.
Do you think that, if the Nazis come to power and there are no censorship laws, the Nazis will just shrug and say "too bad that the government cannot change laws"?
At least if Nazis implement Nazi laws themselves, all the blame's on them. If the supposed non-Nazis implement Nazi laws that Nazis don't even have to change, that just shows that your law system was already fascist.
Does this mean we should 1. allow anything to be posted on Twitter, or 2. somehow determine whether something on twitter is a joke with perfect accuracy?
> Social media platforms need to wake up and realize they have a responsibility to society - just like "classic" media - and that is to further democratic discourse instead of helping to destroy it. Allowing lies and propaganda fabrications to spread is nothing less than destruction of democracy.
There's another word to describe what you get when the ultra-rich and powerful are the ones that decide what's true and what's not: plutarchy.
Further, I'm not so sure the classic media organizations see their responsibility the same way you do. The centralization of the media landscape resulting from the invention of radio and television was extremely pernicious: it led to the near-total control of news and information by a few people, who were able to effectively propagandize their interests to millions of Americans.
These same media organizations worked hand-in-hand with the CIA and other intelligence agencies to advance falsehoods and propaganda. We have a long and sordid public history of things like Operation Mockingbird, and it never stopped. The same situation goes on today - what do you think all these "anonymous officials" are doing, who end up being cited repeatedly by the media, even after they prove to be lying, and why do you think media organizations actively hire people like John Brennan?
The Internet has given us, for the first time in decades, the ability to read information not controlled and filtered by the news media/government establishment. It is difficult to see these efforts on the part of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms as anything other than an attempt under pressure (by the government and the classic media) to get the populace back under control and wholly informed only by government/plutarch approved information sources.
For centuries, even millenia, "fake news" and propaganda have been real problems. There were arguments at the Constitutional Convention about how 'designing men' were already spreading lies and propaganda to influence elections. Rumors and propaganda caused all sorts of problems in democratic societies throughout history, which survived anyway. Democratic discourse means yes, letting everyone speak even when it means a lot of people will be misinformed. It means it's your duty to try to convince people otherwise, even if you have to do it a thousand times or a million times. It means that you are not the possessor of ultimate truth and you don't get to dictate the truth to others. Maybe that's not the best way to run a society. Maybe we should be trying to construct Plato's Republic and penalizing people who put out what we decide is harmful. But that's not democratic.
That is exactly what is being discussed, sorry if my harsh words hurt your feels...
I cut through the BS, and careful "Politically Correct" phrasing to boil the point down to its logical ends
Shielding this around a conversation claiming you only want to end "fake news" and "hate speech" is saying you want to silence those with incorrect thoughts.
Further Comrade is a proper pronoun for people that subscribe to such an ideology, an ideology authoritarian dystopian speech controls used to punish, silence, "re-educate" people that dare to speak in a manner not approved authoritarian left ideology
> I see so only those with "correct opions" should be allowed to talk
No, exactly opposite: those who repeatedly and knowingly distribute lies to manipulate people (e.g. "crisis actor" crap) should be silenced, for they are not interested in furthering democratic discourse, but rather in destroying discourse.
"only those with correct opinions should be allowed to talk" and "people with incorrect opinions should NOT be allowed to talk" are essentially equivalent. I'm really not sure how you don't see this.
You can point to extreme examples to supply support for your Draconian position, however the road to hell is paves with good intentions.
For example I 100% oppose the Death Penalty, not because I want to protect the life of a serial killer, no it is because I want to protect the life (and rights) of the innocent guy that was not able to prove innocence to a biased jury...
Similarly I do not support Free Speech because I want to defend conspiracy theorist that talk about crisis actors, no I do so because I want to defend the guys that talking about Government spying on everyone years before Snowden released the documents, I want defend the scientists that has the balls to say the Earth is not flat when everyone else says it is.
Giving a corporation or government the power to silence anyone that they say is "wrong" is far far far too dangerous
Some Americans don't like google interfering with their discourse and they spend their time using constitutional arguments as to how ok that is or not. International people watching these arguments look on with boredom.
Meanwhile, and american company per default explicitly shapes the dialog of the entire world and people shrug.
The international angle on this is absolutely scandalous and no one cares. Every international government acknowledges the problems of the great firewall of China, but this doesn't matter?