I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), but that's different from saying that we as a society should want our private platforms to engage in such censorship and suppression.
Booting people off of platforms merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them.
COVID-19 has added the additional element of this new concept of "disinformation". The argument is seductively simple: "being exposed to this information could lead you to engage in patterns of behavior that harm society. Therefore we can conceptualize this speech as being an indirect form of violence/negligence and therefore we have a moral obligation to remove such content".
Many may disagree, but I think we need to throw out this concept of "disinformation" entirely. I don't believe in fighting "bad ideas" by suppressing them, I believe in shining a light on them. Let the truth fight for itself. (And of course now comes the classic counter-argument: that the evils of disinformation possess a virality that makes them spread far more easily than the truth, being that truth is nuanced and difficult to acquire whereas bad information is seductively simple. I won't address that argument here but personally I think it's a very dangerous way of thinking)
> I won't address that argument here but personally I think it's a very dangerous way of thinking
The problem is you’ve just said you won’t address the primary, most compelling reason to take these actions.
Assuming that “sunshine is the best disinfectant” presupposes a lot of things about society that are, in my observation, no longer true. We do not have the time, through our own actions or not, for quiet contemplation and retrospection into deep topics. We have polarized ourselves into camps of right and wrong. We are exposed to a staggering volume of information that all seems mostly the same with some slight differences but widely varying outcomes.
Your theory of how the world should work is very, almost simplistically, seductive. Woe but for the world to be like that, like the “perfectly rational actor” assumed in economic textbooks or the “perfectly smooth sphere on a frictionless plane” in physics.
In short, I am not saying that the truth will necessarily "win out" over the false. Rather I am saying - and this was my fault for not being clear enough - that I reject the notion that we should try to pick a side to suppress. Because the same part of human nature that leads to rampant spread of disinformation is the part of human nature that tries to decide what the capital-T Truth is.
So, my personal belief system - and I know how unpopular this viewpoint is, especially in current times - is just let them have at it. Remove blatant calls for violence, and nothing more. ("nothing more" should include racism and other unpopular beliefs, by the way, in case my viewpoint isn't controversial enough thus far).
So, saying "We should go out and attack $GROUP" should be removed. But saying "I think $GROUP is inferior due to highly discredited scientific-seeming reasons" should not be removed, because however wrong or distasteful it is, it's not directly advocating for violence. Similarly, something like holocaust denial or anti-vax beliefs, etc should similarly not be suppressed.
Again, I know I'm probably in the minority here, but I hope that helps you understand my thoughts on these issues.
So, so far I haven't seen anyone on here take the strong free speech absolutist position -- that nothing should be censored ever, including calls to violence. I've seen several comments that basically say "don't censor in general, but do remove calls to violence," so that seems like it's not a controversial opinion at least in this discussion.
Why are calls to violence bad, but spreading misinformation about a pandemic (whether it's that it is a hoax, that it is not transmissible, or that you can cure it by drinking bleach) is okay?
It seems to me that, if you're saying calls to violence can be censored because they will inspire people to act badly, then you've crossed the line into saying people can't be trusted to act appropriately.
Why ban that, but not misinformation about the pandemic?
>Why ban that, but not misinformation about the pandemic?
Wearing Mask a few months ago was misinformation by many. Which most of the world finally revert course later but still not agreed by WHO.
So who is to define what is "misinformation"?
For every single downvote I got on HN for stating Hong Kong got it right with mask in March, do I get a brownie point for every single US citizen that is wearing a mask now?
I dont have an answer, but I am leaning towards the same thinking as OP. Because everything I said right now is considered as misinformation by the Hong Kong government. Personally I think "misinformation" is a pandora box that should never be opened / used.
>Why are calls to violence bad, but spreading misinformation about a pandemic
How do you know what is 'misinformation' ? WHO claimed that face masks were worthless, now you are forced to wear them in lots of places. WHO also claimed that there was no human to human transmission of COVID-19, etc.
The powers that be will not stop spreading misinformation when it suits them, they just want no one to be able to question it. The right to question is something we can't give up just to avoid bad actors.
It looks like you've been caught-up in misinformation as well, as the WHO never said that masks were "worthless" nor that there was "no" human-to-human transmission. Those are distortions of more nuanced and qualified statements by the WHO. You can argue that these more nuanced statements were still harmful, but you're pushing misinformation by claiming the WHO said what you merely think they said.
Claim what you want, but on Jan 14 the WHO stated the following "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳."[0]
The nuance is that they were repeating Chinese propaganda.
I don't know how to define what is "misinformation" but I could surely call out a couple examples. Maybe we can figure out what makes them misinformation.
1) 5G causes COVID-19
2) COVID-19 doesn't exist, i.e. it's all a hoax
3) Aquarium cleaning solution is a cure for COVID
I don't know what makes those different from "masks are worthless" but they seem qualitatively different. Maybe for a couple of reasons.
Maybe for #1, there's no plausible mechanism of action linking 5G and covid. But the people claim there is! Using a nested series of faulty reasoning and unreproduceable evidence to back it up.
Maybe for #2, there's no observable evidence that it's a hoax, i.e. people claiming otherwise are doing so with no supporting evidence, only reasoning that they (subjectively) do not trust government or media, therefore their claim is supportable.
But I don't know. I don't think the answer is that it's unknowable (which you may or may not have been getting at).
For me misinformation as a characteristic is a big umbrella, that the discretion for it depends on the measurer. Which makes it an unreliable characteristic to censor content by.
As an example of things that can follow into the misinformation umbrella parody, humour, good/bad science, good/bad journalism, misinterpretation of intent, paranormal reports, religion.
It done for the greater good. People have done surgeries in their garage, I can't believe it's from lack of credible information, and that making a general policy from the exception is a sign of a bad design.
They certainly were spreading it on purpose. What's unknown is whether they knew it was misinformation at the time. Perhaps they thought this was a good way to manage supply shocks and keep masks flowing to medical workers. Or perhaps they truly thought masks were useless. That's hard to believe, but not impossible.
But they wouldn't have backed off as quickly without pushback from others taking the opposite position that masks were critical. And at the time, that was contrary to the officially espoused position by both CDC and WHO. Even now WHO haven't fully reversed course, they have only stopped anti-recommending face masks as hard.
Banning spreading this countervailing opinion would have been a grave mistake.
> In light of this new evidence, CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.
> Rather I am saying - and this was my fault for not being clear enough - that I reject the notion that we should try to pick a side to suppress. Because the same part of human nature that leads to rampant spread of disinformation is the part of human nature that tries to decide what the capital-T Truth is.
Yes, we really can't have it both ways. Either we have free speech for everyone, or we have censorship. There are exceptions, of course: calls to violence, libel against non-public people, and so on. And yes, also inciting panic by crying "fire" falsely in public places. But I believe that's distinguishable from spreading "fake news".
The problem with censorship is needing to trust censors. And even if we have honest censors, how do we know what the "truth" is? Do we trust "authorities"? That seems iffy, given how often we've learned that they've been dishonest or just plain wrong.
Also, authoritarians always start with the edge cases. And then they widen the scope. By the time your position -- which always seemed so reasonable -- becomes unacceptable, it's too late.
Isn't spreading dangerously false information about a viral pandemic similar to shouting "fire" in a theatre? I'm not sure it's always so easy to distinguish that actively dangerous conduct from fake news.
The "shouting 'fire' in a theatre" meme comes from a case where the Supreme Court used the Espionage Act to restrict speech because the speech in question didn't sufficiently support entering into a World War and advocated against the draft.
Not exactly the best way to convince people that restricting speech is actually good.
The fact that you need to explain that sort of demonstrates that it isn't relevant to the use of the argument. Good arguments can come from poor sources.
Most people agree that shouting fire in a crowded theatre is the sort of speech which should be restricted, wherever the argument came from.
All the more reason to not silence cranks and conspiracy theorists.
From John Stuart Mill's On Liberty:
> But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
"the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries."
By far the most dangerous and most widely spread "information" in this pandemic has come from the same authorities that are being allowed to decide what is so-called correct and what needs to be censored. The only check on their extremism and self-centred attention seeking has come from the grassroots blogging and video making community - those same people YouTube (really I suspect, Wojcicki) is trying to wipe out.
OK, so I admit that Icke's thing about 5G and COVID-19 is batshit insane. I truly can't imagine how someone could argue that in good faith. He must be trolling, doing it for the lulz.
But still, that's arguably distinguishable from creating a panic by shouting "fire" in a crowded theater that's undoubtedly not burning. In that crowded theater, it's the stampede that gets people killed in the moment. I do see the analogy to Internet meme explosions. But connections between actions and consequences are weaker and slower enough.
Icke is one of, if not the, originator of the theories of shapeshifting reptilians controlling society. His own descriptions of himself coincide strongly with paranoid schizophrenia.
Calls for violance can be, and are, very subtile. Just removing open calls for violance wouldn't change a bit, propaganda doesn't work that way. Nor does psychology. So in the end, both of your examples about $Group can lead to violance against that group.
Yes, but I think trying to map out indirect violence gets into very dangerous territory. So, that's why I draw the line at "directly" advocating violence.
Of course, the lines as always get blurry. To use a random example that comes to mind, when Kathy Griffin posted the severed head of Trump - was that a direct call to violence? That's a tough one to answer. My first intuition is that it does cross the line, but I could very easily see an argument that it's not.
So unfortunately there will always be that difficulty, unless we committed to an absolutist position of not removing ANY speech. I drink a lot of the kool-aid, and even I don't go that far.
So we should expect schools to teach our schools that the earth is flat, and the earth is round, and hope the kids pick the right option? Or where exactly do you draw the line in "we shouldn't suppress speech, just because it's provably false?"
Just saw this comment. Saying "don't censor expression of opinions on online platforms" is not saying "teach creationism" in schools, nor "teach that the earth is flat".
In other words I think that's very much a red herring.
I agree anti Vaxers are ridiculous. But just to play devils advocate. What if there ever was a dangerous vaccine out there, wouldn’t we want people to be able to speak out?
Honestly I don’t have any solutions. I don’t like either option.
Right. In general contradiction arises when we try to prevent people from doing stupid things. It becomes very difficult to maintain a logically consistent view on what's okay to censor and what's not.
Most of us agree anti-vaxxers are ill-informed and that adopting their beliefs causes people to engage in patterns of behavior (avoiding vaccines) that are not in what we think is their best interest.
What about other beliefs? If someone posts a video saying that they don't think seatbelts are effective in preventing injuries during car crashes, should they be suppressed?
What about someone who claims that vaping is safe and popularizes the practice? Do we ban that?
It's easy to pick a few almost-universally hated groups and rally against them: racists, anti-vaxxers, flat earthers. Few things are that cut-and-dry. And watching the widespread rise of "benevolent censorship" wrt COVID-19 has really shown me how far we can take the idea of "protect people from information that could harm them".
For example, I recently submitted a highly controversial 7500+ word blog post that advocated for ending lockdown in the US. I got some matters of scientific fact wrong (and have since addressed or am currently working on addressing those), i.e. things like accounting for the phenomenom of "overshoot". Some sections probably did not give a perfectly fair view of "each side" and could be/were criticized as being cherry-picked. And I think I got a lot of things very right. I've now had 9 people e-mail me in the last 24 hours saying that they tried to share my post on Facebook/Messenger and that the entire domain is now blocked for violating the community guidelines. Is that something worth banning? It advocates for a position that could easily be argued will lead to death, and therefore reading it could kill people. So it's a very easy argument to make, if you take the position that we should suppress "harmful" information.
As I said at the start of this thread, I basically reject the entire concept of "disinformation" for that reason; it inevitably gets used to suppress even the most good-faith and well-researched (or in my case, somewhat-well-researched :P) arguments. Therefore I think the entire concept is inherently dangerous to a free society.
Okay, that's enough rambling for one night. I'll let everyone else duke it out :)
Furthermore, there is zero guarantee that the censors won't eventually develop a taste for antivaxxing themselves, and now any information about potential benefits of vaccines is actively suppressed.
There indeed were a few dangerous vaccines, about three generations ago. That's exactly why we have the elaborate clinical trial system today: they stop potentially unsafe vaccines all the time. A large fraction of the COVID vaccines might go this way. Nobody is against banning unsafe vaccines, but some are for banning people from spreading baseless, conspiratorial anti-vax bullshit.
There have been issues more recently with vaccine safety. Or at least, there were enough lawsuits to start frightening off vaccine manufacturers. Since 1986, however, they've been insulated from lawsuits under federal law:[0]
> The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, ..., as amended, created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), a no-fault alternative to the traditional tort system. It provides compensation to people found to be injured by certain vaccines. Even in cases in which such a finding is not made, petitioners may receive compensation through a settlement.
> The VICP was established after lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers and healthcare providers threatened to cause vaccine shortages and reduce vaccination rates. The Program began accepting petitions (also called claims) in 1988.
The current anti-vaccination movement began largely over concern that thiomersal preservative in many childhood vaccines was causing autism. Although multiple epidemiological studies indicated that there was no appreciable risk, "the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) asked vaccine makers to remove thiomersal from vaccines as quickly as possible as a precautionary measure", and it was ~gone by 2001.[1]
A business decision to avoid risk of costly litigation is not at all the same as actual harm. If you have any information on actual harm, please share it. Otherwise, please leave your FUD at the door.
So you don't believe that people ought to have the right to sue when injured?
Also, calling stuff "FUD" is a classic strategy to escape responsibility. For example, the tobacco industry claimed that lung cancer risk was FUD for decades. Other examples include groundwater pollution, asbestos, and lead paint.
Not to mention human overpopulation. Which is arguably the root cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with HIV and Ebola, and likely more to come. And of course global climate change, which may well kick serious ass in coming decades.
The irony with your comment is that it's the tobacco industry which started (and is still significantly funding) the whole anti science/evidence campaigns. In fact the whole antivax movement is part of a big FUD campaign. So historically these campaigns have almost always come from a certain direction to discredit established scientific evidence. The current antilockdown campaigns come from the same corner/often the same people so yes people are sceptical about them, I'm sorry that you got banned for your "well reasoned" post.
Maybe the solution is a law that if someone posts/airs clearly wrong facts. Or if someone's theories/facts... Get later disproven they need to post/air a correction at the same time at least as long (maybe better twice as long) and give it as much prominence. Maybe then outlets would be more careful about posting obvious untruths.
Huh. I didn't know that, and I'd appreciate references.
I am aware that the ad agency behind the "tobacco doesn't cause cancer" campaign got into the "lead paint is safe" and other pro-industry campaigns, including the climate change contrarians. And the Tea Party. Funded by folks like the Koch brothers.
> Maybe then outlets would be more careful about posting obvious untruths.
That's a very slippery slope. As I've said before, you may be surprised when you become the pariah.
I would absolutely agree that those who are harmed need adequate remedies under the law. I also know that vaccines provide an immense public benefit. If the specifics of the tort system were causing companies to exit the vaccine business (and they were) , that's certainly something the government ought to step in to fix. However, that doesn't mean there were "issues with safety" as you claim. The implications in your comment are actively harmful to the public health.
If you read the background for that law, you'll find that people were in fact being injured by vaccines. And some still are. Just as virtually all medicines injure some people. Because there's great variability in responses.
The law didn't get enacted just to prevent lawsuits, but also to compensate those who were injured.
> The implications in your comment are actively harmful to the public health.
That way lies totalitarianism.
For example, there's considerable pressure in many countries to outlaw secure end-to-end encryption. To protect against terrorists, child abusers, and other criminals.
So how would we feel if support for secure end-to-end encryption were censored in social media?
Yes, vaccines have side effects, just as any other medication or treatment does. Nobody has claimed otherwise.
The reason your comment is harmful is because you make implications that have no basis in evidence, but which serve to advance dubious claims accepted by a small but growing and very vocal group of antivaxxers that have had a clear negative impact on our society.
If you have some new evidence or analysis to add, please add it. If all you have is fear, uncertainty, and doubt, please don't throw gasoline on this fire.
Well, I think that you're overreacting. Considering risks is important. We've suffered too much from denial. Pollution of groundwater. Fallout from nuclear weapons testing. Toxic chemicals in food packaging. And I could easily come up with another dozen examples.
> The reason your comment is harmful is because you make implications that have no basis in evidence, ...
That's exactly what attorneys for polluters always say. There's this thing called the precautionary principle. So you act when damage is possible, long before there's conclusive evidence.
Edit: If you like, I can probably find defendants' briefs and expert reports from landmark cases, asserting that plaintiffs have provided insufficient evidence of causation to support their claims.
Here's the thing: either you're simply naive to the tactics of anti-vaxxers and unaware that your comments play into their hand, or you're actively advancing their interests.
Yes, it's important to consider the risks of any medical treatment. Your comments make it seem like that hasn't been done, as if doctors and public health officials are just pretending that side effects don't exist. That's simply untrue -- rigorous clinical trials and careful reporting mean that modern vaccines are really quite safe. When you lucidly compare the incidence of side effects against the impact of contracting illnesses that vaccines prevent, there is only one reasonable position to take.
Your initial comments about thiomersal are pure FUD. You acknowledge that there's not real medical concern there, but choose to bring it up anyway? What could your motivation possibly be? If you'd like to discuss it objectively, here's how to do it: Someone with a financial interest who is no longer allowed to practice medicine falsified data in an effort to mislead the public about a supposed danger of a preservative in vaccines. Many people siezed onto that lie, despite the clear evidence that it was flawed, and continue to espouse it, causing lasting damage to society.
> So you act when damage is possible, long before there's conclusive evidence.
The damage that's real here is the damage caused by anti-vaxxers. That's actual damage that's caused harm to real people in the real world. Your comments help advance that agenda, which is why they are harmful.
I completely agree. For the simple fact that no human or organisation can be trusted with the power to silence anyone or any group.
I Think this should apply to functional social monopolys as well. YouTube/facebook/instagram etc shouldn't be allowed to remove content they deem untrue.
If HN moderators started censoring posts because they disagreed with them, or thought the ideas were "too dangerous" (rather than just because they were spam) then yeah people would start complaining about it.
I don't think HN has a monopoly on discussion between people with (slightly) above-average critical thinking skills. Many sub-reddits fit that definition as well.
I don't follow how this would be impossible to enforce. The person whose content on youtube is removed for example is going to complain. It's dead simple to slap youtube with a couple million dollar fine for such things.
> We do not have the time, through our own actions or not, for quiet contemplation and retrospection into deep topics.
This is a problem, but how does censorship solve it? You would in fact need to solve that problem for all ideas in order to correctly know what to censor, which nobody has time to do, hence the problem.
> We have polarized ourselves into camps of right and wrong.
This is exactly what the censorship makes worse. You say "not here, go somewhere else" to anyone who disagrees and everyone who disagrees is separated, so that each camp has no exposure to the other side's arguments and whoever is wrong will remain so.
> We are exposed to a staggering volume of information that all seems mostly the same with some slight differences but widely varying outcomes.
The world is complicated. Not everybody is going to understand everything. That isn't possible, but it isn't required. What you need are two things.
One is free and open debate, so that the people who choose to allocate their time to a given specific topic enough to come to an accurate conclusion on that topic are free to do so.
And the other is trusted thought leaders who consult a variety of domain experts on a given topic to determine the consensus of the experts and relay it to all of the people who don't have time to look at the specific details on that specific topic. This is what has completely imploded. The news media has lost their credibility by explicitly abandoning even the pretense of impartiality and chasing clickbait nonsense for ratings, so nobody trusts them anymore. As it should be when they're publishing things like that.
But you either do the research yourself (which nobody has time to do for everything) or you trust somebody else to do it for you. So now people need to figure out who they can trust to distill the informed consensus. But you don't do that by censoring the debate, you do it by being so consistently right that people begin to trust you over the lies of the blaring partisans. That doesn't come from force, it comes from hard work, which nobody seems willing to do anymore, which is why everything is messed up.
> And the other is trusted thought leaders who consult a variety of domain experts on a given topic to determine the consensus of the experts and relay it to all of the people who don't have time to look at the specific details on that specific topic. This is what has completely imploded. The news media has lost their credibility by explicitly abandoning even the pretense of impartiality and chasing clickbait nonsense for ratings, so nobody trusts them anymore. As it should be when they're publishing things like that.
I would argue that this assessment quite strongly examplifies the whole issue. I think that we have seen an unprecedented campaign to propagate the belief that the "mainstream media" is untrustworthy. And that campaign is very clearly politically motivated (funnily enough the most partisan of the big news networks portraits itself as the the upholder of truth, a misinformation campaign itself), and is very strongly based on misinformation and providing easy answers... Largely financed by an ideological opposition to government intervention and fueled by propaganda against global warming action
The biggest issue is that the open debate is vulnerable to astroturfing with corporate influence and financial backing, which can completely drown out others and turn public opinion, through sheer exposure.
And when it comes to subjects like human rights, there is a definite right and wrong, not a "truth in the middle".
> The biggest issue is that the open debate is vulnerable to astroturfing with corporate influence and financial backing, which can completely drown out others and turn public opinion, through sheer exposure.
Meh. Money buys speech has been a thing since day zero. If anything the internet has made this problem smaller because you don't have to buy a TV station to publish video anymore. Then the corporate propaganda isn't the only thing people see, which allows them to see it for what it is, which makes them think this is some kind of novel problem never previously encountered, when it's really a novel solution that makes the old and pervasive problem much more conspicuous through contrast.
You also have to see the irony in suggesting that corporations decide what people can see in order to protect us from corporations influencing the public debate.
> And when it comes to subjects like human rights, there is a definite right and wrong, not a "truth in the middle".
That would be really convenient, but it's still as complicated as anything. There is a truth but it isn't a simple truth and that means getting it right is hard work.
Uncle Google doesn't have a magic wand of righteousness that lets them tell right from wrong over everybody else in the world.
The "marketplace of ideas" clearly doesn't work for the betterment of mankind and the world. Corporate interests throw vast amounts of money into astroturf campaigns, creating propaganda and misinformation, in order to discredit their opponents, who do not have the same access to funds and influence. Google, FB et.al. are part of the problem, with their deep influences in politics. They ban the token nutjob like Icke ever so often, so they can claim they're "doing something", meanwhile their algorithms continue to funnel people from completely ordinary videos to conspiracy theories and virulent content. It's disturbing how quickly this happens on a brand-new profile.
Misinformation spreads like wildfire because it doesn't need fact checks, it doesn't need to be based on research. As long as you can get enough spread, you can get a large number of people to believe anything, simply because they heard it from someone. People are not rational actors.
Witness the demonization of pipeline protestors, people who protest the clear-cutting of forests, people who argue for trans rights. They upset the corporate-run status quo, so they are suppressed by the authorities, who act on the whims of the rich and powerful.
Witness the rise of the alt-right, the so-called "intellectual dark web" and the influence of sites like 4chan and 8chan.
Armed people barging into governmental buildings, and basically being allowed to do so almost unimpeded by police, photo ops for the media, a show of force for their allies. I've seen them ridiculed as yokels, but it didn't matter. What matters is visibility and the "look at what we can do without being stopped" factor.
Imagine what would have happened if BLM, a group of Muslims or any left-wing group had tried to do the same thing. Think Kent State and the National Guard.
The message is clear: Act against capitalism and the powers that be and you will be suppressed, by unlimited force if necessary
It's incredibly unlikely you'll agree with the powers that be on every issue, so you'll find yourself deplatformed, and unable to speak out against injustice. As you mentioned, you feel that the powers that be are suppressing certain ideas. If you want censorship, guess who will be in charge of deciding what to censor.
Sure, astroturfing and other misinformation campaigns can happen if speech is truly free, but the alternative is far worse. With free speech, if your ideas have merit then at least there is a chance they will be recognized and your audience can grow. With complete censorship, you have no chance at all. Free speech is the least bad of these two options.
"The alternative is far worse", with us currently being in a state of world politics where whoever shouts the loudest on social media gets to set the agenda.
Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right. No ifs or buts about that.
In the same breath, it is very important to realize that your freedom of speech does not absolve you from responsibility for what you say. It does not obligate others to facilitate your speech, it does not entitle you to any platform you wish, and it does not obligate anyone to listen to you.
Similarly to the second amendment, which enshrines your right to own weapons (being the foundation of a well-regulated militia and so on) does not obligate anyone to provide you with weapons, nor the facilities to train with and maintain weapons, and it certainly doesn't require anyone to admit your onto their property if you are currently holding any weapons.
I agree with what you say here. Freedom of speech does not obligate YouTube to give anyone a platform, as they are a private entity. It does not obligate anyone to listen to you. What the top level comment is saying though, is that just because there is no legal requirement, doesn't mean we can't "ask nicely" or otherwise strive towards the idea that the predominant video platform refrain from censorship.
There is no legal obligation for YouTube to listen to us, but there is no reason we can't ask for less censorship. If they say no, then they are well within their rights, but we don't have to be happy about it either. Just because we can't legally force change doesn't mean we must abandon the cause. The most optimistic scenario would be if public sentiment changes enough such that YouTube feels they are being seen as unfair and it is damaging to their reputation/bottom line, perhaps we may see a change in their censorship policies. This is an ideal to strive for, and uses social/economic pressure as opposed to legal pressure. It is like your obligation to be a helpful neighbor or to be a caring friend. It's not by force of law, but people are expected to do it because it's "the right thing to do." In the same way, when you're the predominant video platform on the internet, the right thing to do is not to censor opinions you disagree with.
I think sponsored posts and conflicts of interest on social media or blogs are meant to be disclosed based on some law by the FTC, at least in the USA?
Does that apply to astroturfed reddit comments etc? I don't see why it shouldn't. Of course it's a bit harder to prove, but it's not always impossible.
Extremely paraphrasing, ryankemper's original comment was something like "We shouldn't let private companies decide who to boot off. Besides, booting them off doesn't work anyway".
Then techsupporter said something like "actually, booting them off does work".
Finally, paraphrasing your comment, "so you're saying you should let private companies decide?" No, that is clearly not what techsupporter's comment meant.
It's ok to disagree with the second half of that first comment ("booting them off doesn't work") without expressing an opinion on the first half. In fact the way the original comment ties together those two things has has led to the quagmire of crossed arguments you're seeing in these comments, so untying them is quite important.
If a majority of the population was using HN, then we’d be getting closer to an apples to apples comparison. The crux of the issue includes Google’s reach.
Does it matter if the majority is using it or not? The same concept of freedom of speech should matter. And HN is one of the largest tech forums on the internet; making it effectively the 'Youtube' of tech forums.
So given HN's expansive reach, why do you think it deserves to be excluded from the concept of being a provider? Why shouldn't it be forced to house all content?
Deplatforming has proven highly effective at preventing bad actors from continuing to spread misinformation on Reddit and other social media sites [1]. I support free speech in principle, but internet platforms are such a powerful megaphone for spreading misinformation, the likes of which history has never seen, that platform owners may feel ethically obligated to act against those who would misuse their systems to cause global societal harm.
Some misinformation is just unambiguously harmful and so profoundly incorrect that no reasonable person could see stopping it as a slippery slope of free speech. For example, the misinformation being proliferated by Icke, that 5G spreads coronavirus and that people should destroy 5G towers. People actually went out and set 5G towers alight in response to Icke's posts [2]. It's quite reasonable that Youtube or any other social media platform would not want to be responsible for disseminating information to leads to real-life crimes.
Not defending him, nor do I believe him, but I watched a brief portion of the London Real livestream interview last night and he said that 5G provokes symptoms similar to that of COVID-19, not that 5G spreads Coronavirus.
He's said a lot of bullshit in a lot of different venues. I did a quick search and found a long, rambling article [1] on his website about how coronavirus and 5G are linked. He sums his position up at the end with
> The evidence that COVID-19 is a bioweapon is overwhelming – and so is the evidence that 5G is involved to either cause the flu-like symptoms/pneumonia people have been experiencing, and/or to exacerbate the virulity of the virus by weakening people’s immune systems and subjecting them to pulsed waves of EMF to open up their skin to foreign DNA fragments (including viruses).
So he's been saying both that 5G causes an illness that is mistaken for COVID-19 and that 5G spreads coronavirus.
This board regularly ‘censors’ people who break the rules. It’s the price of having a reasonably nice board to post on. There’s a difference between censorship and punishing bad behavior.
If I'm interested in content not on HN, I'll find it elsewhere. Why is it any different for YouTube? Now, if you'd said to me that Google doesn't prioritize other content, I'd argue that those wanting to talk about other content always have smaller forums to do it in, they just might be more local or viral in other ways. To me it's the difference between national broadcast TV "I'll know it's wrong when I see it," and the ability to post flyers or posters in a community. One is local and the other is wide-reaching.
There is, I suppose, another alternative. If we want to promote fringe ideas, we should make it easier to organize and elect local candidates, abolish "first-past-the-post" voting systems that encourage a two-party system, and so on.
But currently scientific reasoning is an accepted system of analysis for evidence-based decisions, and most politicians rely on it in addition to emotional intelligence to alter and guide their behaviour and decisions, even as they generally do whatever the person with the deepest pockets says to do, whether because that person sponsors scientific research or conducts surveys and campaigns to sway public opinion.
The issue I have is that fringe opinion, like this, would reject cause-and-effect reasoning and evidence to rely almost entirely on emotions instead. And because it's controversial, people click on it and watch it and wonder about it. When there's no actual evidence to it.
We used to and probably still do, have courses in grade/high school on media literacy, or not believing everything you see on TV. We routinely, as an HN community, encourage reading source materials and deciding for ourselves. But we're a small community, and for YouTube, it's easier to say "it's not our problem any longer" than it is to try and provide counterpoints to the material.
There's a serious risk to YouTube to not pull this down, because of how the feedback loop of their algorithms will encourage folks who like this to watch other fringe videos, until eventually they think all of YouTube, or the world, thinks the same way as these commentators. It's easier in the short term to pull down the content than to change how the algorithms work to make them somehow less relevant. And back to my original point, folks who want this content, they will find it, regardless of what platform it's on.
Have you found any new blogs or websites you visit on a frequent basis in the last 3 months? You can’t discover the voice of the little guy, there’s too much noise.
I’m probably not the best target audience as yes, I have. I use an RSS reader and manually curate a list of blogs to follow and podcasts to listen to, in addition to, yes, YouTube playlists I subscribe to as well. I even support content authors directly on Patreon. But not all good content is on YouTube — I’ve actually purchased content on Vimeo, for example, and have bookmarked a number of non-YouTube content sources, some of which are aggregators but some of which aren’t. How do you find it? Same way you always did... by following links, subscribing to email lists, searching Google with plus signs, err double quotes, and so on. Don’t get me wrong, YouTube is “easy” but sometimes it’s impossible to find that video you were watching the other day (if you have history disabled). As I said before, though, the problem is some folks want a worldwide platform to broadcast their ideas, no audience or community necessary. I think it’s just fine for such an audience to have content moderation strings attached. Nothing’s free, not even the soap box. If you really want an audience, work for it, and if you just want clicks in exchange for ad dollars, it shouldn’t be at the detriment of what’s considered acceptable by society. And yes, that might, indeed, mean censorship, but as pointed out, that’s the compromise we made for broadcast radio, TV and to some degree, newspapers. Any platform with enough viewers seems to inevitably become a cesspool without community reinforcement and guidelines. Not to say there shouldn’t be choices of platform, I don’t think ISPs or AWS should be banning individuals from the Internet, that’s something local police and judicial systems can determine. But if anything I’d say the opposite, the more unknown something is, the less culturally censored it should be, the more famous, the more cautious we should be, as a society... I don’t want to support regimes but I do support political systems and political discourse in general, and I think societal norms eventually change as needed, they have in the past without such widespread individual broadcasting platforms...
> I support free speech in principle, but internet platforms are such a powerful megaphone for spreading misinformation, the likes of which history has never seen
This analogy is misleading, because it does not make it clear that in this situation, everyone has a megaphone.
> Booting people off of platforms merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them.
Ok, except that you 1) just made this up from whole cloth and 2) have missed the point of deplatforming entirely. Deplatforming trashbags reduces their reach. It doesn't need to change their minds. The trashbag is one person. The gullible are many.
Reach is key, IMHO. Freedom of speech, already a very different thing in the US and Europe for example, is about being allowed to say what you want, with certain country specific restrictions. It doesn't mean to be granted access to biggest platforms with the highest reach out there to spread your opinion. Which is fine, as far as I am concerned.
If you are to just claim that someone made something up, you must yourself raise the standard and provide a scientific or otherwise evidential source. And Vice ain't it.
> If you are to just claim that someone made something up, you must yourself raise the standard and provide a scientific or otherwise evidential source.
Vice in this article links to evidential sources while summarizing the findings. You should bother reading it and what it links to.
ALSO, and this is a bug fucking also, that's not how the burden of evidence for claims works! You just argued against falsifiability! OP is responsible for providing evidence for their own made up claim!
I was responding to you, not the OP. Most statements on HN are not immediately backed by sources, as this is not a scientific forum. But if you are just gonna tell someone they are full of shit, you should have some solid data behind it rather than a questionable clickbait rag that may or may not be cherry picking and massaging its own sources.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” - Hitchens's razor.
The burden of proof is always on the person making an assertion or proposition. When they do not provide proof of their claim, and another person calls it "full of shit", it is not valid to shift the burden of proof onto them to disprove the original claim.
And there's a great reason for this - the bullshit asymmetry principle: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
Private institutions should be bound by the first amendment once they've reached a critical mass. The reason I say this is that, if a small number of entities control the flow of information, and they get away with picking and choosing who has the opportunity to be heard, then the first amendment is effectively made meaningless. I want to be able to choose what comments to allow on my block and, at the same time, I want to be able to express myself on a prominent platform in a way that may or may not offend the powers that be.
Big friendly looking corporations like Google shouldn't be used as proxies for the government to bypass the rights of Americans(or anyone for that matter). For whatever reason, people see corporations as being different from governments. What is a government but a corporation that owns land? What is a corporation but a form of government? They're quick to should about the importance of dissent, telling the government what it cannot do to our rights, yet corporations get a free pass when they are on the right side and hand out free goodies.
Beyond the likeness of corporations to governments, big corporate censorship should be opposed on the grounds of principle. America and other countries are founded on the principle of freedom of speech, among other things such as the concept that all "men" are created equal. We don't allow businesses to discriminate people by their race, color, sex, or religion because of that principle. Why then can we not apply the principle of freedom of speech to Silicon Valley and Big Media?
It's pretty frightening that the same people who told me how brilliant Nineteen Eighty-Four is(I found it the least convincing of dystopian warnings I've read), easily fall into the trap of believing that we desperately need a centralized Ministry of Truth. In the last year I've been realizing that Nineteen Eighty-Four is more realistic than I had believed.
It’s kind of the same argument for your water company. There’s only one company in town, are they allowed to deny you water service without some sort of published process with oversight?
If they did so unfairly, there'd be hell for them to pay.
As you say, they are fundamentally the same argument, except for one thing.
A water company that decided to cut off water to people that its CEO doesn't like would, in short order, have to face both political scrutiny and the proverbial torches and pitchforks, if you will; unlike speech, if the water goes away, people start dying or they are forced to leave.
Speech is necessary, but it's cheap as dirt, and most people don't have a lot to say in the first place. If the speech started going away, even in ways that are fundamentally unfair or flaunt the ideals of the country, not enough people would make a fuss about it. You won't die without speech. It can be comfortable to live without speech, or freedom of speech, anyway.
Otherwise, the argument is the same and, in either case, regulation and the pissed-offedness of the little guy could change the outcome. Such is less likely in the case of speech.
How do you, though, actually decide in a reasonable and objective fashion who’s big enough to warrant being held to a different standard than others?
How do you really quantify that in a way that is objective and obvious
Look at the rise of tiktok. On one hand at least where I live they had almost no mindshare but in the past 2 months now they do, and they’re growing in user count. Should they meet the same threshold as YouTube now? Instagram?
This feels intractable to me, I don’t have a good answer to this problem. Not to mention it could easily become a gating mechanism to competition
Also, how do you determine what information is harmful? Some of it feels obvious, but some of it not so much
I don't actually know. At some point, we need to figure out how to address that question. I think it can be addressed... I just don't have a good idea, and I don't know that anyone does. But we've been kicking that can down the road for ages.
Work out the audience share of a service, then work out the audience share of its nearest competitor/competitors. If the former is twice/four times/whatever as high as the latter, then it's counted as a de facto monopoly and regulated.
So YouTube's got 74.08% of the market and Vimeo has 18.02%[1], and the former is definitely twice or four times more than the latter, so regulate the former.
Corporations now spin off new companies so that they hover just below that arbitrary number that turns them into a public space. Instead of YouTube, we have YouTube, MeTube, ITube and UsTube.
We're now back to square one, because those companies hover below said number and advertisers control what content is allowed on said sites. All of those individual companies ban 5G conspiracy theories because it's bad for business. Next step?
Subdividing your corporation isn't a right just like mergers this can be disallowed. As with any fraud laws intentionally trying to avoid it can be made illegal.
Yet when a platform like YouTube deletes accounts and publicly announces the censoring of information that doesn't conform with the Ministry of Information(aka the World Health Organization), there's no mystery that they're violating people's rights.
Not promoting the video in their algorithm would basically accomplish the same functional difference as censorship. Ditto for any platforms that can demote content from their ranking.
Like I said, I [mostly] agree. However, there's precedence that publishers be free to pick and choose the content that they publish. Even if it isn't fair, this is a concept that's already existed at various scales for hundreds of years. To single out YouTube for censorship-by-curation would be much more difficult than to guard against them for blatant abuses.
I'll give you an analogy. In America, businesses can't pick and choose people on the basis of their skin color or their sex. Obviously, discrimination in hiring still exists to some degree, but because it's covert or the result of implicit biases, there's a limited number of things you can do to address that discrimination. On the other hand, if the PR for a fast food chain goes on TV and says that the company only hires white people, that's unambiguous and has no conflict with the rights of the corporation.
Perhaps someone should analyse and pop such filter bubbles instead. We all know US gov is incapable going to bathroom by their own, so perhaps EU could step in and require platforms to publish such filter bubbles. I'm fairly sure most platforms actually curate the bubbles already.
IMHO EU should work on disinformation harm reduction strategy. Similarly how some members deal with drug addicts - contact people infected with bullshit and try to set them straight. I guess that (public mental health) would sound too dystopian for HN crowd.
This thread is the first time I've heard someone makes this argument. It resonates with an idea that I've had for years, since the first time someone pointed out that an internet forum is not bound by the first amendment. Yes. But. There's something there that is problematic at scale. Thanks for taking the trouble of bringing this debate forward.
>Private institutions should be bound by the first amendment once they've reached a critical mass.
That would be impossible, since the First Amendment as written explicitly only applies to Congress, and it restricts Congress' ability to pass laws, which is something private institutions don't actually have the power to do anyway.
Then something has to change, because this situation won't become more tenable going forward. Platforms like YouTube will only continue to grow and obtain power. We either need a bill of rights against these corporations or leverage to get them to comply.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
> In Comments
> 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.
These guidelines seem like a private corporation censoring content. Are platform guidelines like these also an example of censorship?
To me, these guidelines shape the content and quality of discussions of the community, but also it's one of the reasons why it's a highly effective community. I don't see why YouTube cannot do the same.
Yes, as the parent mentions, YouTube can do the same kind of content curation from a legal point of view. The question is whether YouTube is a platform where we should advocate for less censorship/more freedom. I think that since YouTube is a general platform and that no serious alternatives exist, we should advocate for less censorship.
YouTube is different from Hacker News because YouTube is more of a general platform (not focused on a particular topic). In contrast with Hacker News, less censorship on YouTube would not significantly degrade the experience. You can still go subscribe to the channels you like and be completely unaware of the content you don't want to see. On Hacker News, the whole point is that it is focused on particular subjects (I suppose it would be analogous to a curated list of YouTube channels), and its rules keep it that way.
Another factor to consider is what alternatives exist. As far as I know, YouTube is the only serious option at the moment for general video content. YouTube content includes news and politics, and many people use it as their primary source of information. No matter what your politics are, they will likely differ from Google's in some way, and if YouTube begins to aggressively censor opinions they disagree with, you'll find yourself without a platform since no serious alternatives exist.
For one, Facebook's trying to give YouTube a run for their money. There's an entire tab in their mobile app dedicated to small bite-size videos like are watched on YouTube, and Facebook Live is all about connecting small video producers directly to their audiences. Outside of that, there are lesser known sites. Vimeo, Metacafe, Dailymotion, Twitch, Veoh. YouTube has the brand recognition, but simply hosting video online isn't that hard. It's way harder if you have to build your own colo though.
For the casual viewer, YouTube has unbeatable brand recognition, and if I was trying to build an audience for a mainstream idea, that's the obvious place. However, for dedicated fans of a specific ideology, with YouTube deplatforming that ideology, the usual considerations are fewer.
Normally, the friction associated with getting viewers to install an app would be enough to dissuade a large number of users. For users who believe the government lies and that they're seeking the truth, and only the RushLimbaughTube app can expose them to it, I don't know if there's the same friction.
> [On YouTube] You can still go subscribe to the channels you like and be completely unaware of the content you don't want to see
Generalized, therein lies the crux of the tension.
It's not about the existence or accessibility of content, but rather its discoverability.
That YouTube's recommendation algorithm is so psychopathically ammoral that they had to rig it (several months back) not to suggest conspiracy video after conspiracy video should have been the alarm bell.
Content + discoverability composes the potential danger to society, and YouTube wholly controls one of those levers.
> As far as I know, YouTube is the only serious option at the moment for general video content.
Are they? There's Vimeo, Facebook, Pornhub's SFW option, Twitter can host short videos, there's a metric shitload of porn hosts, and if you're in for premium service every major CDN offers video hosting/distribution.
You're absolutely right with the advertising aspect. YouTube is not simply a video hosting platform. It is also an advertising platform.
YouTube's dominance is not because video is impossible to host but because YouTube takes care of the advertising/revenue aspect for content creators. Any competitor would need to provide a similar service, and that's hard to do at the same level when you're not run by the world's largest advertising company. A serious alternative to YouTube would need to draw creators like YouTube does, and you need some sort of built-in way to (probably economically) incentivize them to create videos and put them on your platform.
Or like
https://watchnebula.com/
be owned by creators in the first place and try to finance by subscriptions without ads. But this obviously will not scale like Youtube..
I followed your link, then struggled to find something as you have to choose from a list of thumbnails. I then clicked to view something and immediately hit a paywall.
How are you supposed to "discover" this content? That is where youtube is so strong. Often on youtube I will be directed to patreon, etc - does this work on the same principle?
A lot of large YouTubers (like Wendover Productions/Half as Interesting) have been doing sponsored ads for a thing called 'CuriosityStream' which is basically Netflix for Documentaries/Non-Fiction and as part of a bundle if you subscribe with their link you get Nebula for free as an extra for as long as you pay for CS.
It's mainly existing content from YouTubers but with premium exclusive videos like Patreon has.
It wasn't quite what the parent was saying, but basically here we're advocating that YouTube amounts to the public sphere in a way that other sites do not.
To be a little extreme: If we limited your freedom of speech by saying you can speak freely, but only in your own house, then that would still effectively curtail your rights. Whilst being technically true that you'd still have the right to speak, it wouldn't be in the spirit of freedom of speech.
This situation seems similar to me.
I think there's an argument to say, for the biggest providers of web communications, that if you would be allowed to stand on the street corner and say your bit that those providers shouldn't be allowed to prevent you speaking that 'bit' either.
Obviously as with IRL speech you have no right to an audience; none of us need listen. And, the provider has no curtailment of providing counter-points adjacent to your "speech", just as counter-protest is a normal part of protesting.
This ability to speak in ostensibly public forums is a natural and necessary part of democracy. IMO we should act to maintain that.
I'd add a couple of provisos:
# warnings on extreme content are fine
# the platform can demand those who are "speaking" be identified by name and nationality
> since YouTube is a general platform and that no serious alternatives exist, we should advocate for less censorship.
Disagree. Online misinformation can kill people [0] and act as a recruitment tool for Nazis [1]. Less seriously, it can result in people burning down 5G towers. There's plenty to lose by YouTube hosting this stuff, and they're under no obligation to do so in the name of free speech.
It strikes me as odd that more people seem to want YouTube to permit far-right propaganda on their platform, than want YouTube to permit 'adult content', which just about no-one advocates.
> YouTube is the only serious option at the moment for general video content
People don't have a positive right for their poisonous nonsense to be hosted by, and discoverable on, YouTube. Such content should be forced off mainstream platforms.
> if YouTube begins to aggressively censor opinions they disagree with
'Disagree with' is trivialising the problem. This stuff is serious.
And you're content with YT effectively having the ability to choose the way "public" discourse is censored?
Media outlets have immense political power because of this ability to keep the demos out of the loop of what can and can't be censored. Politicians have leverage with the media outlets, but The People do not.
> And you're content with YT effectively having the ability to choose the way "public" discourse is censored?
This strikes me as a backward way of approaching the problem.
My opinion is that it's not only acceptable for YouTube to ban certain categories of videos, but morally obligatory. It would clearly be atrocious for them to officially permit ISIS recruitment videos in the name of freedom of expression, or in the name of never taking down political videos (ISIS is political, after all).
To put that another way then, my position is that:
1. A video platform like YouTube clearly needs to have, and to enforce, a content policy. It seems obvious that it cannot be a free-for-all.
2. Videos with political content cannot be granted a special exemption from the content policy on the grounds of political videos being special.
The question then is what categories should be on the ban list. It clearly shouldn't include ordinary political videos. It clearly should include recruitment videos from ISIS or neo-Nazi groups. It clearly should include dangerous misinformation about COVID19.
There may be contentious edge-cases, as there are for just about any matter of policy. That doesn't mean YouTube should run a free-for-all. That's just not a reasonable option.
If you want a free-for-all, a centralised platform like YouTube isn't the place to start anyway.
>Disagree. Online misinformation can kill people [0] and act as a recruitment tool for Nazis [1].
Same as online, officially accepted information. Only the latter can be even more dangerous.
As a reminder, the actual Nazis had the official, state sanctioned, platform on their hands, and they also labelled whatever they didn't like "misinformation" (from Jews, communists, etc).
No war was ever started by David Icke and his conspiracy theories. But NYT "official" and "sanctioned" Saddam's WMDs stories were crucial in building support for the Iraq war. Same for many other wars -- it's usually the state, official, sanctioned, news that are more dangerous...
Please don't start using HN for ideological battle again or we'll have to ban you again. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
> what is "far-right" that needs to be silenced, and why?
I'm not about to explain why I believe YouTube should officially oppose neo-Nazism. [0]
> Do you also want the "far-left" silenced?
If there are left-leaning life-threatening lies being spread, YouTube should treat them similarly. It's not the left/right spectrum that matters here.
I suspect anti-vaxxers tend to lean left, for instance (the natural=good branch of human folly), but it's less clear-cut on the left/right spectrum than Nazism.
On a related note, jihadist recruitment videos could be described as 'far right', but that's not normally how we think of them, and it's not especially relevant. YouTube should clearly ban those videos; the left/right question is of little concern.
> Online misinformation can kill people [...] Such content should be forced off mainstream platforms.
Censorship can kill people. Look at China's initial reaction to COVID19, to name a timely example. Admittedly, YouTube doesn't censor to the extent that China does, but whenever you have censorship you open the possibility of censoring life-saving speech, which may be controversial at the time.
Yes, if taken blindly without critical thinking, online misinformation has the potential to do harm and even lead to deaths, as you mention. For freedom of speech to work best, you need an educated and thoughtful population. If you think people are sheep and believe everything they read online, then certainly at first pass it sounds like censoring what they see is the right move. But this relies on a critical implicit assumption: that you (or the censor you defer to) know better and are never wrong. Have you ever changed your opinion? Perhaps you from five years ago would censor something important you would say today. There is no flawless human being in the world that can be trusted with this power.
Okay then, how about we just censor the obviously bad stuff, like Nazis or the 5G conspiracy theories? As other commenters have suggested, censorship will just feed into their narrative, further radicalize, and drive them underground. Instead, for things that are indeed so obviously wrong, simply explain why. Counter their flawed ideas with your correct ideas. If they're so obviously wrong and you're so obviously right, this should be trivial. Reasonable people will see that you're right, and those that don't would be radicalized anyway.
> It strikes me as odd that more people seem to want YouTube to permit far-right propaganda on their platform, than want YouTube to permit 'adult content', which just about no-one advocates.
Personally I would have no problem with adult content on YouTube as long as it's labelled as such. And it's not just "far-right propaganda" that falls under free speech, but also "far-left propaganda" and anything in between. True free speech would not discriminate.
> 'Disagree with' is trivialising the problem. This stuff is serious.
Censorship is also serious, and has serious consequences. It is important to think carefully about the consequences of censorship.
And then you wake up one day to Brexit and Trump being elected. Forcing content/ideas underground doesnt stop it spreading, you just become totally unaware of the spread, its not even talked about in social settings. But still it silently spreads. Do you want a situation when it becomes vacine time, half your country revolts? Do you just not care about these people? If thats the case why bother supressing it at all. The time to address these ideas is now, but no its all too easy to stick your head in the sand and exclaim shock after the fact.
Forcing content out off mainstream media quite plainly does limit the spread of information and does limit radicalisation, we have plenty of examples of that. Conartists rack up millions of views because they can use free infrastructure of companies (companies that in turn convert human attention into profit via advertising, the sale of user data etc.). Without access to the infrastructure they can't have their business flourish as it does.
The link with Brexit and T you make doesn't make sense either, both of these phenomenon got plenty public exposure, with all information available to those who wanted to find it. The central theme tieing both those developments was the ability for people to use the architecture built by digital corporations to quickly spread misinformation unopposed. People receive the information in isolation, they don't get it side-by-side with other views. People engineering the spread of misinformation know it's not a fair contest, that's why it is so effective.
And that's the point being missed by people who say keep the content up and let bad ideas be exposed by better arguments, the problem is that the ideas aren't being opposed or presented in a robust way. Hosts like Brian Rose and others for instance interview in a way that don't challenge their controversial guests, instead they add credibility to their guests. And because we are thinking of these characters as individuals expressing themselves and exchanging their personal views, people are distracted from the fact that they are businesses operating a money making scheme. And they are only able to do that on this scale because they can use other corporate infrastructure for free.
Of course various US (Chinese, UK, Israeli, Saudi, Indian, Iranian, etc, etc) interests run their own versions, both at home and elsewhere.
And corporate astroturfing is not a new thing.
There's a huge difference between kooks sharing a bit of kookiness with each other, and industrial misinformation campaigns created for political and strategic ends - which may include political destabilisation, radicalisation, and the promotion of extremism and domestic terrorism.
The two phenomena are not even remotely comparable. But at the moment information consumers literally cannot tell them apart, because there is no practical way to do that.
The crucial distinction is between individual freedom of speech, where people with unusual views are allowed to say whatever they want as long they don't incite violence, and industrial misinformation, which is inherently toxic and cannot be excused or justified.
There is no principle that can defend deliberate mass manipulation of the public through lies, exaggeration, and wilfully misleading manipulation.
The challenge is getting that principle enshrined in law. So-called free speech advocates will of course agitate against it, and they will be wrong. Knowingly and deliberately running a campaign to mislead the public should be considered a criminal act with criminal consequences.
> you wake up one day to Brexit and Trump being elected
> Forcing content/ideas underground doesnt stop it spreading
In what way were Brexit or Trump "forced underground"? Trump got millions of dollars worth of free advertising from the second he announced he was running because the media could not stop covering him. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox aired 30 minutes of an empty podium for him!
And Brexit was constantly in the media in the UK. There was no "underground" at all. The BBC were almost a full-on propaganda arm with their fawning over Farage and terror that any even slight non-worship of the Tories would be reflected in yet more license fee beatings by ukgov.
Well thats my point, they werent forced underground. It was clear for anyone who looked to see what was going to happen. My point is there was an oportunity to engage and faciliate real conversations around these things. That oportunity was squandered with these two instances, because despite them not being outright supressed it was not socially acceptable to have a reasonable conversation around them without being labeled racist etc etc.
If you force them underground you have no idea how prevalent the ideas are, nor do you have any oportunity to genuinely change peoples minds. You cant address a problem you are not aware of.
> Well thats my point, they werent forced underground.
My mistake, I misfollowed your logic.
> it was not socially acceptable to have a reasonable conversation around them without being labeled racist
Well, that's because Trump is an outspoken racist, the GOP is also pretty racist (but better at keeping it quiet), and Brexit was largely predicated on racism.
Do you really believe there are 15,188,406 racists in the UK and 62,984,828 racists in the USA?
If you truly believe that then I feel sorry for you, because you live in a really sad world. Is that really the experience you have living in or visiting these countries or travelling around them, that 1 in 2 people you meet are racist?
I think its a bit lazy and easy to substitue fringe views from within these two camps as the views of the majority.
If you agree that they are not the views of the majority of peoplpe who voted in these directions then clearly there are other areas that made them vote this way that could have been discussed and had there minds changed over but werent, because well racist. Everyone loves to complain that trump supporters and brexiters suffer from a lack of critical thinking, and especially conspiracy theorists, but come on. How lazy is it to say all these people are/were racists or that is why brexit/trump won.
Sadly, this is quite evidence backed. Somewhere around 1/3rd of the UK population have racist attitudes based on multiple surveys across multiple decades. In the 60s and 70s there was close to 75% support for ending immigration into the UK for non-whites.
So yes, it's absolutely believable to have 15M racist wankers in the UK.
I'd say most people want their country to "win" against others, they want to be richer than other people and want their country to be the richest sat the expense of other nations.
That's racism/xenophobia, isn't it?
Brexit seems to be predicated on the idea that Brits would rather suffer than risk the possibility that mutual benefit would be weighted towards others in the EU. That's pretty extreme racism (albeit founded on greed) IMO, and is endemic in British society AFAICT.
> How many racists would you guess are in the USA?
Obviously that depends on how you define "racist". If you define it as "votes for an explicit racist from a racist party espousing distinctly racist policies", about 62M.
Sure, you may think all these people are racist. Does calling them racist change anyone's mind? No, it just makes them and their supporters mad at you and just poisons the well.
Instead, debate the policies. Explain why they're wrong in a reasonable conversation. You'll actually have a shot at changing people's minds this way.
> Explain why they're wrong in a reasonable conversation. You'll actually have a shot at changing people's minds this way.
This seems to be expecting the opponent/interlocutor to be open to having their mind changed, while not being open yourself.
Also, when it comes to values (as opposed to questions of fact), you can't really argue the point, you can just understand the differences between the positions. If someone values sovereignty so highly that it outweighs any possible cost of Brexit, for instance, then they're not likely to change their mind after a discussion.
Trump and Brexit aren’t silent spreaders, both used targeted video and social media to hit the people most open to their message. MAGA is magical for certain populations — they basically took the people who were loving Ron Paul back in the day and weaponized the message.
It was silent to you, because the broadcast wasn’t aimed at you.
I see where you’re trying to go with that, but there is a huge gap between “Here are some suggested guidelines for submissions and comments, please try to follow them.”, and “Under no circumstances can you say anything that contradicts the policies of this particular political organization we agree with, repeated violations will result in de-platforming.”
>These guidelines seem like a private corporation censoring content. Are platform guidelines like these also an example of censorship?
Obviously they are. Nominally they censor certain content.
That said, not all instances of censorship are equally bad -- e.g. a parent forbidding their kid to swear at strangers, or some small forum like HN is not comparable to a large platform with big global political influence like FB or YouTube.
From my perspective, Hacker News is a website built for the tech community. However I don't view Youtube as a community, but as a platform for individuals to publish videos, broadcast, and sometimes form sub-communities. It's possible that some people who don't login and hang around on the homepage of algorithmically selected videos treat Youtube as a publisher for curating.
Are you saying that the size of the company factors into what policies it can enforce? i.e., smaller companies can have more freedom in policing content, but if an undefined critical mass is reached (perhaps market share), they should have less flexibility on curated content?
Or is it a factor of what it's trying to build? e.g., if YouTube only focused on hosting political content, should they be allowed to censor that content or shape what is permitted?
GP argument is similar to the common carrier argument. Some communication channels (e.g. post, telephone, and maybe YouTube) are so pervasive, important, without comparable alternatives, that they should be considered as common goods and regulated as public services, rather than private companies. In particular freedom of speech applies to their users.
I would be for the common carrier argument if the logical extension that YouTube also gains the protections afforded to common carriers. No more having big companies get special treatment in abusing the Content ID system.
As much as I dislike YouTube’s policies in general, I find it difficult to argue against their current actions simply because powerful entities are already abusing the system behind the scenes to moderate content themselves.
Yes the size most certainly matters, obviously Facebook should be held to a different standard than some niche social network for pet owners with 100 users. Monopolies should be held to a different standard.
I'd argue that the nature of the business should factor into it as well. Since Youtube advertises and presents itself as a platform where any user can upload any kind of content excluding pornography and dark stuff (eg. animal abuse), I don't think that censoring on the basis of political views alone is justified (I'm not familiar with David Icke, so I can't speak for this specific incident).
>Since Youtube advertises and presents itself as a platform where any user can upload any kind of content excluding pornography and dark stuff (eg. animal abuse), I don't think that censoring on the basis of political views alone is justified
YouTube is pretty clear about their stance on what is and is not allowed. They have made it very clear, in particular, that coronavirus misinformation is not allowed. I see little difference between choosing to censor pornography and choosing to censor coronavirus misinformation. Both are protected speech in the USA but they are both also things that are allowed (and is reasonable to) censor if the platform wishes.
Platforms that are monopolies or close to it are essentially the modern day town square, except instead of police and government enforcing rules, it's tech companies.
The courts have made it quite clear that they’re unwilling to consider companies to be similar to the “town square” unless if they’re doing literally what governments have traditionally done. There is no clear way to argue that YT is doing something that governments traditionally did, so you’re out of luck there.
If you believe YT is a monopoly, then it would be far less harmful to everyone if it was just broken up, rather than basically banning moderation on the internet.
You're commenting about "the courts" in a thread that started with "I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech."
In a discussion about morality and the health of our society it is perfectly reasonable for decent people who are exploring the question of 'what ought to be' to set aside the decisions of the courts and the letter of the law.
It's good work to ask how things could be better than they are, but setting aside the law may not be great way of approaching the issue because:
* a good portion of the law as it exists is actually a result of people thinking, in legal contexts, about what ought to be, at least insofar as any portion of the law represents values and ideals.
* any new "what ought to be" that turns out to be at some point in the future will need the force of law in one sense or another, which means it must be nested within a legal context, probably one enough like the present legal context that some if not all present constraints will matter.
Did you post this comment in reply to my comment in isolation, or as a reply to my comment in the context of the previous comments in the exchange, starting with
"I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech."
and ending with
"What’s your point? That we should ignore how the courts and first amendment law actually works?" ?
This argument could have been used to discourage people from discussing the need to make any ethical improvements in our society, including, for example, ending slavery.
The power of enforcement follows from policy, in a democracy policy is influenced by public opinion, public opinion is shaped by discussion. We ought to discuss moral issues for which there is currently no enforcement.
The First Amendment is one specific protection of freedom of speech. It does not equal freedom speech, which is a general concept that private companies can also uphold (but I think everyone here acknowledges they are not legally obligated to)
I think that the government coming in and telling companies what they can and cannot do with their private platforms is entirely contrary to freedom of speech. What would be better is a wider array of communication platforms, for which there is a entirely different set of regulatory tools available.
Not only are they not legally obligated to uphold free speech, very few (almost zero) companies allow anyone to say whatever they wish whenever they wish.
Im still wondering why anyone expects this of youtube but would never ever expect it of the bar down the street.
> I haven't been in a bar where the patrons were told they couldn't discuss quack medicine.
That's over specific.
All bars (even the worst ones I could find) usually have unspoken rules about what can be discussed, until you start to talk about those subjects (eg drug dealing, weapons dealing, planned violence, etc) openly. Of course you can't effectively restrict communication between individuals, but that's also not the issue.
The problem with YT tends to be less the price, and more the fact that Google controls search, most ads, and YT. Compare this to FB which mostly controls ads on its own site, Google as a whole is more problematic.
Of course “more problematic” is not the bar for anti-trust regulation; I leave that to the lawyers.
The problem I always have with this argument is that everyone is undervaluing the unintended consequences of holding companies like YT to the first amendment only. Most people like to image that what they’ll get is more free wheeling discussions on the topic, but in reality all you’ll get is porn.
See, YT bans all kinds of stuff that the first amendment protects, including pornography, violence, and a lot of other nasty stuff that they don’t want on their platform for entirely clear reasons. Eliminate YT’s right to clear those off their site, and it’ll be filled with the lowest common denominator very quickly, as regular users flee from the torrent of unwanted offensive material.
Of course, it’s easy to imagine that we can give YT the right to ban some “offensive” material, but who defines what “offensive” is? The Government? Giving the government the right to control what can and cannot be moderated on YT is kind of contrary to the entire point of this exercise.
If you believe that YT controls too much of the information in our society, then anti-trust or anti-monopoly law is a much richer area for fostering free speech.
You seem to be rather fixated on the "first amendment" lens, while others have their own ideas of the value of the ethical principal of free speech as a means of preventing control over 'that which we are permitted to debate'.
The first amendment is a legal principle with clear implications, limits, and enforcement mechanisms. This makes it much easier to discuss rather than the more nebulous “free speech” which allows everyone to just make up their own definition in-situ, leaving the conversation unmoored from any common definitions.
Aside from that, removing the first amendment from my argument changes very little. You’d still be obliged to create a definition of what is and is not free speech and a mechanism for enforcement, which would be subject to the pitfalls listed above.
Because Youtube presents itself as being agnostic to the content and letting anyone upload anything (excluding porn and dark stuff that any reasonable person would deem inappropriate like ISIS propaganda or child abuse).
If Youtube presented itself as being a video platform for <insert political affiliation> from the getgo, then I wouldn't see a legal problem with moderating videos containing opposing views.
How and where does YouTube present itself as being "agnostic" to content?
And if you think it's only natural that YouTube disallows "propaganda" that "reasonable people" would object to, why are you surprised that they would remove other varieties of propaganda? Of course, different people will have different definitions of reasonableness.
Section 230 does not require that YT or any other service be neutral. It is extremely common for people to represent 230 as if it requires neutrality, but it absolutely does not.
Here’s the entire text of 230, it doesn’t have a “unless they’re biased” clause.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
I don't believe that was the point GP was trying to make.
You're correct that section 230 doesn't require neutrality, but that was part of the point of the legislation. The case law prior to section 230 did result in such a distinction, though not necessarily in those terms.
The cases in question are:
- Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe Inc., in which CompuServe was held not liable for content hosted on its systems as it was merely a distributor and did not have knowledge of the content, and
- Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co., in which Prodigy was held liable for defamatory content posted on its systems as it performed moderation and was therefore considered to have editorial control over the content
Section 230 introduced a carve-out for internet service companies to avoid liability for user-generated content, but given the case law it does seem like this is otherwise a distinction made in US law.
It was a distinction made in US case law, until Section 230 rendered it moot. Section 230 was in fact written partially in response to Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co., because the ruling was considered such a threat to the growing internet.
Youtube also presents itself as an international platform, so what you say about ISIS might have very different perceptions e.g. in comparison to a US Navy ad in the US than in the Middle East. Or do only US standards of what is reasonable free speech apply? Why is porn obviously not free speech less than lizard people conspiracies (that's what Dike is propagating).
My actual answer is in the last line, but I'll ramble a bit first. You make an interesting point, but I think there are times in which we can prohibit certain types of posts and comments that might technically be censorship (using the definition of suppression or prohibition of things that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security), but they aren't bad censorship. I would place some sort of test using focus and/or ubiquity.
Focus: if a community has a stated purpose, then it's okay to censor things that don't contribute to the purpose. If I ran a forum dedicated to ham radio, then it's okay to censor topics about NASCAR. Usually forums have a miscellaneous section for off-topic discussion rather than prohibiting it outright.
Ubiquity: if a community is small enough or in a limited setting, it is okay to censor things. It is accepted practice in many households to censor profanity. That's okay, because each family's censorship only applies to a few people. It is okay for a school to censor certain disruptive things (some people may disagree on what is okay to censor), because it's limited. Once a kid goes home they can read a banned book if they choose to.
Unfortunately for YouTube, I think they fail on both the focus and ubiquity tests. YouTube's purpose (from a layman's perspective) is to share videos. If someone uploads a video then they are staying within YouTube's focus, and YouTube has been pretty free with allowing any video as long as it isn't illegal. So they shouldn't be censoring crackpot videos, because they aren't illegal and seem to stay within YouTube's norms. [Some economically minded people might argue that YouTube's true purpose is to sell ads and should censor videos that cause fewer ads to be shown, but YouTube's previous behavior is that they demonetize/pull the ads from controversial videos, not deleting accounts]. And YouTube has clearly crossed the ubiquity threshold, with zillions of views all over the world.
I struggle a bit with whether YouTube should be legally required to follow the First Amendment (they are a US corporation, not a government), but I can say that I think that their deletion of David Icke's account leaves a bad taste in my mouth- not because I like him, but because I worry that YouTube may one day bow to majority pressure and censor a topic in which I belong to the minority.
To get back to your actual point- HN's guidelines are technically censorship, but they are good censorship. It's designed to keep a community focused and to foster good discussion. The best part is that HN's guidelines are easy to understand and seem to be applied consistently. It would be great if YouTube adopted easy to follow policies and would terminate accounts based on clear breaches of policy, rather than just playing whack-a-mole with whatever topic is hot at the moment. There are tons of other videos spreading misinformation on YouTube about other public health topics (the anti-vax movement being a big one), why is David Icke's account being deleted and not theirs? There are tons of other conspiracy theorists on YouTube, why are Alex Jones and David Icke the only ones to get their accounts deleted?
My answer to that would be that YouTube did not de-platform David Icke because of his wacky views, remember he has had an account for ages with no problem. They de-platformed him because he was spreading dangerous misinformation that could endanger lives. For example, the 5G misinformation has led to 5G masts being set on fire and 5G engineers being threatened and (I think) assaulted. Now you can say what you want about free speech, and I largely agree with you, but if someone is spreading dangerous misinformation that is causing people to commit arson and assault then I think that silencing them is a reasonable option.
I think that argument proves too much. It can be applied in many more cases than it actually is, and I can't help but notice certain discrepancies in who gets the banhammer and who is spared.
What about the dangerous misinformation regarding the coronavirus? We had Twitter accounts telling people not to wear masks. Do we ban the WHO[1][2] and the US Surgeon General[3][4] from Twitter? Do we delete the account of NYC's Health Council chair for encouraging public gatherings during a pandemic?[5]
Those proclamations led to far more harm than just property damage, yet none of those accounts have to worry about being censored. If you support banning David Icke for his crazy views because it might have led to a cell tower being damaged, you should definitely support banning all of these accounts for causing thousands of deaths.
There is one big difference between sharing the best avaiable information (taking circumstances into account) and conspiracy theories and disinformation. The WHO falls in the first category, Alex Jones and Co. in the latter.
It was definitely not the best information at the time. Everyone knew that masks worked, but many organizations and governments lied to the public because they didn't have enough masks. And how could anyone think that encouraging people to go to crowded public events during a pandemic is the best available information? It was clearly harmful at the time and it's one of the reasons why over 18,000 New Yorkers are now dead from coronavirus.
It's easy to find far more harmful information than a stupid conspiracy theory that almost nobody believes. Here's a fun one: Should we ban all pro-life messages? After all, they reliably lead to some crazies attacking abortion doctors. Should we ban all pro-communist sentiment? Communism led to mass death and starvation in the USSR, China, and North Korea. If there's a more harmful ideology, I have yet to hear it.
Getting back to cell phones: Should we ban anyone who says that cell phones cause cancer? The exact same argument applies: It can cause people to damage cell phone towers and threaten maintenance workers.
There is no coherent framework for censorship that allows these things while also banning 5g conspiracy theories. The double-standard could not be more obvious.
Well, that's disingenuous at best. There's still fierce debate as to whether it's worth the general public wearing masks.
Pro life? Communism? You're really digging now. How about capitalism? Lots of people die because of capitalism. Shall we ban any debate about capitalism as well?
Freedom of speech is one of those issues that will never be resolved because there are no clear boundaries. We all agree that there are some things that people should not say. That's why we have things like libel/slander laws. I'm sure you wouldn't like it if someone was going around trying to convince people that your father likes to give blow jobs to dobermans. You would, rightfully, want that person stopped. Is that suppression of freedom of speech?
The question is: where does the boundary lie? This is where we have the debates.
> Should we ban anyone who says that cell phones cause cancer?
Possibly. The difference is we have not (to my knowledge) heard any stories of engineers being attacked because of this whereas there have been a number of stories in the news recently of engineers being afraid to go to work because of idiots attacking them because of these ludicrous coronavirus 5G stories.
I find troubling that everyone in an argument pro freedom of speech and first amendment always says it is OK for YouTube to censor "illegal" content, but isn't making content illegal the definition of government censorship? It is a weird argument to come from the free speech proponents.
I think for argument's sake it's not really about what the government decides is illegal or not, it's that there are some areas of "illegal" that YouTube ignores, while choosing to punish (through demonetization or sometimes deleting accounts) other perfectly legal areas. It's not strictly a free speech argument (at least for me), but the inconsistency deserves to be highlighted.
Consider that snuff films are illegal regardless of their method of distribution- nobody is complaining that YouTube (and every other law-abiding distribution method) censors snuff films and nobody is crying about the First Amendment in this case. Nobody complains because there is a clear legal requirement to prohibit this content, superseding any free speech considerations.
Consider a gray area- filming an activity that might be illegal depending on your location or age, such as smoking marijuana. At a federal level in the USA and in a lot of other countries this is illegal, but it's okay in some areas. YouTube is pretty lax about demonetizing or taking down videos about marijuana. Joe Rogan regularly smokes and promotes weed with guests on his podcast, but there is very little pressure on YouTube to do anything about him.
Consider another scenario for comparison- simply talking about guns on your channel. Following Sandy Hook, YouTube started to demonetize channels that just talked about guns but clearly stayed within the legal bounds and did not promote unsafe or illegal behavior, and some channels have been deleted. YouTube is bowing to outside pressure without any legal requirement. And there is a clear discrepancy in who demonetization gets applied to- promoters of gun control get off scot free, but people that promote legal and responsible gun ownership get demonitized.
YouTube arbitrarily deciding to do something about discussing legally owned guns but nothing about promoting a federally illegal drug is not really the hill I want to die on, but I think it illustrates the inconsistency that frustrates some people. A principled and fair censorship policy should definitely allow the gun conversation to happen if you're going to allow the marijuana conversation to happen, and I think the best way to call this out (without writing the several paragraphs above) is to talk about censoring "illegal" content.
> It would be great if YouTube adopted easy to follow policies and would terminate accounts based on clear breaches of policy, rather than just playing whack-a-mole with whatever topic is hot at the moment.
The thing is it's impossible to devise effective policies that are "clear cut" to the point where an entity like youtube can apply them effectively over a media platform with the scope and throughput of Youtube.
It's always going to be a game of wack-a-mole. It's wack-a-mole even on HN. These platforms should be free to yank stuff and be responsible to some extent if harmful content is spread through them. As it is now, the threshold for being deplatformed is too high.
Conspiracy peddlers are totally free to choose another platform for their garbage or create one for themselves. Info Wars is still up and running through their own website. They would be far smaller, however, if Youtube had done the right thing and pulled the plug early-- like when Info Wars started spreading Sandy Hook conspiracies.
We're talking like facebook and google ARE the internet. They are not. They're merely platforms analogous to a "hyper newspaper". Like any news paper, they should have the right to put content of their choosing on it and be held accountable for harm spread through it. No one is going to stop maniacs or anyone else with strange viewpoints from printing up xeroxes and handing them out on a public corner -or- putting together a weird website, that's their first amendment right.
> I struggle a bit with whether YouTube should be legally required to follow the First Amendment (they are a US corporation, not a government), but I can say that I think that their deletion of David Icke's account leaves a bad taste in my mouth- not because I like him, but because I worry that YouTube may one day bow to majority pressure and censor a topic in which I belong to the minority.
As an aside to this topic, I would be a bit troubled if YouTube were enforcing policies silently without telling stating what they were. In this case, they are stating what those guidelines are, and how the criteria of how they enforce them, although that brings up another point of yours:
> It would be great if YouTube adopted easy to follow policies and would terminate accounts based on clear breaches of policy, rather than just playing whack-a-mole with whatever topic is hot at the moment. There are tons of other videos spreading misinformation on YouTube about other public health topics (the anti-vax movement being a big one), why is David Icke's account being deleted and not theirs? There are tons of other conspiracy theorists on YouTube, why are Alex Jones and David Icke the only ones to get their accounts deleted?
I would surmise it could be a factor of scale, but even if it wasn't I am not sure it necessarily matters. For example, let's say they state their position on an arbitrary policy (unrelated to this latest policy) and let's assume that the users would nearly universally support it. However, let's also say they only take action on "the worst offenders" (of some definition), would it be better for them to not do anything at all until they have the means to capture the majority of videos / users that violate those policies, or start with the larger groups first?
Another way I like to look at these sort of problems is switching the position around in how the platform developed. If YouTube still positioned itself as a general platform from the beginning, but at their very start they stated that any health / medical content must adhere to WHO policies, and then YouTube grew to the ubiquity it is today, I am curious what sort of acceptance we would have for it in today's environment right now. Would it have made YouTube less likely to become as popular, opening the door further for competitors to enter the space?
> However, let's also say they only take action on "the worst offenders" (of some definition), would it be better for them to not do anything at all until they have the means to capture the majority of videos / users that violate those policies, or start with the larger groups first?
One of the most common forms of discrimination is unequally enforced rules: they nominally apply to everyone but are in practice enforced only against an arbitrary subset of violators. For a rule to be fair, whether it’s a law or private policy, enforcement needs to be against an unbiased sample of offenders that’s large enough for the community to see that it’s unbiased. There also needs to be an effective appeals process that can overturn the enforcers’ actions in the cases where they behaved wrongly. Both of these have costs roughly proportional to the number of potential offences.
In YouTube’s case, that’s the number of uploaded videos. They cut costs along the way by neglecting the executive and judicial parts of this process with regard to copyright violations. Now, when they want to institute a new policy (with good reason), they have neither the trust of the community nor the institutions necessary to implement it in a fair manner.
The issue (at least to me) isn't that they can point to a policy that Icke violated, it's that they are arbitrarily ignoring other videos that violate the same policy.
An easy example is that if YouTube chooses delete David Icke's account instead of just demonetizing him, why are they only demonetizing anti-vax accounts but not deleting them? Surely the anti-vax movement has harmed more people than David Icke. Any cynic would notice that David Icke's supporters are crazy but far-right politically, while the anti-vax supporters are crazy but far-left politically. This is a bad look and lets the far-right crazies play the victim card.
A consistently applied and principled set of policies would either let both sets of crazies have their voice, or neither of them. Letting them both have their voice would let YouTube claim to be more of a "pipe" and not have to spend as much effort moderating their content. Censoring both sides obviously takes more effort but is at least defensible. What they have right now is that they spend effort moderating content, but still take flak for it because it looks like they are picking and choosing based on the political winds (which is great when it's your side winning, but the winds can change direction at a moment's notice).
"Community" is meaningless enough, "highly effective community" means even less, and squeezing everyone on the planet into one "community" means something else entirely.
YouTube isn't a 'community' any more than the roads we all travel on. There is no viable alternative to YouTube/Google. There is no way to escape its influence. And being banned from it can ruin you (depending on how your life/work is structured).
HN is totally different because of the completely different scale and the existence of viable alternatives.
> There is no viable alternative to YouTube/Google
There is an interesting "monopoly" factor here, but YouTube is also not negatively impacting other groups or organizations from trying to start their own video platforms tailored to general content. In fact, it seems there have been various organizations chipping away at YouTube (e.g. Twitch, TikTok) of people who would normally be watching YouTube have other platforms to visit, watch and host content. Nothing is preventing those platforms from also further expanding into areas where YouTube is traditionally the leader.
It’s an issue that’s difficult to distill in a way that could work as a law or as a winning argument against snarky commenters playing Devil’s Advocate. In theory the line between rules and censorship is vague and grey, but in practice it’s pretty easy to tell what is rule enforcement and what is political censorship. I guess a good place to start would be examining the rules of a website and determining if the takedowns follow the rules and the rules are not overly broad.
While banning or deleting accounts could go all the way from legitimate to oppression, it doesn't seem like banning the account of someone spreading false information that leads to dangerous situations to be an abuse in any way. Yes, we have to hold YouTube to higher standards than others simply because of the disproportionate power the platform has. But this doesn't change the fact that in such cases the measure was warranted.
People constantly misunderstand "freedom of speech" as something that somehow entitles one to trample over someone else's freedom.
For example every time there's a discussion about "hate speech" someone will say that the laws are routinely abused to punish people for their legitimate free opinions. Yet no such examples of routine abuse are ever given. There's room for common sense when judging a situation. Common sense can't be put in law but you also can't really judge these gray areas without it.
Well there are 2 aspects for this. Laws in general consider magnitude and criticality when defining measures. So would a judge. YouTube's reach implicitly means the potential for abuse is orders of magnitude higher. And the effects of that abuse are far more dangerous than what a small platform can induce.
The other part, the one I was mostly referring to, is moral. I know, it's a company, it doesn't need to have morals. But this shouldn't stop people from holding them to a higher standard.
With a flip of the algorithmic switch platforms like YouTube or Facebook can influence results of elections, escalate social issues over the tipping point, etc. Can you honestly say that my conclusion needed too much explaining?
COVID-19 has added the additional element of this new concept of "disinformation". The argument is seductively simple: "being exposed to this information could lead you to engage in patterns of behavior that harm society. Therefore we can conceptualize this speech as being an indirect form of violence/negligence and therefore we have a moral obligation to remove such content".
Some people, after being exposed to misinformation, chose to believe them.
I don't believe in fighting "bad ideas" by suppressing them, I believe in shining a light on them. Let the truth fight for itself. (And of course now comes the classic counter-argument: that the evils of disinformation possess a virality that makes them spread far more easily than the truth, being that truth is nuanced and difficult to acquire whereas bad information is seductively simple. I won't address that argument here but personally I think it's a very dangerous way of thinking)
Do you have evidence that the truth more often than not win over lies?
It is possible that platforms, being designed the way they are to maximize corporations' interest naturally lead to unintended consequences.
There are billion of youtube video, nobody will be able to watch them all. So the youtube algorithm can recommend videos that are necessarily harmful based on what the person watched before.
> Some people, after being exposed to misinformation, chose to believe them.
You missed my point :) Humans, being inherently limited, are always at risk of being wrong. Being wrong about things is the default state. I simply don't think that we should strive to expunge all forms of "misinformation". That is to say, of course people believe misinformation.
> Do you have evidence that the truth more often than not win over lies?
Ah, I see my point is easily misinterpreted. I find it very plausible (in fact, I outright believe) that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes". Rather, I think the implications of using that fact to justify suppression is inherently dangerous.
Furthermore I think truth, just like the concepts of agency and free will, are useful abstractions for us to operate under. But when examined in their totality, the concepts unravel. Thus I feel that truth is local, not global, and by acting like there is a global form of truth we are only forcing our local-truth onto others in the misguided belief that we can separate truth from our individualized local contexts.
Coming back down to earth for a second, the problem always remains: "who decides what truth is"?
The idea that in some cases we do not know what is true is valid. The idea that therefore we can never determine what is true and therefore must, in the name of "free speech" support and help anyone say anything is not.
David Icke is not spreading information. He's spreading nonsense about lizard people. That's objectively true.
I personally agree that what David Icke is spreading is a bunch of nonsense. But I'm against suppressing him because otherwise I can't maintain a logically consistent belief system. That is to say, as soon as we can ban the lizard guy, we can also ban a lot more viewpoints that are not quite as controversial / outright crazy but straddle the line.
And just to head this off, the dimension of palatability to advertisers is separate, and if a site chooses to quarantine or whatever, so be it. I'm speaking merely from a framework of, "is this the kind of society we want?", as opposed to, "is it feasible for a profit-seeking corporation to adopt such an open policy"?
But your belief is already logically inconsistent unless you are saying we should allow porn, animal cruelty, or ISIS propaganda on YouTube (the last one is very clearly suppression of a political opinion, and abhorrent one, but nonetheless).
This is the issue, if you are saying YouTube should allow all content then you need to be consistent and allow all content. If not you really just disagree on what content should be censored, but then you can't make this out to be a censorship vs free speech debate, because you agree on censorship, just not on what gets censored.
But his anti-Semitic content did not result in the ban, his mis-information concerning Covid-19 did. YouTube has not taken any measures to implement a policy of banning for anti-Semitic speech.
Not the OP, but I'm against banning the anti-Semite. I'm against banning Mein Kampf. I'm against banning the writings of Marquis de Sade. I'm against banning people who advocate for a "spectrum" of non-binary genders.
An adult should be capable of consuming information from disparate sources, especially distasteful ones, and formulating logical arguments to deconstruct those positions. It takes some practice. That practice can't be done in an information vacuum. If there are deficiencies in the population's ability to perform the above, then we should be rectifying that through education (whereby I mean improving how people go about mentally solving problems), rather that scrubbing the world of "bad" data or opinions.
Entrusting institutions to ban media is essentially saying "These people know what's good for you, better than you do." and I absolutely abhor that sort of arrogant, misplaced, condescension. It often comes from people who are intelligent, but nowhere near as infallible as they think they are.
It’s very easy to maintain a logically consistent belief system that allows for private censorship. It’s called “the person who owns the servers makes the rules”, and if you don’t like then rules then buy your own servers.
While this kind of censorship bothers me, I think it's funny everyone forgets we're hanging out at Google's house. If Google wants someone to leave their house that person has no right to protest.
What should be protested is that there isn't really anywhere else to go -- and the best form of protest is to build it.
That's right, because "Lizard People" are technically "Jews", so he's not actually ranting and raving about fictitious lizards, he's ranting and raving about Jews, so maybe he's not technically objectively full of shit because Jews really exist, huh?
But maybe YouTube's lawyers advised them that the First Amendment doesn't apply to them because they're not Congress, so they booted him for anti-semitism, and inciting terrorism, and being a menace to public health, among other subjective but perfectly legal and valid and morally justifiable reasons.
I mean, Icke is the most clear-cut of examples. Otherwise you end up backing into "nobody is ever qualified to determine the truth of any statement objectively and correctly". Nihilist anti-positivism.
The thing about the coronavirus is that wrong decisions, both by public health and private individuals, produce real body counts. And quite alarmingly high body counts in those countries which have embraced disinformation.
(Before someone starts in on it, the Iraq war was also a body count produced by the embracing of disinformation)
As with all such matters, its about the slippery slope, and setting precedents. The belief is, we can have our cake and eat it too. e.g. we will allow free speech, except for the egregious cases like X, Y, Z. The problem of course is, who defines egregious, and can it be objectively defined?
I'm asking, because I see it as the complete opposite. The rules of physics apply all over the world and outside of the planet. Yes, some patterns of reality are only found in a specific place on this planet (cultural values, for example), but things like whether COVID-19 is caused by 5G does not.
Do you have evidence that censorship wins over lies? Considering that one of the most fundamental and important US laws is freedom of speech, it behooves you to prove that censorship works, not that free speech works.
History also shows that eventually those regimes fall too.
The question should be which set of policies maximizes the power of the informed general citizens relative the incumbents and the irrationals (or very-very boundedly rationals).
The fact that the first amendment exists is strong evidence that censorship works. If it didn’t work, why is it so important to prevent the government from censoring people? After all, censorship is futile right?
You'll instead find the artisanal hand-crafted propaganda, and you won't find constructive criticism. Usually you'll find massive tomes of apologetics full of self-pity and victimization, and of course absolute hope that Dear Leader will still solve this even if the world is against him.
Is there some kind of "list of prohibited books" in NK (like the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in the 16th century)? I guess not, because anything that's not allowed is by default prohibited?
> I guess not, because anything that's not allowed is by default prohibited?
Yes, at least for online content. As far as I understand it, a researcher who wants access to some out-of-country material has to manually submit a request. The censors then download the article or page, go through it, and pass it on if it's found acceptable. In addition, no single computer has access both to the global internet and to the intranet.
I meant physical books, or whatever. I mean is there some contrived reasoning on why those books are too dangerous, or otherwise prohibited? (Like it was with the Papal Index.)
Science and technology is advanced by a tiny community of humans, relative to the species as a whole. I don't think it works as evidence for "more often", rather it is evidence for the amazing results that can come when the truth wins even within a small group.
The question was not "do you have evidence the truth wins more often than lies for the species as a whole"; there was no specific context implied as I read it. So, do you have evidence lies win more often than the truth for the species as a whole?
This is the exact type of escalation that is not helpful. This caricatures the argument that institutions are not perfect. In the beginning, the WHO said the virus could not be spread between people. And YouTube & friends are actively censoring to imperfect sources (since all sources are ultimately imperfect).
No, because the argument that "institutions are not perfect" is a strawman that distracts from the actual question which is "is anything David Icke says anything remotely approaching the truth?" and the answer is undeniably no. Arguing about a slippery slope that the institutions might not be perfect either doesn't matter. Icke isn't trying to be correct. He's either literally mentally unwell (I've read that he has schizophrenia) or he's intentionally being provocative, or both. This isn't even a case of YT removing someone who is acting in good faith.
I've said it elsewhere and I'll repeat it here: the idea that institutions can be mistaken does not mean that we should remove things that are just clearly completely and totally false (and damaging). It's the difference between the idea that a large portion (say, 10-20%) of the population is infected with covid with no symptoms, which is also almost certainly wrong, but there's at least some level of evidence for. Almost all of that evidence is flawed, but like, you can cite real academic papers from people. And the idea that 5g causes covid, which doesn't even make enough sense to create a well founded argument to the contrary. It relies on the audience not understanding what a virus is (or wanting to suspend disbelief).
> distracts from the actual question which is "is anything David Icke says anything remotely approaching the truth?"
That's not the actual question we are discussing here. Whether he is correct or not does not change any premises of this post or discussion. We are discussing censorship and deplatforming.
Not at all. The parent that I originally responded to stated
> We have a myriad of evidence that societies that suppress the truth for "the public good" [end badly]
To believe that that statement is relevant you must believe that "covid-19 is caused by 5G towers" is, or could be, the truth. Otherwise you have to defend the much stranger position, that societies which knowingly suppress information that everyone knows is false don't end well, which is silly, I know of no society that has ended badly due to its attempts to suppress things that everyone agreed were false. (and by this I mean factually false, not ethical concerns etc.)
If you don't believe that, then you agree that by suppressing Icke, we aren't suppressing the truth, so there is no danger. If you do believe that, you are misinformed, and it's a good thing we're keeping disinformation away from you.
Now, you might argue that I've constructed a catch-22, and you'd be correct if I thought that this was a generally applicable solution, but I don't. While not every piece of information is obviously untrue, some are. "Covid-19 is caused by 5g towers" is one such piece of information. It is also, apparently, dangerous when people believe it.
There's lots of other opinions that I find distasteful or whatnot that I don't believe should be deplatformed because they are clearly false, that is reserved for things which are clearly false.
There's no issue of censorship here, because on the off chance that Icke is right (which again there isn't), he could do a study and submit a paper to the relevant academic circles, and resolve the issue. In other words, society again, isn't suppressing truth, they're suppressing cranks. Which is reasonable. Cranks are bad and distract us from getting actual work done. Most of the time we can just ignore them, but every once in a while a crank gets ahold of an idea that is both wrong and, when believed by a small but fervent group, can be dangerous to everyone. In those cases, keeping the idea from catching on further is good.
Again this applies only to things that are provable in nature, not things of the form "we should overthrow the bourgeoisie".
So yes, the central point is that nothing Icke says is anything remotely approaching the truth. In other words, libeling a concept should be reasonable to deplatform, since libeling an individual certainly is.
Note that WHO never said that, it is correct that they in the middle of January said that the evidence they had at the current time then did not show transfer between people. But they never spoke about it as it was a fact.
But this is the exact example of misinformation spreading easily. I assume you a a reasonable, rational and well informed individual like most on HN, but you still believe this bit of misinformation. The WHO never said that the virus could not spread from human to human, they said "there is no evidence for human to human spreading". That nuance makes a big difference in meaning, the absence of evidence for something is not evidence for the absence of something. But this nuance was lost in all of the misinformation spreading.
That's an example of a very bizarre view that seems to have almost no chance of being right and almost no evidence in its favor. And presumably many truths sounded weirder (less plausible) than that in past societies, and many truths are going to sound weirder than that in future societies.
It's harder to say this because of the implied criticism of the common sense and rationality of people now living (including everyone in this conversation), but perhaps there are many truths that sound weirder than that to us, too.
> Some people, after being exposed to misinformation, chose to believe them.
Some people, after being given the opportunity to gamble, choose to place a bet, even when it has a negative expected value. Should Nevada ban blackjack?
Some people, after being given the opportunity to buy insurance, choose to buy insurance, even when it has a negative expected value. Should we ban insurance? If not, what about credit default swaps?
The reason central planning doesn't work is that everything is much too complicated for a central planner to be able to make good decisions about everything. People who are close to a thing know it better than people who are far away, so the decision is best left to the individual. It's their life, they're the one with the best incentive to get it right.
> Do you have evidence that the truth more often than not win over lies?
Let us take this question to its logical conclusion and apply it to the censors. If the censors can't tell the truth from the lie then they may end up censoring the truth instead -- oops. But how are they any more qualified to decide this than anybody else?
This is doubly true when you're talking about a platform. As if YouTube has "medical expertise" in its bailiwick.
> It is possible that platforms, being designed the way they are to maximize corporations' interest naturally lead to unintended consequences.
That is absolutely possible. But maybe then the answer is to design them differently rather than keeping the bad design while throwing hatchets at random civilians because somebody who themselves has no unique competence thinks they might be wrong about something.
As an example of your point. At some point in the past the censors would have gotten the truth wrong on the cancer/smoking connection. Believe it or not, that began as a fringe belief.
Many may disagree, but I think we need to throw out this concept of "disinformation" entirely. I don't believe in fighting "bad ideas" by suppressing them, I believe in shining a light on them. Let the truth fight for itself.
This argument reminds me of when the WWW first appeared. Everyone thought that at last Truth and Reason would be available to all and "win out" naturally.
And all that happened is that you can now find supporting arguments for any perverse or dangerous theory you are already predisposed towards online. They propagate and multiply because we are primarily emotional creatures, no matter how rational or educated we think we are.
So "shining light" on disinformation only has an effect on people if they are already predisposed to rejecting that disinformation, which makes it redundant.
There's a powerful argument about substantially improving educational equality, which I would wholeheartedly support, but in the intervening generation(s), removing disinformation from platforms that has been shown to be dangerous (ie endangered lives, which David Icke's videos have) is an acceptable compromise IMHO.
The idea that you can convert people who hold racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic or other repulsive thought by just presenting them better facts is of course naive. We have the entirety of human history that shows that the liberal idea of a market place of ideas is ridiculous. It doesn’t work, if only because for example the far right isn’t playing the same game and isn’t interested in fair debate.
> The idea that you can convert people who hold racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic or other repulsive thought by just presenting them better facts is of course naive.
What? We have countless examples of it. What world are you living in? It's free speech, facts, ideas that change individuals and society.
> We have the entirety of human history that shows that the liberal idea of a market place of ideas is ridiculous.
Entire human history? What are you talking about. For most of history, censorship was the norm. That's what made america and our concept of "free speech" unique and exceptional. It was new and rare.
> It doesn’t work, if only because for example the far right isn’t playing the same game and isn’t interested in fair debate.
Neither are the far left - which in america is the greater threat. But guess what? Neither the far right or the far left can take over the US precisely because of free speech. We can call them out. Which is what you are really upset about.
The best protection against extremist far right and far left lunatics is free speech. Also, one of the easiest way to spot far right and far left lunatics is their hatred of free speech.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble but the best protection is not free speech and studies have shown cognitive bias enables people to effectively ignore what disrupts their beliefs.
And very likely you yourself are also affected, in this case by your very belief in free speech. You hold it so intimately that it has become a core of your own self.
The fatal flaw in your argument is that "cognitive bias enables people to effectively ignore what disrupts their beliefs" applies to the people with the power to censor as well.
Thank god for free speech which allows people to burst bubbles.
> but the best protection is not free speech and studies have shown cognitive bias enables people to effectively ignore what disrupts their beliefs.
I know, that's why free speech is important. If people are shown to be cognitively biased, then censorship is the worst thing for society since it keeps people in their bias. Yes, people can ignore whatever they want. It's life. How is censorship an answer here?
> And very likely you yourself are also affected, in this case by your very belief in free speech.
My belief in free speech comes from getting an education and actually thinking about it.
> You hold it so intimately that it has become a core of your own self.
Oh god. This is so obvious and pathetic projecting.
Using your logic, you should be against censorship as it fosters cognitive biases and enables people to live in their bubbles. Without free speech, abolition movement, civil rights movement, lgbt movement, etc can't happen. Without free speech, countries and cultures can't discuss ideas and progress.
Once again, ask yourself why nazi germany, soviet union, north korea, etc love censorship? And ask yourself why you love censorship. It's for the same exact reason. Control and wanting to protect your bubble.
The difference between you and me is that I don't mind my bubble being challenged or bursted. My bubble didn't become a "core of myself". But you, obviously have an agenda and beliefs that you don't want challenged and you want to hold onto your pathetic bubble as long as you can.
You want people think exactly like you, believe things that you believe in and don't want anything challenging it. Just like nazi germany, islamic extremists, communist china, etc.
> Booting people off of platforms merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them.
> Let the truth fight for itself.
We tend to think of humans as very rational beings, that they should have the ability to make the best decisions for themselves, and that we should not take actions to influence those decisions. Unfortunately, this is not always true, which is why deplatforming works.
Deplatfoming is controversial because it is a "negative action", that involves censorship, but we tend to ignore "positive actions" that can change toughts in exactly the same way, like recommendation algorithms, or simply default choices (because default matters and humans rarely deviate from default choices).
I hear this a lot. Light is the best disinfectant. What evidence do you have for this? I've never seen a bad or immoral or harmful idea die out when more people learn about it and scrutinize it. However, I have repeatedly seen the opposite: Sharing bad ideas increases their audience, increases ignorance, hate, fear, and human suffering. You're looking at an article describing this phenomena right now.
More importantly, I've also seen the opposite: Private platforms actively suppressing people trying to harm humanity does work. Deplatforming these people and, importantly, showing social pressure that these are bad ideas and shouldn't even be entertained as valid debate, has shown to work repeatedly. In fact, social pressure is one of the most effective tools against hate and ignorance like this.
I don't think you're basing your "shine the light" argument in evidence, which I suspect is ironic because I suspect you believe you're objective and use evidence to judge things.
> What evidence do you have for this? I've never seen a bad or immoral or harmful idea die out when more people learn about it and scrutinize it.
There is a significant amount of evidence for it. For example, one could measure the effects of showing people fact-checks, and it has been demonstrated that it does indeed work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact-checking#Effects
And there are countless ideas that have died out when more people learn. It's easy to forget about them, precisely because they do die off. A few big ones that were held by the majority but died out:
- flat earth (before Galileo)
- pro-slavery views
- human sacrifice
- caning children
- hanging
- smoking is good for you
- communism
- laws against gay marriage
> In fact, social pressure is one of the most effective tools against hate and ignorance like this
It can be used to enforce hate and ignorance as well. It's naive to think that the way you propose enforcing it would be different to all other times in history when it was used.
> Most of them _everyone_ knew about for thousands, or even tens of thousands of years
This is false.
For most of the past several thousand years of history, "knowledge" has been imposed and speech has been restricted by religious and/or political decree.
Freedom of speech, along with the value of the individual, are enlightenment values - i.e., they have only been around for a couple of hundred years, and even then only in a few parts of the world, and even then they have continued to be suppressed and assaulted at every opportunity.
But those of us who have been lucky enough to grow up in societies that have relatively high levels of freedom of speech and freedom of the individual can easily take these freedoms for granted.
But if you look at all the positive societal changes that are espoused by people who believe in liberal values: workers' rights, women's rights (to vote, work, refuse or leave marriage, own property, drive), equality and rights for racial/religious minorities, immigrants, the disabled, gay people, etc; these changes have happened first where there has been the greatest freedom of speech.
Yes I know it's unpleasant to hear speech that feels uncomfortable or dangerous, but be assured it is immeasurably better than the alternative.
Edit:
For what it's worth, I've been paying attention to the David Icke story since he first appeared on London Real a few weeks ago, and I'm a financial supporter of an investigative reporter who has gone deep researching and revealing the possibility that this whole thing looks like a financial scam by London Real.
It looks every bit like The Streisand Effect is at work here, and that YouTube's ban of Icke is only serving to amplify his signal, increase his following and generate huge amounts of money for London Real (and possibly Icke too).
So it's the Hydra myth playing out yet again. Be careful what you wish for.
Because "sunlight" includes the norms of a free and intellectually-open society, which didn't develop until well after those thousands of years. Censorship itself is not even that bad merely due to how it might deal with the YouTube fruitcake du jour; it's really, really bad because it's openly destructive of these hard-gained shared norms, in so many ways.
This is a pretty low effort comment, but more importantly is conceding the several upthread assertions that freedom of speech has historically been effective at correcting bad ideas.
If your claim is that we shouldn't expect this to continue in the future, that's a whole new claim that you need to support.
I mean, a teleological view of history and ethics is just so absurd that it disturbs me that professed "rational" scientifically minded people believe it. There's no basis for believing just because things "tend" to get better that is in itself a causative argument about some intrinsic nature of humanity.
I mean, even the example used ("the noble class") is preposterous on face because:
1. The Russian Revolution? Germany 1849? Even the American Revolution? None of these are about ideas, or "shining the light on ignorance" -- they're about putting the nobility up against the wall. If there's some kind of teleology at play here, it's not that we thought about it in the marketplace of ideas long enough and decided to do away with the concept.
2. Nobility still exists! At best, this just means we live in a secular society, where we no longer believe the Word of God justifies massive inequality.
Only as formality in some countries. In America, there are some people who call the Kennedys "America's aristocracy", call JFK's white house "Camelot", and make references to members of the Kennedy family being "entitled" to office, but there's no legal basis for it.
All the events you list happened in the wake of the enlightenment, the period when ideas challenging the validity of the dominance of the monarchies, nobles and the church were disseminated and popularised in large part due to the invention of the printing press - i.e., an instrument of free speech.
This either trivially true, in the sense that the Western canon builds on itself, or patently absurd, in the sense that you attempt to frame the 1918 revolution as being a mere effect of the invention of the printing press 500 years earlier. Neither strikes me as being particularly rigorous historiography.
It was one-line discussion-board summation of what is widely accepted by historians (as you said, "trivially true"), but if you'd like to share an explanation of how the spread of ideas leading to the revolutions of Europe could have happened without an innovation that had the same effect as the printing press did, I'd be intrigued to to read it.
> patently absurd
So far, three of your replies in this thread alone have contained the word "absurd".
They probably all break the HN guidelines ("Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation", and "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says").
But more importantly, you're too busy sneering at other people's comments to make any positive assertion of your own.
So what is it you actually want to persuade us of, about the appropriate levels of constraints on speech in the modern world?
> If you'd like to share an explanation of how the spread of ideas leading to the revolutions of Europe could have happened without an innovation that had the same effect as the printing press ded, I'd be genuinely intrigued to to read it.
History is more complicated than a single invention! It's needlessly reductive.
I could also say: "how could have the revolutions of Europe happened without mercantile capitalism challenging the economic structures of feudalism?" But that's just imposing a post-hoc narrative on history that happens to fit my existing views.
> So what is it you actually want to persuade us of, about the appropriate levels of constraints on speech in the modern world.
My sole reason for participating in this thread is to firmly reject idealism and the teleological view of history. Ideas aren't magic. Technology isn't either.
(P.S. it's kind of hilarious that you're invoking HN rules regarding my speech in the same breath as you are defending the merits of free speech.)
> History is more complicated than a single invention
Yes, of course, I never claimed otherwise. But some concepts are more fundamental and influential than others, and the flow of information is more fundamental and influential than most.
> My sole reason for participating in this thread is to firmly reject idealism and the teleological view of history. Ideas aren't magic. Technology isn't either.
If that's all you're trying to say, then, OK, thanks for pointing that out.
> it's kind of hilarious that you're invoking HN rules regarding my speech in the same breath as you are defending the merits of free speech
Fine, have your free point :)
But dismissing everyone else's comments as "absurd", "preposterous", "hilarious" etc whilst not making any effort to construct a solid assertion about the main topic is just a waste of everyone's time.
> America literally has a nobility class right now.
Literally nope. For example, there is no law that says the word of one group of people is worth more in court than another group. There are no laws saying only certain people can be in power based on their ancestors. There is no law enshrining divine right.
I think "routinely" is overstating it. These days, "infrequently" is probably more accurate. US politics is very much of the monied, for the monied. Without a huge warchest, barring odd circumstances[1], you've got little chance of making it through the various filters.
[1] e.g an extremely unpopular incumbent against a popular challenger with excellent ground game.
> politics is very much of the monied, for the monied
This is somewhat true of course (though Obama is a notable recent exception).
Indeed it's pretty true in most countries and systems of government (though my closest experience is here in Australia, where all our prime ministers going back almost 40 years, and most others in our ~120 year history, have come from modest origins).
But the topic at hand is freedom of speech/expression.
Whose interests are likely to be served, ultimately, by constraints on speech/expression?
Those already holding power, or those seeking to reform/subvert the system?
Why has the goalpost moved from an idea dying out, to dying out within one day? And who is "we"?
> Most of them _everyone_ knew about for thousands, or even tens of thousands of years
That's not true. People didn't know about it. When the sunlight came, people changed their beliefs relatively quickly compared to how long the false beliefs were held. Sometimes within a few years, but generally within a generation.
Do you really think people at large didn't know about hanging, slavery, human sacrifice, and ideas about a flat earth in societies where these ideas were applicable?
Not only that, the truth as it's taught in history books was relatively short-lived. Prior to mercantilism and the industrial revolution, slavery and serfdom were basically equivalent. There was a lord and you worked for them in exchange for room and board and protection. You might not love it, but there wasn't really anywhere else to go for anybody who couldn't raise a military force and become a lord themselves.
Then suddenly there were factories who would hire anybody who showed up and pay them real money and plantation workers started running off to work in the factories left and right. It was no longer that people stayed because they had no better option, they were then being forced to stay against their will. The dynamic changed. Chains and beatings entered the scene to keep slaves from running off. They did anyway, so their replacements had to be forcefully kidnapped because there were no longer any volunteers.
The whole thing collapsed and was dismantled in a relatively short period of time after that.
I mean, like many things, this just comes down to axioms that ground your meta-ethics. I don't find moral Platonism very convincing.
There's no natural inclination of humans towards justice or injustice, beyond the limits of our own psychology. To me, the idea that there is some internal teleology towards justice is absurd. These are material struggles and material gains that must be defended materially.
I also reject platonism. I really don't mean to imply changing these norms was easy, or is only a matter of putting the information out there disregarding material conditions and then just hoping for the best.
It seems that having free speech is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition to improve society. It's a principle worth defending.
I think that framing ("necessary but not sufficient") is a much more productive way that I wish free speech advocates would use more.
My opposition to censorship derives from the fact that it tends to require an unjustified hierarchy (i.e. the violence of the state).
However, I have a real problem with imparting some kind of magical quality to ideas. I'm particularly annoyed by the way in which free speech advocates act like social norms are a form of censorship. More specifically, that free speech requires platforming -- i.e., rejecting a freedom of association.
While I do think that the power companies like Google exert of society is well wroth investigating, in general I find that these are much weaker examples of the use of force to censor ideas.
stevebmark said "I've never seen a bad or immoral or harmful idea die out when more people learn about it and scrutinize it"
So I gave examples of some ideas that did in fact die out when people learned about them and scrutinized them. My argument was that it's naive to think censoring ideas this time will be on the right side of history.
I believe this isn't true - the sphericity of the Earth was widely believed well before Galileo.
> - human sacrifice
> - laws against gay marriage
> - caning children
Were these ever views held by the majority? As opposed to, say, a minority of religious zealots in power?
That people thought the Earth was flat before Galileo is a meme. Even Ancient Greeks knew it was round.
> pro-slavery views
In 1776, America is born with its Freedom(TM). In 1829, Mexico abolishes slavery. In 1835, Texas revolts, resulting in Republic of Texas (1836), which then merges with the US (1846), which triggers the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), which leads to, among other things, recognition that Texas is a part of a slave-holding nation. Slavery won't be abolished until the Civil War (1861-1865).
In the end, slavery wasn't abolished by debates: it was abolished by literally sending troops to shoot slave owners.
> communism
Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital in London while writing articles for New-York Daily Tribune. Whatever its merits are, his ideas were widely known throughout Europe, and still accepted widely enough to turn Russia into Soviet Union.
> That people thought the Earth was flat before Galileo is a meme. Even Ancient Greeks knew it was round.
Well knowledge wasn't spread as easily, and could be lost. People knew, then they didn't and so on. It doesn't detract from my point that flat earth is an example of an idea that died off when more people learn about it and scrutinize it.
> In the end, slavery wasn't abolished by debates: it was abolished by literally sending troops to shoot slave owners.
Abolishment of slavery took many angles since it was a massive change of society. Sure, you can pick one country where it required a war. But that doesn't mean the battle of ideas aspect is any less important. Even to rally troops you need to convince them their ideas are worth fighting for.
> (communism) still accepted widely enough to turn Russia into Soviet Union
Sure, and then we saw the results, and the bad idea died off (mostly)
China is not communist, at least not in any way related to the western definition. There is no common ownership of the means of production and there is still very much an independent state, money, and social classification.
Communism collapsed intellectually in the West after the economic collapse of the USSR and the relevant death tolls. I know China is communist, but in democratic countries, for the most part, communism is an idea that died off.
I'd say it died off for generations because of active deplatforming of anyone involved rather than an open debate on the merits. For instance it was literally illegal to be a communist in the US due to the Communist Control Act of 1954.
Google "do facts convince people" and you'll see lots of stuff about this. Here's one, from scientificamerican.com...
> In a series of experiments by Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan and University of Exeter professor Jason Reifler, the researchers identify a related factor they call the backfire effect “in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.” Why? “Because it threatens their worldview or self-concept.”
Yes that is a good point. The link I gave mentions that study, and says it has failed replication attempts. I think the truth is more nuanced - there are ways it can be more effective and yes sometimes counter-effective. But that doesn't mean we should just give up fact-checking entirely. I think there are several ways we can make corrective fact checking more convincing to people and am working on building a collaborative fact-checker https://verifact.io to try to do that
The problem is who decides what's a "bad idea"? Every group has its own list, whether it's Scientology, the CCP, NAMBLA, PITA, etc. What group do you trust with defining your list of "bad ideas"? Historically the "bad idea" list has been generated by whoever rules/controls you. Why do you think it's different this time?
Yes, this is a completely valid question. In this specific case: Do you think it's bad for YouTube to be active in reducing the spread of this information? Because to me it's almost self evident it shouldn't be entertained as a valid idea.
I might also ask why you aren't protesting Hacker News having moderators? Content is deleted from this platform all the time.
Moderators don't delete content on HN in the sense of removing it altogether. The most we do is kill it, meaning remove it from the default view of the site—but anyone with 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile can still see it.
Again, the issue is the abuse of power. Google is very nearly a quasi-government organization. They have endless government contracts, they spend more on DC lobbying than anyone else, and they actively share data with US intelligence agencies.
At some point, the laws that protect us from government, must also apply to these massive quasi-government monopolies - or they quickly become worthless.
> At some point, the laws that protect us from government, must also apply to these massive quasi-government monopolies - or they quickly become worthless.
Except that Google cannot arrest you, prosecute you, sentence you to prison or limit any other right you might have. The best that they can do is no longer letting your voice be heard on their service because you have violated one of their _stated_ guidelines. If corporations were doing this in secret, that's a little bit different, but Google is being very forthcoming on the guidelines they are setting.
I would venture that the government should be protecting its people from misinformation like Icke's (after all, they enforce things like "truth in advertising", "medicines must state side effects", etc.) and not leaving it up to YouTube.
The problem is, the "protection" and "regulation" quickly become tools to eliminate your political enemies. In some ways this is already happening in the western world.
We are becoming what we used to oppose against to.
Is protection against fraudulent advertising, poisonous food, products, and "medicine" being used to eliminate political enemies? If so, is it not worth it to limit the ability to lie to prevent the massive ensuing harm?
You don’t see a pattern? We went from questionable analysis of COVID cases by actual doctors last week, over to 5G coronavirus conspiracy theories this week.
This is the proverbial slippery slope, albeit a bit anachronistic as the more egregious case is the latter (5G conspiracy), so the escalation is unable to be painted by the sequence.
I’d also ask you consider that your line of thinking as a framework has been misused throughout history, often in the context of censorship.
The '5G coronavirus conspiracy theory' is a convenient broad brush to paint any dissident thought as inane, even if 99% people entertaining dissident thoughts are just as appalled as anyone at the 5G theory.
I'm not sure why you're quoting me here. My argument is that the assumption that societies which suppress truth end badly may be valid, but "covid-19 5g lizard people" is so far outside the realm of what is possibly true that it isn't relevant to such arguments.
You can socially suppress the obviously wrong without any danger. The marketplace of ideas doesn't need to make an effort to hold on to cranks.
The exchange reads like textbook example of broadbrushing. Somebody raised concerns about negative long term effects of censorship, your reply accused them personally of believing that 'Covid-19 is caused by 5-g towers'. They never even mentioned Covid19 or 5G.
> Are you saying that the truth is "Covid-19 is caused by 5-g towers"?
vs. a reformulation, to capture your stated intent:
> Are you saying that we should allow the circulation of obviously wrong ideas like "Covid-19 is caused by 5-g towers"?
Just because some of the 'Covid19 is caused by 5G towers' crowd also believes censorship is a bad idea, we can't infer that everyone / a majority of people that believe censorship is a bad idea are also believing 'Covid19 is caused by 5G towers'. Alas, our brains are very prone to this kind of elementary logic error, which makes the broadbrushing mechanism so powerful.
> Just because some of the 'Covid19 is caused by 5G towers' crowd also believes censorship is a bad idea, we can't infer that everyone / a majority of people that believe censorship is a bad idea are also believing 'Covid19 is caused by 5G towers'.
I, personally, don't see how this leap in logic is implied, and it certainly wasn't intended. Thanks for the explanation, unfortunately I can't change the original post.
Hopefully it's clear that that wasn't my intent. To be a bit defensive though:
> your reply accused them personally of believing that 'Covid-19 is caused by 5-g towers'. They never even mentioned Covid19 or 5G.
No, I didn't. I asked them a very pointed question that forces them to either take on a ridiculous position or to confront a flaw in their line of reasoning. I find this to be a valid strategy when discussing with people. I certainly don't believe that the person I responded to thinks 5g causes Covid. I think basically no one believes that. Hence why I thought that the question would be interpreted as I intended: that there's a difference between censoring "truth" and "untruth". This was apparently missed.
> I've never seen a bad or immoral or harmful idea die out when more people learn about it and scrutinize it.
Leaded gasoline, phlogiston, cold fusion, phrenology, scientific racism, basically the entire history of the progress of science.
But let's also not forget that you're asking for a list of discredited ideas, so you wouldn't have heard of them, by definition, if things are working as they should, because they're wrong and the former proponents have long since abandoned trying to disseminate them to you.
> Deplatforming these people and, importantly, showing social pressure that these are bad ideas and shouldn't even be entertained as valid debate, has shown to work repeatedly.
If all you're doing is defining "work" as "the censorship target was censored" then you're not claiming anything. When you kick these people off of major platforms, they don't cease to exist, they break off like an extremist splinter group and go to a place with no moderating influences to fester. You don't see them anymore, but they're still there, and then suddenly somehow Donald Trump is the President of the United States and people can't believe it and don't understand how it happened.
> In fact, social pressure is one of the most effective tools against hate and ignorance like this.
Censorship isn't social pressure, it's force. Social pressure is telling wrong people why they're wrong, every time.
People who are wrong need to be made right, not made frustrated and angry and yet not only still wrong but now even more convinced that their wrong ideas are right because they now have real evidence that they're not getting a fair public debate.
> Leaded gasoline, phlogiston, cold fusion, phrenology, scientific racism, basically the entire history of the progress of science.
The progress of science wasn't driven by nutjobs delivering spittle-flecked rants on Youtube. Almost all of it was driven by careful peer review of ideas -- which is the exact opposite of unrestricted speech.
Those ideas were originated by careful peer review of ideas— they were put into practice by unrestricted discussion proliferating throughout the populous.
Peer review being so widespread and regarded as necessary is remarkably recent, and it's not at all clear that it's necessary or terribly effective for science.
Let's have a word about gay rights then. Once upon a time a pride parade full of rainbow hair dye and BDSM leather and face paint and drag queens and hairy-chested shirtless men would have been right next to your "spittle-flecked rants" in the proper gentleman's book of ways not to get your message out, but I wouldn't want to be the one to say that they should have been censored over it.
Not everybody is a traditional upperclass gentleman and not everybody who isn't is wrong.
But that's not actually how it worked out. Gay marriage didn't go from an unpopular stance to a popular one throughout the 2000s by displays like this. If anything, they were used as ammunition by people strongly against gay marriage in order to slow the change in public opinion.
First you show the world you exist and convince your friends it's worth trying to change things, then you convince the moderates, then you win the fight, then you wait for your bitter enemies to die because they'll never be convinced but at least their kids are open to new ideas.
Pissing off your bitter enemies can be hard to avoid and still get the job done.
But this article is making my exact point. By the time gay marriage was actually gaining acceptance, the largest pride parades had become as tame as 4th of July celebrations, with SF pride marching with the police, the mayor, and Google employees. They're completely different from their predecessors, like the Stonewall riots.
Because it's a different stage of the fight. You don't start off having a parade with the mayor in it because the mayor won't give you the time of day until your movement is big enough to be taken seriously, which starts with getting noticed and getting out the base. Being bland and studious doesn't do that.
And the parades are still full of weirdos, but they won, so now it's okay.
The point stands that even these seemingly "queer", radically expressed ideas clearly became a lot tamer, less insolently-stated and more agreeable over time, despite the lack of anything approaching real censorship. That's precisely what you want if you care about not harming society at large, especially in the longer run.
Actually, Galileo did largely deliver self-aggrandizing spittle-flecked rants, full of personal attacks against other astronomers, which were complete rubbish. His arguments for why the Earth revolved around the Sun were complete nonsense, and were more theological, than scientific in nature.
His contemporaries were not particularly impressed, but he probably wouldn't have been censored, if he also didn't try his damned hardest to personally piss off everyone in his social circle.
His 'efforts' probably set the adoption of heliocentrism back by decades.
And Isaac Newton did a lot of work in alchemy, occult studies and predictions of the apocalypse founded in the period equivalent to the "Bible code". I don't know why people assume that the foremost scientists in recorded history did not benefit from an overall intellectually-open social climate and worldview. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Galileo in particular was prosecuted by the Catholic church for making spittle flecked rants against the Pope. Much like a modern YouTuber, he then pretended he was persecuted for his science.
When did scientific racism die out? Mainstream US publications are still publishing op-eds that assume scientific racism is a legitimate topic. This has been going on since the country was founded. I'm not sure how effective a disinfectant sunlight is if it takes centuries to work.
The body of opinions designated as scientific racism has changed over time. Giving the parent the benefit of the doubt, I took their statement to be referencing traditional scientific racism, such as that which rested on craniometry and other bizarre pseudoscience.
> When did scientific racism die out? Mainstream US publications are still publishing op-eds that assume scientific racism is a legitimate topic.
I encourage you to review some of the early to mid 20th-century publications on the topic. "Science" backing segregation. Americans pontificating about whether Hitler was right or that blacks should be sterilized, and then actually doing it. Doctors. In hospitals. "Three generations of imbeciles are enough" from the US Supreme Court.
If you think we're in the same state now as we were then, you don't know where we were then.
> I'm not sure how effective a disinfectant sunlight is if it takes centuries to work.
You would prefer the alternative where anything contradicting the then-prevailing doctrine of racial supremacy and eugenics was censored? How long does the truth take to get out in that case? And what happens in the meantime?
That's off the mark. It's more that there are angry, frustrated, or stupid people and they taught how to channel their anger, frustration, and stupidity into specific forms of hate. Conspiracy theories don't grow because all these people came to the same conclusion independently and then found each other.
Sure but who decides what ideas are bad or immoral or harmful? Everyone pretends like this is some simple problem to solve but come on. It's incredibly complex and it seems that both sides of this argument that want to anoint an Arbiter of Truth are only okay with it insofar as it's their Arbiter.
Just imagine traveling back in time and trying to convince your grandmother of this.
"We just can't know if the polio vaccine will work, because it's just fundamentally impossible to decide what is true and false."
"What about the trials the scientists did?"
"No, grandma, believing the scientists would be picking a side."
The only reason that anybody thinks deciding the truth is impossible is because we're currently living with the greatest amount of free speech in history. It's a slippery slope but in the exact opposite direction than everybody thinks.
This is a really stupid example because they didn't actually do the kind of double-blind peer-reviewed trials for the polio vaccine that you seem to think is the only way for "science" to declare something as acceptable - they just did it. And actually, in the first round of "trials" for the Polio vaccine a bunch of children died. But, thankfully, we didn't have some annoying corporate apparatus running things at the time, so we eventually got over that initial hiccup and BAM ... no more Polio.
That's an idealistic statement but a false one. Bullshit is much easier to produce than truth, and is inherently much more appealing, because it isn't constrained by having to be true.
For example, the "good speech" counterpart of David Icke is a number of real experts who are taking to Twitter and blogs. I've seen a few. They usually have single digit reach. In five minutes, Icke can reach a larger audience than all of them combined throughout their entire lives.
Perhaps you'd prefer a quote like: the best response to bad speech is an authoritarian censor with unlimited powers to silence and imprison people? Because if your only criterion is effectiveness at silencing someone I think that misses the point. Built into the statement is the idea that otherwise the cure (censorship) is worse than the disease.
This slope isn't nearly as slippery as you're saying. If YouTube began issuing a million times more bans, it might approach the quality of an average newspaper in terms of accuracy. Would we be living in a dystopia at that point? No, we'd be living just like we did in the year 2000, when YouTube wasn't around but newspapers were. Just like a nutjob in 2000, Icke still has print, radio, TV, going outside with a megaphone, and going door to door with pamphlets to promote his message. In fact, he's even luckier, because he still has access to the entire rest of the internet.
Indeed, the fact that we're here discussing Icke's massive popular impact is proof that in 2020, there is far more free speech than there was in 2000, when he was mostly ignored. We are at historically high levels of free speech. Freaking out over this is like thinking we've gone back to the Bronze Age every time the stock market goes down 1%.
I'm not making a slippery-slope argument or freaking out over anything. Just noting the metric you are using will always prefer a more authoritarian response. I.e., did the policy work to silence every example I can find for any conspiracy theory that might survive to gain attention? Defenders of free speech obviously want us to take the bad with the good.
As for the internet, I think of it as technology that brings advances also brings new problems. Sometimes we just have to accept them.
Not that I'm against YouTube censoring their content as a private company, by the way. Just defending a quote here.
There are huge differences between YouTube (a platform for user-generated content) and a newspaper (a publisher). The latter curates and is legally responsible for anything it publishes, the former isn't.
I think YouTube is a lot closer to AT&T than to the New York Times.
Maybe legalistically it is, but my point is that it's like the NYT and radio and print in the sense that these are all routes for one-to-many communication. Restricting one route of one-to-many communication isn't the end of the world. (Meanwhile, AT&T facilitated one-to-one communication. It would indeed be horrifying to censor that -- which is why precisely nobody in this giant comments section is advocating for it, nor is it going to happen.)
Because, as I said a couple comments ago, the degree of one-to-many communication available to people has been continuously skyrocketing for decades, and currently stands at levels far beyond any seen in history. Even the heaviest possible strawman-censorship one could imagine on Youtube would only erase a small part of this rise. That's because the internet has allowed one-to-many communication to massively scale up, while almost by definition one-to-one communication can't.
Totally disagree. Sure the degree of one-to-many communication has greatly increased, but it's been mostly concentrated within the top platforms. Losing access to those would be severely limiting. And no, an email blast isn't a proper alternative to Facebook, any ideas kicked off of major platforms would be at a severe disadvantage.
I feel like we're going in circles here. Even if every single site and app coordinated to kick off David Icke, he would end up, at worst, as silenced as the average American in the year 2000. It just doesn't seem all that bad to me.
No, that's simply not true. The forums of pubic discourse from before do not exist anymore, the collective's attention has moved. If you lose the megaplatforms, you are much worse off than someone in 2000.
What forums are you talking about? Radio, mail, TV, and newspapers still have audiences of hundreds of millions. Internet forums are in decline, but those have always had completely negligible public reach (as in, down by more than 2 orders of magnitude) compared to the others.
The audience of the things you've listed has shrunk dramatically, in terms of percentage at the very least. Just look at where ad dollars have been moving for the past 15 years.
> More importantly, I've also seen the opposite: Private platforms actively suppressing people trying to harm humanity does work. Deplatforming these people and, importantly, showing social pressure that these are bad ideas and shouldn't even be entertained as valid debate, has shown to work repeatedly. In fact, social pressure is one of the most effective tools against hate and ignorance like this.
Really? Seems to me like there is a resurgence in hate and ignorance right now and deplatforming seems to only be adding fuel to the fire.
What you are missing is the bad, immoral and harmful ideas that perpetuate themselves by virtue of being proclaimed true by the authorities. Every totalitarian regime out there perpetuates a set of such 'official truths', that are painfully and obviously untrue to the subjects, but have to be aquiesced to.
"More importantly, I've also seen the opposite: Private platforms actively suppressing people trying to harm humanity does work."
On who, really? David Icke and the dude from infowars? Are these the big players in the harming humanity business? I don't think so. I'd go as far as to say they're irrelevant. David Icke was a crank on youtube and now he's a crank off youtube-- which might sound significant until you remember he was a crank before youtube, and could well be a crank after youtube.
The big players, the significant forces harming humanity, they won't be challenged by private platforms, because the private platforms need their money, or need access to them, or in some other way have their interests entangled.
> In fact, social pressure is one of the most effective tools against hate and ignorance like this.
If you de-platform people, you no longer have a way to pressure them. Declaring them "beyond the pale" means giving up further rational influence on them. Nothing is left but violence.
The people we revere as history's greatest moral leaders never took this approach.
I know that HN is an international community but it's based in the US and most users are Americans. In the US, you need strong evidence of negative repercussions to restrict speech, and even then it's extremely difficult, due to the 1st amendment being one of the most important laws of the land.
It's not the other way around - evidence is not needed to show that allowing speech is helpful.
Apparently, that's not true. I initially had that strong impression too, from the way estadounidenses talk on here, (like as if everyone in the world lives under US constitutional amendments etc) but I heard the majority are non-US. Last I heard, HN might have another survey on that question soon. I hope so, I'd love to know what the numbers actually are.
That's not what the first amendment says. The first amending only stops the government from enacting laws that limit speech. Private companies and individuals are free to limit speech however they like on their own platforms and environments (within the bounds of the law of course).
The first amendment is like 50 words long, you should read it.
No need for snark. Of course I've read the first amendment. I'm speaking of speech in general. This post is about censorship by private entities, but there is current of thought in this thread that speech should be restricted in general.
That's just not true though. In the US the rights of property trumps the rights of Freedom of Speech in 99% of cases.
If someone puts up a cardboard box on my property and begins a speech, I have the right to kick them off of my property. We have 'Free Speech Zones' which we kick protesters into so that their exertion of their rights doesn't bother other people. We have cases of senators getting people arrested solely because they laughed at them.
And that's ignoring our long history of suppressing people based on their race or origin. Black Americans are the first ones that come to mind, but we treated Italians and Asians as second-class citizens not that long ago as well. We've had this 'freedom of speech' right enshrined but not at all interpreted like people seem to think it was.
I disagree. I think you have to accept the consequences of destructive behavior. If someone was talking like this at my office, I'd expect them to be fired. Same as if they were outwardly racist or sexist. It's detrimental to other people's well-being.
Who chooses whether it’s detrimental to other well being? What if that person who chooses is tyrannical like the CEO of Reddit, who suppresses all right wing posts?
> COVID-19 has added the additional element of this new concept of "disinformation". The argument is seductively simple: "being exposed to this information could lead you to engage in patterns of behavior that harm society. Therefore we can conceptualize this speech as being an indirect form of violence/negligence and therefore we have a moral obligation to remove such content".
Which is actually extremely funny, since Youtube directly links to all WHO content as it were the Word of God, and WHO just a month and a half ago was crying on all rooftops that masks were useless and should not be used before completely reversing their stance. So by their own standards WHO is propagating disinformation/negligence and harming society as well.
Wouldn't you want a health organization to be able to quickly adjust their advice if needed, if new information has been found? Or if a fault in the old studies or information has been found? Or how would you have them behave instead?
> I don't believe in fighting "bad ideas" by suppressing them, I believe in shining a light on them. Let the truth fight for itself.
The truth often doesn't get the chance to fight for itself on platforms like YouTube and Facebook. They are designed to keep showing you more of what they think you want to see because that drives engagement and engagement is what's profitable. You simply won't see opposing views. You go further down the rabbit hole and your existing ideas are reinforced, no matter how faulty they are.
Sometimes the truth doesn't have the resources to fight for itself. For example, this woman has been falsely accused of starting the coronavirus pandemic:
It's a lie concocted by one of her fellow Americans. It's a lie that's now been spread all over the world resulting in death threats to her and her family. She simply doesn't have the resources to stop it. The police haven't helped her. YouTube hasn't helped her. She doesn't have the money to pursue a civil lawsuit. The best she can do is get in the media and hope that somehow helps.
Once a lie is spread far enough it will eventually find someone who believes it and is unstable enough to act on it. We've seen that before as well:
A contest of ideas presupposes a level playing field, a balanced presentation, equal voices, and a basic agreement of the facts. That is, unfortunately, not the practical reality.
> Many may disagree, but I think we need to throw out this concept of "disinformation" entirely. I don't believe in fighting "bad ideas" by suppressing them, I believe in shining a light on them. Let the truth fight for itself.
Your argument is flawed on many counts.
(1) You’re forgetting that the people subscribing these 5G conspiracy channels on YouTube by definition already have access to YouTube and likely the rest of the web. A plethora of true information is already available to them.
(2) Stop anthropomorphizing truth: people fight to promote what they think is true.
(3) Even if the first amendment applied here, recall that it has been established that the first amendment does not protect shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater.
(4) How can you claim that the truth will fight for itself when you’re unwilling to even address the very convincing counter argument you so helpfully included at the end of your comment?
The 'shouting fire' example is not a trump card that's valid outside non-live situations. It's not applicable in a live situation where someone [as in your (2)] believes the fire, for what appeared to be a good reason, to be a true risk. Finally, in (4) you seem to believe that an abstract statement is necessarily rendered invalid by someone's failure to adhere to the thrust of its message. It isn't.
The first amendment is about the government. Your speech is not illegal. The government cannot persecute you for your opinion or beliefs. It has absolutely nothing to do with your ability to be heard on the internet.
I must admit I find your reply a bit frustrating, because I literally began my comment by addressing what I feel is exactly your argument:
> I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), but that's different from saying that we as a society should want our private platforms to engage in such censorship and suppression.
In other words, do you see how your response is taking exactly the "well, technically it's legal" attitude that I was talking about, and how my point was about that there is a difference between what is legal and what we actually want in a society?
You're completely ignoring the fact that corporations are comprised of people, and as such have First Amendment rights of free speech and self-expression of their own.
I understand your letter of the law/spirit of the law position on free speech. I agree that the dichotomy is frustrating, for a ton of issues beside speech.
I disagree that "platforms" answer to a higher calling than I do. The first amendment is a contract between a US citizen and the US government. I'm not shrugging off your argument as "this is how things are"; I believe this is how things should be.
Many of the comments in this thread focus on large players' significant influence on the information that Americans consume. I don't think this has anything to do with free speech law; if anything, it's an anti-trust issue. Forcing for-profit, non-governmental organizations to publish all speech of all Americans sounds like a nightmare. I don't want to live in that society.
Neither of those are cases of the government prosecuting you for opinion or belief.
One is the government prosecuting you for destroying government property. The other is the government prosecuting you for sharing information that you are not allowed to share.
It has always been the case that certain forms of protest are legal, and certain forms are not. Protesting in ways that are illegal doesn't mean that your right to free speech is curtailed. You can still say whatever you want, you just can't say it while burning cars or whatever.
> It has always been the case that certain forms of protest are legal, and certain forms are not. Protesting in ways that are illegal doesn't mean that your right to free speech is curtailed. You can still say whatever you want, you just can't say it while burning cars or whatever.
All four cases involve some form of protest against the government. All four were peaceful; They did not harm others. All four involve the Supreme Court upholding their convictions.
> Your speech is not illegal. The government cannot persecute you for your opinion or beliefs.
Don’t you tell me that the government doesn’t try to censor speech or that they can’t.
Corporations should not be allowed to persecute based on option or beliefs either. Corporations already cant persecute based on sex, race, religion, orientation or age. Why should beliefs be any different?
Employers may not discriminate based on these things. They can let you go for what you say. It's called employment at will and I should have the right to remove someone from my private company who is toxic to our culture. If someone is acting unprofessional, I can see no way to force the company to retain them.
This is completely separate from private publishers and platforms. Should a magazine or news paper be forced to publish anything? Does YouTube not charging you for producing content somehow change their relationship?
"Give your worst political enemy the power to decide what is "hate speech" and what is "disinformation" and then you'll realize that free speech isn't something we should ever compromise on". - Naval Ravikant
No. Regulating the speed of cars on the freeway is radically different than giving a group the ability to decide what does or does not qualify as "disinformation" and regulating accordingly.
> now comes the classic counter-argument: that the evils of disinformation possess a virality that makes them spread far more easily than the truth, being that truth is nuanced and difficult to acquire whereas bad information is seductively simple
This is such a knockdown argument that I can't believe you just refused to address it!
The mirror image of David Icke is the genuine experts that are trying to get good, nuanced information out there, often fresh out of research papers. Most of these people have single digit reach, i.e. so little that they could spend their whole lives getting less reach that Icke gets in 5 minutes.
The asymmetry in potency between good and bad information is far higher today than at any time in the past, and I applaud Youtube for doing a tiny bit to stop the bleeding.
> Booting people off of platforms merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them.
This is just not true. Or rather, it may be true, but it is entirely irrelevant.
We as a society don't care who radicalised David Icke is. It just doesn't matter. What matters is that letting him spread his misinformation causes harm and death. Actual people die because of this. And that can be stopped by denying him a platform. If it makes him more angry, that is absolutely irrelevant.
1. Government passes law that websites that get a million eyeballs a day and display user-generated content are forbidden from curating the content on their site.
2. Government produces propaganda, or through some legal indirections, arranges the production of propaganda.
3. Producers of above propaganda publishes or arranges astroturfing of the propaganda onto every large platform.
So this is a situation where the government has the power to dictate speech of private parties. Is that seen as a positive outcome by free speech advocates?
And what happens when the government lowers the bar? With precedent set that the government has the right to halt censorship by private parties, will they stop at a million views per day? Will they expand to things such as messaging services?
And what will happen to spam content? After a website crosses the million views threshold, must its genuine content be diluted into oblivion?
The high and mighty freedom argument is tired. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean an inalienable right to broadcast or use someone else’s property in a way that is against their wishes.
A newspaper had no obligation to publish some crazy letter to the editor. Nor does YouTube have an obligation to publish some crazy video.
freedom of speech gives adversaries a way of saturating the information channel to capacity with at best noise, at worst actively incorrect but otherwise coherent data (see conspiracy theories). end result is people either believing the misinformation (because truth is impossible to discern) or stopping the use of the channel at all (same cause, different rationale). it's a losing proposition in the age of information. it was a great idea before while technology didn't allow capture of the channel at such a low cost.
freedom of speech is now a tool used against democracy with great success. yes, i'm super pissed about it and no, i don't have a solution. i believe we're witness to a crawling fall of rome scenario which is carefully helped by nation states outside of the west.
The following may seem frivolous and/or uncharitable but I think you would find them hard to disagree with:
- booting people off platforms is a "bad idea" which you wish to "suppress".
- booting people off platforms shines a light on their "bad ideas"
I'm sympathetic to the spirit of your comment, but I think Mr Icke has plenty of other ways to publish his ideas, and I don't believe youtube is suppressing them in a way that necessitates suppression of theirs.
> booting people off platforms is a "bad idea" which you wish to "suppress".
Not censoring an idea and arguing that an idea should not be implemented are not equivalent.
> booting people off platforms shines a light on their "bad ideas"
If this is true, i.e. reporting of the censorship increases the visibility of the bad idea, then it completely destroys the pro-censorship argument that it reduces the visibility of bad ideas. It would also immediately cease to be true if censorship ever became uncontroversial, in which case you couldn't claim that it's giving the allegedly bad idea a chance at a fair debate.
> I'm sympathetic to the spirit of your comment, but I think Mr Icke has plenty of other ways to publish his ideas, and I don't believe youtube is suppressing them in a way that necessitates suppression of theirs.
Is somebody suggesting that YouTube should be prohibited from creating and distributing their own videos?
> Not censoring an idea and arguing that an idea should not be implemented are not equivalent.
I'm not sure this is correct, but I'm willing to be convinced if you can expand a little more. I guess I see it as censoring the act of censoring.
> If this is true, i.e. reporting of the censorship increases the visibility of the bad idea, then it completely destroys the pro-censorship argument that it reduces the visibility of bad ideas. It would also immediately cease to be true if censorship ever became uncontroversial, in which case you couldn't claim that it's giving the allegedly bad idea a chance at a fair debate.
In this case, it is true. But youtube censorship is not equivalent to societal censorship, it just signals that youtube does not endorse Icke's ideas and does not wish to publish them, but people can still evaluate them somewhere else.
> Is somebody suggesting that YouTube should be prohibited from creating and distributing their own videos?
No, the suggestion is they should not be allowed to write their own terms and enforce them.
> I'm not sure this is correct, but I'm willing to be convinced if you can expand a little more. I guess I see it as censoring the act of censoring.
Censorship applies to information. Restricting information can't be justified because it's by definition impossible for the public to evaluate whether what's being censored is appropriate when it gets taken down and they can't see it. "Censoring the act of censoring" doesn't have any such problem -- if YouTube was prohibited from censoring videos, they can do it even when everybody has full knowledge that they're operating under that constraint.
They could even run a banner at the top of videos they don't like that says "YouTube things this is wrong" and link to their own video explaining how, and that wouldn't be censorship. But you don't need to take down somebody else's videos to do that. It's in fact better if you don't, because then more of the people who come to see the video you think is wrong will see the message explaining why you think it's wrong, instead of going somewhere else where there is only the alleged misinformation.
> But youtube censorship is not equivalent to societal censorship, it just signals that youtube does not endorse Icke's ideas and does not wish to publish them, but people can still evaluate them somewhere else.
That would be fine so long as the somewhere else is equally prominent, but YouTube is too big for there to be any such place. If you're a monopoly/oligopoly then you ought to be a common carrier. If they really wanted out of that they could always break themselves up.
> No, the suggestion is they should not be allowed to write their own terms and enforce them.
Enforcing terms as a monopoly is effectively legislating, so they should follow the same rules as the government.
You can bring megawatt lasers to bear on a bad idea from all angles and fools will not budge. Many people are not rational, it's impossible that you've not realised that yet you push this POV.
Saying we can deal with idiot ideas with rationality is itself disinformation because for some groups it clearly doesn't work.
> ...whereas bad information is seductively simple. I won't address that argument here
Odd that you won't, because this is the exact forum to address that argument. Please address it.
Someone I know has repeatedly told me that "they[0] added HIV to covid to make it so dangerous" and telling them for the Nth time there's no evidence of that has not changed anything, nor will it ever I suspect.
[0] Unstated who 'they' are but implication is the chinese.
"But, indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries. To speak only of religious opinions: the Reformation broke out at least twenty times before Luther, and was put down. Arnold of Brescia was put down. Fra Dolcino was put down. Savonarola was put down. The Albigeois were put down. The Vaudois were put down. The Lollards were put down. The Hussites were put down. Even after the era of Luther, wherever persecution was persisted in, it was successful. In Spain, Italy, Flanders, the Austrian empire, Protestantism was rooted out; and, most likely, would have been so in England, had Queen Mary lived, or Queen Elizabeth died. Persecution has always succeeded, save where the heretics were too strong a party to be effectually persecuted. No reasonable person can doubt that Christianity might have been extirpated in the Roman empire. It spread, and became predominant, because the persecutions were only occasional, lasting but a short time, and separated by long intervals of almost undisturbed propagandism. It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it."
> I don't believe in fighting "bad ideas" by suppressing them, I believe in shining a light on them. Let the truth fight for itself.
I used to think this too, but I think the decentralised nature of the internet has broken this notion. There is no universal “light” shining on disinformation because there’s no universal anything. You can spend your entire online life in a very strict filter bubble that means the disinformation you consume never gets corrected (Facebook and YouTube have implemented algorithms that opt people into these bubbles without them even being aware). The only way it gets fixed is if people actively try to find information that disagrees with their preconceived notions, and very, very few people are interested in doing that.
Are you saying that I am entering propaganda territory, or instead that David Icke is/was? The meaning is not clear to me, although I assume you are referring to myself.
Again, the distinction here is that I don't think being wrong (even if you think it's intentional) is something we should try to suppress. And the reason I think that is because right/wrong is ultimately a value judgement, and thus opens the door for equally flawed individuals to castigate a viewpoint as false while conversely spreading their own falsehoods (which they themselves view as truth).
As far as advertising revenue is concerned, I understand that business incentive. So, if they want to use Reddit's quarantine concept - or even boot them off their platform as they are doing now - they're free to do so, but I don't think that it's the _right_ thing to do.
In other words, we can agree that a business is acting in its own self-interest and thus would want to get rid of these types of people. I believe that they have the legal authority to do so, as well as all the incentives. But where I don't agree is that I don't cheer them on when they do it. Rather I think it's very dangerous.
So in other words, I suspect the difference between our beliefs here is that you are cheering on YouTube for doing this. You're (correctly) seeing that David Icke is a total fucking wacko and saying to yourself "good riddance". I certainly understand that inclination. I just don't believe in it myself, for the reasons that I've outlined. (I hope I haven't mischaracterized you there - sorry if I did)
That's a slippery and dangerous road to say whats propaganda and whats right speech, and saying propaganda isn't allowed is like saying you can't have the government give announcements either.
The “platform” (section 230) discussion has always been based around a bad faith reading of the law; Ken White (1st amendment lawyer) covered that in his podcast “Make no Law”.
I think the troubling thing is that binding corporations to the first amendment would have all kinds of troubling consequences, including eliminating the ability of moderators to ban people for misbehavior.
At small groups shinning light on falsehoods does help, at the scale of internet where 8 billion people are interconnected on social networks is not working at all, I would like to see research proving otherwise but it's as the old saying goes: A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.
I want to believe what you write here, but reality seems to be proving that there are just far more absurdly gullible people out there than I would like to believe.
I mean flat Earth is an actual thing. That proves to me that there are no limits.
What I don't know is whether this is new or an eternal part of the human condition that was just masked in the past. I know there have always been gullible fools, but have there always been this many?
I personally wonder if there might be more today due to too many people being too insulated from the "real world" beyond the easy cushy paths of school -> college -> office job. There are too many people who have never deviated from these paths and thus have never seen the "real world."
I don't think it's stupidity. A lot of these people seem relatively intelligent. They just seem shockingly naive.
I used to have a very similar opinion to yours until I found out the truth rarely fights for itself if there's an alternative, much more convenient lie — preferably one that plays into peoples' confirmation bias or makes someone richer.
We've got an aysmmetry here that never existed before in human history. Any kind of large scale public addressing: newspapers, TV, books, had some kind of controlling mechanism and instances who stood in for the quality with their reputation: Editors, printers, TV stations.
All legislation, including the First Amendment (which, just picking nits here, is probably too simple to slap onto YouTube as a global content platform as a US-only law) was written regarding these conventions.
YouTube goes out there and hands everyone a big fat mike who wants to be heard, and then amplifies this voice to believers via recommendations.
I used to think the Internet would be a net benefit to the world. After witnessing Cambridge Analytica, the "Internet Research Agency", large scale online harrassment and Anti-Vaxxers, I'm not so sure anymore.
I don't claim to know what the answer is.
I just claim I'm pretty sure it's not the unbounded freedom to anonymous and partly highly maliciously motivated actors to spread their message without oversight.
I also like to cite Ben Franklin, writing about the time more than 250 years ago, about him being one of a very few printers in the whole new nation, and facing the same dilemma:
"In the conduct of my newspaper, I carefully excluded all libeling and personal abuse, which is of late years become so disgraceful to our country. Whenever I was solicited to insert anything of that kind, and the writers pleaded, as they generally did, the liberty of the press, and that a newspaper was like a stage-coach, in which anyone who would pay had a right to a place, my answer was, that I would print the piece separately if desired, and the author might have as many copies as he pleased to distribute himself, but that I would not take upon me to spread his detraction; and that, having contracted with my subscribers to furnish them with what might be either useful or entertaining, I could not fill their papers with private altercation, in which they had no concern, without doing them manifest injustice. Now, many of our printers make no scruple of gratifying the malice of individuals by false accusations of the fairest characters among ourselves, augmenting animosity even to the producing of duels; and are, moreover, so indiscreet as to print scurrilous reflections on the government of neighboring states, and even on the conduct of our best national allies, which may be attended with the most pernicious consequences. These things I mention as a caution to young printers, and that they may be encouraged not to pollute their presses and disgrace their profession by such infamous practices, but refuse steadily, as they may see by my example that such a course of conduct will not, on the whole, be injurious to their interests."
From "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin", written between from 1771 to 1790, now in public domain.
In theory I agree, but freedom speech should come with responsibilty of speech, especially when you have a broad audience. When you built an audience that you make believe "science is bollocks" and spread that 5g is responsible for the spread of COVID-19, how do you prevent the potential death and destruction it's gonna result in? I agree that just shutting down a youtube account is not the best approach, but in this case, something has to be done and there's no good framework for that currently.
I do believe strongly that people should be held responsible for any act caused by them spreading lies.
>I don't believe in fighting "bad ideas" by suppressing them, I believe in shining a light on them. Let the truth fight for itself.
I mean, this is testable. Look at websites where "bad ideas" aren't suppressed, and instead anyone can chime in with their reasoned or unreasoned opinion and duke it out without any real-life consequences.
...and you end up with 8chan, the site where people discuss the best ways to murder Jews.
Science, facts, truth, those don't matter on chan boards, what does is virality, fear, anger, emotion. Or since it's Star Wars day, The Dark Side wins unless people are willing to stop it.
That is related to currency and none of its backing arguments have any applicability to speech. Using it in this matter is highly misleading, and could be cited as a form of misinformation.
> The outcome described by Aristophanes is common in competing human groups or organizations: When bad behavior has taken root, and that bad behavior has a “survival advantage” against good behavior, it becomes difficult, and occasionally impossible, to drive out the bad behavior; a process akin to natural selection.
This is the mental model reference I was thinking about when posting.
I understand that you’re arguing they should honor the spirit of it, but the language is:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.“
Could be argued that this is a covenant of sorts the federal government is making with the people and/or states. In a sense, could be argued individual states wouldn’t need to honor it to individuals provided they don’t include such language in their own constitutions (I’d assume there is said language, but don’t know).
The only issue I see with the “bad ideas” thing is that it requires a lot of effort on the part of the person doing the debunking. They have to provide data points, citations, etc. to counter whatever was put out and in a lot of cases, it is just ignored in favor of the bogus bit that started the whole thing (which in some cases requires some degree of effort on the part of the originator, in other cases spitballing gets them there).
I’m somewhere in the middle. I worry about cases where seemingly the only wrong committed is to hold an opposing view, but in cases where someone willfully put forth bogus information, I’m not terribly opposed. Would rather that the sources for where the conclusions were drawn were similarly provided, at least then I could assume some degree of good faith. But if you and I are looking at two pieces of data and come to differing conclusions, that in and of itself should not lead to either of us being “silenced.”
> That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment
There is no right conferred by the constitution that guarantees you a public platform in a private forum, it is simply an exemption from persecution by the government for statements made on any platform. That does not mean that the private owner of a forum must provide a platform of statements it does not endorse or condone for content that would be contrary to the forum owner or administrator's intended audience. That would be like forcing a restaurant that has been vandalized with graffiti from washing the exterior because the vandal has the right to have his work displayed regardless of the content, audience, or message.
> COVID-19 has added the additional element of this new concept of "disinformation".
This is not in any way a new concept. Furthermore this kind of disinformation can destroy the lives on innocent bystanders. Don't believe me? Ask all the people that have been effected by Sandy Hook truthers, Pizza Gate, and if you want to go back to the 80s, the daycare satanic moral panics.
what evidence do you have that shining light on bad ideas is effective? ive spent 30 years online trying to shine light on bad ideas like creationism and climate change denial and seen way way less penetration than a hastily made conspiracy video.
i'm not sure suppression is the answer either but i have sure not seen shining light winning this war.
Unfortunately, I fear the reality of this situation is a lot less nuanced than you're expressing here. It's more likely that the advertisers who give YouTube a lot of money simply threatened not to advertise on the platform should he continue to have a presence there.
In David Icke's case, he directly threatens telecommunications carriers' ability to sell 5G services. That's directly counter to said carriers' marketing goals.
Not to anthropomorphize YouTube too much here, services like them derive their morality from profit. If something threatens profitability, they'll do what's required to correct that problem. Moreover, there are a number of feedback loops in place that reinforce this behavior. This isn't a matter of YouTube judging a bad idea on its merit; this is a matter of them judging a bad idea on how it affects advertising revenue.
Put in a somewhat more uncouth manner: Money talks, bullshit walks.
Couldn't YouTube have adopted Reddit's quarantine concept? (Ignoring for the time-being the inherent tendency of such a concept being used to drive out dissent as happened with Reddit with respect to fringe conservative voices)
If YouTube's advertisers found that kind of thing agreeable, I suppose they could. That said, I'm not sure the incentive exists for them to undertake that kind of work.
The platform existing for everyday people to disseminate their views is secondary to using user-submitted content as a vehicle for advertising revenue. Another way of thinking about it is that the popular content subsidizes the not-so-popular content.
As a corollary: The more popular your content is, the more advertising revenue it needs to bring in. There was even some controversy somewhat recently about this very thing.
Corporations are just people. You are suggesting that when people speak in groups (e.g. enforcing the Youtube EULA) that is not protected free speech but when an individual speaks it is.
Good luck translating this half-baked idea into a legal framework that is consistent and sensical.
The very nature of scientific inquiry is to question conventional wisdom. Often those new ideas are heretical.
That is not to say that all ideas are valid forms of scientific inquiry. But suppressing all but the "blessed" opinions of the WHO goes against the scientific process.
Suppressing blatantly false, inflammatory ideas isn't "all but the 'blessed'".
It is taking the man on the corner who is shouting "Ducks are responsible for your failure!" and "Letting the blacksmith build a second shack will cause insanity in all the children!" off to a quiet room where he no longer causes people to throw stones at the blacksmith, or shoot ducks on sight.
Icke was that special kind of conspiracy nut who wouldn't dare fact check his own bile because he'd find his whole worldview based on nothing.
Slippery slope questions aside, we tend to put controls on things like schizophrenic rambling and people having psychotic breaks... I consider him in that same category. He should be isolated for his own protection and those around him.
> I don't believe in fighting "bad ideas" by suppressing them
What is a "bad idea" is also hard to know sometimes. If I was there in the time of Galileo I would probably be fighting his "the earth goes round the sun" argument as well.
Many times great ideas first appear seemingly as "bad ideas". Which then are the good "bad ideas" and the bad "bad ideas"? It is unclear if corporates can answer that better than the world as a whole.
Maybe they should just explicitly mark the content with "this may be a bad idea" and leave it online - trusting the users?
So, operatives for ISIS, should be allowed to put up bomb-making or even just videos on how to shoot a gun properly with infidel-like targets (manequins in business suits for example), and it should just be allowed? Should they be allowed to put up recruitment videos to get more kids willing to become walking bombs?
People literally are using the mis-information about covid-19/5G and setting 5G towers on fire. Mis-information is dangerous. It's a tool used by governments and terrorist organizations alike, information can be propagandized to create upheavals that benefit specific groups.
We tried shining light on bad ideas. It didn't work. All the light the world could muster was being shined onto the lack of a link between vaccines and autism, yet there was a measles is having a resurgence.
Suppression doesn't really sit well with me either, but "disinformation" is nothing new. There are plenty of ideas that are similar to David Icke's nonsense and most of them predate 2020. Things like "the moon landing was faked", "the Earth is flat", and "the government is controlling us through chemtrails". The difference is, someone else believing the Earth is flat doesn't affect me the same way a measles outbreak does.
This isn't a conversation to have in the abstract. The idea that David Icke is spreading is that the COVID-19 pandemic is linked to 5g cellphone service. 5g being deployed in Wuhan is somehow evidence of the link between the two.
What light can you shine on that idea, to get people to stop shooting telecommunications workers and burning cellphone towers down?
On HN bad comments get very light. Still readable but everybody knows they were downvoted.
YouTube could add labels over the videos like "this content contains false and dangerous information". Then the content can still be discussed but everybody will be alerted to be very sceptical about the information.
I kind of agree and disagree, we should somehow remove it, but again we need to withdraw root causes for those. Sometimes it is just lack of public answers and experts inability to simplify really complex knowledge to drive people to those "alternative" stories in case of covid for instance.
I think they’d be more effective if they added an un-skippable ad before each video which contains the best argument against the content that follows.
I guess the expense would make that an unrealistic option, but it would be much more effective than chasing folks away to their own uncensorable corner of the web.
This is a frighteningly naive take on the rationality of humans.
If you are an engineer at a tech company you really don't have a grasp of how unfathomably dumb most people are because you only associate with smart people all the time.
>I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), but that's different from saying that we as a society should want our private platforms to engage in such censorship and suppression.
Not to mention the "first amendment" is a US thing.
We need better global laws imposed upon them, because those private corporations operate globally, and have influence (as social media platforms, etc) in all countries, not just the US.
the askhistorians mods adressed this - the problem is the bullshit asymmetry principle:
'Bullshit Asymmetry Principle' states the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than that needed to produce it. Bullshit can be propagated quickly, but can be more difficult to disprove.
YouTube is a public platform because it is viewable without an account or membership.
If you had to log in to view a video or read an article, then it would truly be private.
I think we’ve gotten to the point where we need to define a clearer set of rules with stronger protections of speech on these open platforms. (Closed platforms can do whatever the they want, as always.)
You're basically just saying about YouTube/Google what people have been saying about any large corporation that does things that are legal but less than agreeable.
The difference is, if you think that WalMart's practices are bad for small businesses, you can stop going to WalMart and only shop at small businesses, and pretty much get the exact same products. You can vote with your wallet.
But on YouTube, you have no power as a consumer. You are the product. And boycotting YouTube traps you in a world of YouTube rejects, forced to construct their own platforms, who more often than not are right-wing extremists pushing violence, intolerance, and misinformation.
YouTube is a town where WalMart is the only grocer. You can give in to the large corporation to get what you need, or you can eat out at fast food joints for every meal.
So really, you have only three choices:
1. Get the laws changed so that the First Amendment applies to private companies, stripping them of their own freedom to cull what they publish, and making misinformation and violent speech much more difficult to address.
2. Accept that there is nothing you can do to compel Google to do or not to do things that they aren't legally compelled to, especially when the decisions they are making revolve around selling as many ads as they can to their customers (the advertisers) not making the product the sell (you, the viewer) happy.
3. Accept that Capitalism is why you have no power here, and work towards a future in which large corporations don't have the power to control and suppress you without recourse. Or sell your data and attention as a product as they act as the largest VoD platform in existence.
You say this as if the converse hasn't been attempted - platforms without moderation. They exist and instantly fill up with trolls, kooks and nazis to the point where they become unusable by anyone but trolls, kooks and nazis.
I'm sorry, but "freedom of speech," as in the first amendment protects the right to express opinions. It does not protect misstatements of fact.
Not all people are rational animals that objectively acquire and then review all the information in front of them to weigh the merits of "5g versus virus." Sometimes, when you see a guy gaining a following by telling others that vaccines have secret microchips in them and that humanity has to fight 5g in order to survive, you tell him to go to hell and host his vile videos somewhere else.
Exactly. In France there is a set of laws that forbids the denial of various genocides, in particular the Holocaust. Unfortunately this backfired badly, as several prominent Holocaust deniers, who are generally despicable nazis over that, got condemned and from then hailed by their hateful followers as "martyrs" and even "martyrs of free speech". One even managed to have Chomsky say something nice about his "oppression" (which is quite ironic given the guy's an antisemite).
Since then, antisemitism has risen, and prominent antisemites still fills up theatres, garners millions of views of their videos, always speaking in transparent allusions to keep barely out of the reach of law (Don't say "Jews rule finance worldwide", say "'The organised community' rules the world's finance"). In retrospect, that looks like an utter failure to me.
Who decides the truth? When conventional knowledge is fatally flawed, how can it be changed?
Democracy is necessarily a battleground of ideas. The alternative is battlegrounds between groups with competing ideas.
For this reason, the by-any-means-necessary aspect of modern wokeism is terribly dangerous. What if these fuckers are wrong? Whenever we are urged to discard debate and the free exchange of ideas so that truth may prevail - watch the hell out.
Quite often, the damage caused by disinformation is simply allowing it to be spread.
Look at all the experts trying to fighting the lies Trump has been spreading. All that effort, and yet almost 50% of this country believes him. Every moment they have to spend debunking yet another lie is time they can't spend on something useful.
Look at all the people blaming 5g for COVID19. Every person that acts on that rumor and damages property or makes terrorist threats is drawing police attention away from something more useful.
Sometimes, you can't fight bad ideas by debunking them.
No, the media covered it because the president of the most powerful nation on earth making a speech about a global pandemic is newsworthy, and his words and actions have national and global impacts.
When the platform receives 85% (or whatever the percent is) of all video sharing internet traffic "we are a private organization!" shouldn't really apply.
Become a semi-monopoly of public discourse and obey the rule of free speech!
I would prefer to add an amendment to allow to censor extreme views contradicting modern science knowledge.
It is, indirect, what happens and to be honest, i do believe that people doing the youtube videos about aliens and flatearth have often enough some agenda.
It hurts our society and we need to find a proper solution.
And those in 'science' captured by a groupthink? How do we deal with them?
Don't forget that the 'lipid hypothesis' was everywhere just a few years ago and everybody believed it. Now you have more chance of finding somebody who will admit to be being a member of the Stasi.
Science is, at its base, the rejection of hypotheses by experimental validation. Quite a lot of what is touted as science either hasn't or can't be experimentally validated. The non-falsifiable stuff dressed up as science, when it is really philosophy (or perhaps religion) is just flat earth thinking with better PR and credentials.
This is the reason free speech has to be defended. Remember Cromwell's Plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
This is a very dangerous viewpoint in my opinion. There is no true science without free speech. Kepler for example was censored due to his highly controversial views about the sun being at the center of the solar system.
If the science is so shaky as to be blown over by some crackpots then it is no science good at all. Interestingly, some among the flat earthers have independently verified the curvature of the earth. This is a beautiful outcome for these true skeptics and critical thinkers. These are true scientific minds in my opinion.
I'm not talking about 'science' which is sho shaky as to be blown over by some crackpots.
The science for 'we are not on a flat earth' is here. We still have YouTube Channels saying otherwise without being able to prove it at all. And they do create issues in our society.
I agree. It's the spirit in which these actions have been taken, as if to conform to a narrative, which in itself, has see-sawed between facts and fiction, as to almost being intentionally confusing. It's not a "conspiracy theory" to ask questions, critical thinking has taken a huge blow since 9/11.
This is a valid point, but as a matter of pragmatism, these platforms are going to have to police information there's no way around it.
It looks specious right now ... but in reality, they and everyone else have been doing it from the start.
It's really easy to garner attention, and even easier to buy it.
Foreign agents, like governments, can use this as a tool to nudge populations, and in many cases, that's all that's needed to change outcomes, particularly in things like elections.
As just one example.
I do however believe that platforms of sufficient scale also become a platform of public, like 'papers of record' have a special status, maybe some sites should as well.
What we need for the 'big platforms' is some kind of smart, modern regulation that maximizes freedom of expression, maybe flags the rubbish as rubbish and very rarely moves stuff off-platform.
I'm not going to shed a tear for David Icke, but this quote is very concerning:
> YouTube has clear policies prohibiting any content that disputes the existence and transmission of Covid-19 as described by the WHO [World Health Organization] and the NHS [the U.K's healthcare system] [emphasis added]
The WHO at least has been flat out wrong several times during this pandemic, such as telling people not to wear masks. Anointing one agency as the sole source of truth and censoring anything that contradicts it is not going to lead to a good outcome. People need to be able to question authorities.
> 2. There is no evidence of human-to-human transmission.
This is one of those completely false things that people only believe is true by repetition. Go back and actually read the full set of WHO statements in mid-January. They have a bunch of statements saying that nations should get prepared, one saying that specific studies haven’t yet found hard evidence for person-to-person transmission (because at that point most of the cases they’d managed to find were tied to the market). The WHO never, ever said that it can’t be transmitted, and they absolutely never said that people should do nothing about COVID-19. They were urging nations to act for months before they actually did.
> 4. Masks don't work (but health workers need them!).
They don't say masks don't work either, they say that health workers need them more. Here you need to remember that the W stands for "World". They worry the most about the poorer countries who have much fewer masks available.
> The WHO never, ever said that it can’t be transmitted
They did, however, say that there was "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission". That claim in GP's post is at least partially accurate if disingenuous for argument's sake (I would counter that "no clear evidence" is a much less strong claim than "no evidence".)
"they said that healt workers need them more" -> WHO could say that normal people should use cloth masks (not surgical/N95 masks). Problem solved. I still think WHO made a blunder in their recommendation about mask usage.
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus"
There is a world of difference between "no human to human transmission" as you claim they said and "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" as they actually said.
"There is no alien life in the universe" vs "There is no clear evidence of alien life in the universe".
Or say I have a jug containing marbles. I tell you there are either ninety-nine yellow marbles and one blue or one hundred yellow marbles. I'll draw 10 marbles and you pick "no blue" or "no clear evidence of blue" as your statement. If you're wrong, you owe $1M to charity. I've drawn 10 yellow. Which statement do you pick?
No evidence of something is not the same as evidence of (not something).
No evidence that Person A is the murderer does not mean there is evidence that he is not the murderer(e.g. alibi). Evidence may turn up later on that he was indeed the murderer.
WHO said that there was no evidence of human to human transmission. They did not say they found evidence that it is not transmissible from human to human. That's a world of difference.
Go to their daily situation report and search it for "Taiwan". An entire country isn't there.
Now I don't particularly care whether they want to list Taiwan or not, but the only reason for that decision (when they are listing places like the Holy See!) is because they are moderating their position based on Chinese interests.
This is basically conversation ending evidence that the WHO is willing to act as a mouthpiece for Communist Party positions. That really should be it as far as YouTube's decision is concerned. The WHO are not an appropriate source for deciding what media people see. No body where the CPC is involved is. The CPC is not trustworthy; they can and will abuse the trust YouTube is placing in a body they have serious influence.
> Here you need to remember that the W stands for "World".
So they give dubious advice to the entire world since the good advice doesn't perfectly fit the world in entirety? There are many better options: don't give advice, explain two sets of advice, ask for advice from governments to be followed, make the advice generic enough that it still applies to the world.
An example of advice that might apply anywhere in the world:
"Face coverings will help to reduce transmission. In most parts of the world, masks will be in short supply and needed by health care workers much more than the general population. Masks can be made from any type of cloth. Although these may not have the same efficacy as high grade masks and the efficacy will be dependent upon the material used as well as the degree of seal against the face, these will help to reduce transmission."
Just because countries have mandated a mask requirement doesn't mean there is a scientific consensus yet. You all talk like this it's a fact that masks for the broad public will actually help. In my country the general advice is the opposite. We simply don't know so I'm not surprised that WHO hasn't taken a firm stance yet.
This isn't what the WHO said. They said bans on air from specific places (especially those that disrupt supply chains) are bad. This is true. Banning all air travel to/from china would have hurt medical supply chains in the US, with very little benefit.
> 2. There is no evidence of human-to-human transmission.
When this claim was made (in early january), there was not clear evidence of human to human transmission. It was revised a few days later when there was.
> 4. Masks don't work (but health workers need them!).
This isn't what was said. They said that random people shouldn't go out of their way to acquire medical PPE (save it for medical personnel)
> 5. The CFR is like 4%.
Depending on the country, the CFR varies between 1.5% and like 15%. 4% seems like a reasonable estimate there. Unless you rely on the unfounded belief that there are large completely undetected swaths of the population that are infected but entirely asymptomatic, (which would have been found in South Korea, for example), the WHO's estimate is reasonable.
> They said bans on air from specific places (especially those that disrupt supply chains) are bad.
No, they advised "against the application of travel or trade restrictions to countries experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks." Which is identical with not restricting global air travel.
> When this claim was made (in early january), there was not clear evidence of human to human transmission. It was revised a few days later when there was.
True, the exact wording was "no clear evidence", but this is widely regarded as a cover-up, especially because it is known there were attempts at covering up the outbreak.
> This isn't what was said. They said that random people shouldn't go out of their way to acquire medical PPE (save it for medical personnel).
Again false. They wrote for individuals without respiratory symptoms, "a medical mask is not required, as no evidence is available on its usefulness to protect non-sick persons".
All epidemiologists seemed to have agreed at that time that CFRs were inflated when compared with a more stable situation with more testing kits being available due to the unknown denominator. Simply using the country average was extremely silly data. There were much better data available from Wuhan and that cruise ship.
> All epidemiologists seemed to have agreed at that time
No, the 4% was based on academic papers and epidimeoligists. Granted there was and is disagreement, but the whole "it's less than 1%" thing was from nonreperts.
> but this is widely regarded as a cover-up
By who? Some people believe China wasn't forthcoming with evidence, sure. That's possibly true.
> Which is identical with not restricting global air travel.
Well no, general travel restrictions and reductions, and travel bans instituted by areas under outbreak are both within the WHO policy.
That is, Italy can ban all travel out (which they did). But the US shouldn't ban all flights from China.
> They wrote for individuals without respiratory symptoms
Yes, and if you read into the underlying papers, not just the headlines the reasons they recommend this are to prevent shortages and because it's easy to mishandle masks.
I am not sure what your goal is here, you seem to be disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing.
> Well no, general travel restrictions and reductions, and travel bans instituted by areas under outbreak are both within the WHO policy.
The point is that it is obvious that a pandemic is prevented by restricting all travel. The economic damages of a late lockdown are extraordinarily higher than a few weeks of travel restrictions. It was extremely predictable what was going to happen and the WHO somehow did not act swiftly. This YouTuber's videos were much more informative than most info from the WHO and made much more accurate predictions which is extremely weird to me.
> Yes, and if you read into the underlying papers, not just the headlines the reasons they recommend this are to prevent shortages and because it's easy to mishandle masks.
I've cited the raw source, not a "headline". The point is it was an outright lie which decreased trust in the institution as someone at the NYT also noted. Arguably, a much better lie would have been that DIY masks are just as effective as professional masks.
> The figure was actually 3.4% and it was just the dumb fatality-divided-by-cases estimate. IMO they failed to convey the uncertainty in this estimate.
I don't believe you're referring to the same statement as the prior person. In the case that you are, that statement is very precise, very correct, and ultimately uninteresting if you're wondering how dangerous COVID is. It's observational (and has minimal uncertainty) as opposed to trying to understand the actual case fatality rate.
> The point is that it is obvious that a pandemic is prevented by restricting all travel.
Yes, if you do so before the thing spreads. If you can't, then no, localized bans aren't really useful. By the time, for example, Trump, was considering a ban on all travel from China, it wouldn't have helped. I'm not sure what the point of linking to a random youtube channel is.
> The point is it was an outright lie which decreased trust in the institution as someone at the NYT also noted. Arguably, a much better lie would have been that DIY masks are just as effective as professional masks.
It's not though. Cite me a paper that shows that cloth masks prevent the spread of corona. The best you'll find is a paper that Zeynep Tufecki (whose tweet you cited), a literature professor at UNC Chapel Hill, coauthored, that concludes that Cloth masks and handwashing limit the spread of COVID-19.
So here's the chain of reasoning:
1. that there is no reliable data that shows that cloth masks are helpful
2. there is data that shows that misuse of cloth masks can be harmful
3. Therefore, we should be cautious and perhaps not recommend cloth masks
Which of those three statements do you feel the WHO got wrong? Please give cited evidence for your disagreement.
> I don't believe you're referring to the same statement as the prior person.
I am the same person.
> that statement is very precise, very correct, and ultimately uninteresting if you're wondering how dangerous COVID is
Indeed, but they've compared that figure to the CFR of the common flu. IMO when saying X% have died, they should rather say "between X and Y" and add that this figure is much more uncertain than the CFR of the common flu under normal circumstances. That's my entire point of critique. I know they need to dumb things down to be consumable by the media, but still.
Well, of course. The earlier the better, the smaller the impact on the economy. The WHO and most countries reacted way too late.
> I'm not sure what the point of linking to a random youtube channel is.
I've linked to the YouTube channel because it's by an epidemiologist who covered the early outbreak in detail and repeatedly he called out the WHO not being proactive enough. It was obvious it was going to spread and stopping global travel for a couple of weeks would have saved us presumably trillions of USD if one could predict most countries would indeed do a full lockdown later.
> Which of those three statements do you feel the WHO got wrong? Please give cited evidence for your disagreement.
Those three statements are detached from the part I quoted, which is "a medical mask is not required, as no evidence is available on its usefulness to protect non-sick persons". This sentence is a lie at worst and overconfident at best. Other coronaviruses have similar transmission characteristics and molecule sizes and there was literature that even simple DIY masks help reduce the spread of e.g. SARS-CoV-1. The reason being that the highest viral loads are suspended in droplets which are large enough to be caught by simple fabric or a face shield. AFAIK the evidence that people tend to misapply masks is rather slim by comparison.
Was the fact that it kept spreading not strong evidence of human to human transmission? It seems they just went with the Chinese government instead of asking why people kept getting infected.
No, because at the time the statement was made, most of the known cases were directly linked to a single wildlife market. (Also keep in mind that this announcement is within 2 weeks of discovering the virus, sequencing its genome, inventing the first ever tests for it, and deploying those tests!) Luckily, enough evidence came in that they were sure a few days later.
In those few days it began spreading internationally, I'm not sure I'd call that "lucky".
In the WHO's defense, China was actively trying to cover up the outbreak. People were starting to panic because more people were getting sick, so they went full authoritarian and banned mention of it on social media.
More people kept getting sick because it was spreading between people, people were getting worried, then WHO announced no evidence of human to human transmission and recommended no restrictions on travel to Wuhan. We know full well in hindsight that was a mistake.
Having watched their briefings each day in Jan and Feb, this is absolutely not what the said. If you're going to misquote them, at least provide sources.
CFR is case fatality ration and is literally defined as "people who we know are sick to people who died". It does not mean overall lethality and it never meant that. CFR is not prediction nor model, it is input into the mode.
Asymptomatic non tested population is literally not supposed to be counted into CFR.
'asymptomatic non tested population' is an interesting way to refer to people with covid 19 antibodies found via immunoassays. This sizeable population shows that our cfr estimates have enough error to be meaningless.
CFR does not have "error rate" this way. It is just defined differently then you thought it is defined. You thought it is mortality, it never was. It is the only number available at the beginning of epidemic (no matter which one).
"asymptomatic non tested population" is the most exact description of people who were not tested, had no symptoms and therefore don't count as "cases". Yes, we measure them by measuring antibodies if precise tests are available.
No, there are tests that have high false-positive rates. The studies in both the US and Europe used similarly flawed tests and didn't correctly account for the false-positive rates of those tests. [0]
There are two ways to think through how these results are flawed: the first is that the false positive rates of the tests is vastly higher than the prior (which we'll assume is approximately the confirmed case rate per capita) is. There were three studies, NYC, Santa Clara, and one in Europe that I know of. All three tests had false positive rates over 2%, and one test had a false positive rate of like 10%. So when a study shows that a large percent of the population have the virus, and that percentage is suspiciously similar to the false-positive rate of the test, you pause.
The second is a much more grokkable one. Let's assume that 2% of people in Santa Clara were infected (per the study), then 40,000 people are infected, and of them around 2000 people were symptomatic enough to get tested and be hospitalized/tested (per available stats). Or 5% of infections are symptomatic enough to get noticed, ish. Then we'd see that NYC would have ~3.5 million people infected now, or something like 40%.
So we'd expect to see 40% (or more actually) of people tested in NY and NYC test positive for covid. But we don't[1]. We see that as NY adds more tests, the positive rate of the more reliable tests is going down, because they can test more people and because NY appears to be over the hump. At peak, 20% of people were testing positive daily, now it's down to closer to 10%.
And note that most of the tests are going to people who have some symptoms of something, which is why it's that high. 40% of NY residents were infected, we'd expect to see more than 40% of the tests positive, but we don't.
If you do the same calculation but with death rate, you find that there are more people in NYC with Covid than live in NYC. In conclusion: those studies are bad because the tests they use are unreliable.
Are you equally skeptical that we have a test that reliably detects Covid?
And I suppose all of the 2+ dozen studies done are completely inaccurate as well? List below includes the revised study from Ioannidis. Your criticisms are from a preprint.
May 4: 370 workers test positive in Missouri. None had symptoms.
May 1: Dutch Royal Institute of Health 13884 healthcare workers test positive in the Netherlands. 9 have died. 0.06% CFR among healthcare workers 3% hospitalization rate 6/9 underlying conditions 9/9 above 45
Right, and my entire point is that most of the antibody tests appear to be inaccurate with false positive rates that are egregiously high. Quoting a bunch of antibody tests with egregiously high false positive rates doesn't address that at all. You'd need to show that the antibody tests are accurate, and independent tests have shown that they aren't.[0]
The conclusion there is that the serological tests have false-posdtive rates of 15-20% in the worst cases, and 2-3% in the best cases, on blood samples from before covid-19 existed.
So using those tests, on a population where not a single person has covid-19, you'd see results showing that 2-20% of the population was previously infected.
These independent numbers often differ from the official reported numbers from the test makers. And the seroprevalence studies you cute either use those numbers, or worse just ignore the possibility of false positives entirely.
Again, if 20% of New Yorkers had covid, (much more than) 20% of people tested using reliable tests would show that.
> Are you equally skeptical that we have a test that reliably detects Covid?
No, because we have evidence that the seroprevalence tests are god awful. We don't have that for viral presence tests, unless you believe the god awful seroprevalence tests.
To humor you, I'll run through some of the links you posted:
May 4: 370 workers test positive in Missouri. - Reliable (PCR, not serological) tests, people may be presymptomatic, since this just happened.
May 1: revised Santa Clara study - From the paper There is one important caveat to this formula: it only holds as long as (one minus) the specificity of the test is higher than the sample prevalence. If it is lower, all the observed positives in the sample could be due to false-positive test results, and we cannot exclude zero prevalence as a possibility.
May 1: Dutch Royal Institute - Unreliable sero test
May 1: 15.5% seroprevalence in German Community - Unreliable sero test
April 30: partial results give 61% of population infected - Unreliable sero test (likely compounded by bad stats, but I can't read french)
April 27: 36% infected in homeless shelters - Reliable test, but unclear if the people were asymptomatic or presymptomatic. Needs followup.
April 27: Governor of NY claims their study indicate 24.7% - Based on sero test
April 26: 96% symptom free out of 3300 positive - No info on which to base an opinion
April 26: 17,000 healthcare workers tested positive - Unclear, can't read french
April 26: Seroprevalence in Kobe Japan 300x to 800x - Seroprevalence says it all
April 26: 25% of seroprevalence in Iran - "Seroprevalence"
April 24: between 123k and 221k cases in Miami-Dade - Blood (sero) test
April 24: Denmark 1.7% seroprevalence - Sero test
April 23: governor of ny tweets that 13.9% of the state could have virus - Based on sero testing
April 22: Sweden health official claims 20% of Stockholm could be infected - Based on sero testing
April 22: LA County could have between 223k and 442k cases - Based on sero testing
April 22: 20% of Stockholm infected - Based on sero
April 20: Up to 10% of the people in Wuhan developed antibodies - Antibodies (sero)
April 19: 49% of the population of Orties developed antibodies - Sero
April 17: 32% of the residents tested for antibodies - Sero
April 16: 3% of blood donors have antibodies - Sero
April 15: 50% homeless test positive in a Boston Shelter - You cited this already
April 15: Coronavirus probably dozens of times - Sero
So, removing duplicates and serological tests, we're left with 3 things:
May 4: 370 workers test positive in Missouri. - Reliable (PCR, not serological) tests, people may be presymptomatic, since this just happened.
April 27: 36% infected in homeless shelters - Reliable test, but unclear if the people were asymptomatic or presymptomatic. Needs followup.
This third study is by far the most reliable, and it's conclusions were that 50% experienced no symptoms, and 1.4% of a working class population (the 2.1% included non-residents, which is less controlled) was infected, which would trend higher than average (Ninety percent of the people who were PCR positive had no capability of working from home during shelter in place.)
The other two studies just show that people in close proximity can all be infected quickly, and so be presymptomatic at the same time.
Can you provide evidence that every antibody test used in all of the studies above are as inaccurate as you claim? Your 1-word opinion on each of them is useless.
> We don't have that for viral presence tests, unless you believe the god awful seroprevalence tests.
> Can you provide evidence that every antibody test used in all of the studies above are as inaccurate as you claim? Your 1-word opinion on each of them is useless.
To my knowledge, there are basically no reliable antibody tests, which is the problem. Some are more reliable, but most are terrible, and there are very few places that publish exactly which test they use have, from my reading, used unreliable tests.
The point, which you seem to keep ignoring is that seroprevalence tests aren't reliable. So citing a bunch of them doesn't convince me. You're just citing something which I've already explained isn't reliable.
So let's assume this is true. My understanding is that PCR tests have gotten a bit better since February when that paper was published, but it sets a decent lower bound.
Let's assume the test has a 30% false-negative rate, and a .05% false-positive rate. If 1% of people are infected, and you test everyone, you'll find that (.01 * .70) + (.99 * .0005) = .75% of the population will test positive.
What about 10% of the population? (.1 * .70) + (.9 * .0005) = 7% of the population is infected according to the test. Given that PCR tests are reporting ~1% of the population is infected, we can expect that no more than 2% of the population is infected. And that assumes an incredibly good false-positive rate.
If instead the PCR test has a more reasonable false-positive rate of half a percent, and we assume an underlying 1.5% infection rate, then with a 30% false negative rate, then P(FP|N) > P(FN|P), or in other words, your test would overestimate the true infection rate (to be 1.54%, precisely).
That is to say, when the underlying infection rate is relatively low, false-positives are much more impactful than false negatives, because there are many more chances to be a false positive. This is the base rate fallacy in action.
So the upshot? Even assuming a better than real world[0] false-positive rate of the PCR tests, and a likely worse than real world false-negative rate, the PCR tests show that the true infection rate is still far below what serological tests show.
> They said bans on air from specific places (especially those that disrupt supply chains) are bad. This is true.
The idea that bans on travel are 'bad' is nonsense. There's a global ban on civilian travel precisely because it is effective.
> There is no evidence of human-to-human transmission.
Sending out a message only to contradict it days later is poor communication and management.
> They said that random people shouldn't go out of their way to acquire medical PPE
No they said masks were not effective: ‘very little evidence of widespread benefit from masks use outside of these clinical settings’. Study after study contradicts this.
Additionally, as a cynical example of subterfuge, their Director-General made up some lies about Taiwan being racist while at the same time, in mainland China, Africans were being banned from shopping malls and evicted from their homes.
The WHO messed up, repeatedly. And now their word is apparently sacrosanct on social media by threat of deletion which is simply outrageous.
I've yet to see any actual evidence that wearing a cloth mask while social distancing helps you, as a healthy individual. And I've seen some to the contrary[0].
One of the WHO's main concerns is to prevent shortages and supply chain issues (see their statements about travel and import bans). A run on medical masks is problematic, and the WHO's guidance prevents that.
I'll note that basically no government suggested (or suggests) wearing medical masks[1], unless you are symptomatic, which is in line with the WHO's guidance.
Social distancing is much more important, and while masks may help, especially in areas that are crowded (which you should avoid if possible anyway), they only really help if you are symptomatic, in which case you should absolutely not be outside.
The bay area is fairly unique in requiring mask wearing, and while it's not a major imposition, the utility is probably pretty marginal.
> One of the WHO's main concerns is to prevent shortages and supply chain issues (see their statements about travel and import bans). A run on medical masks is problematic, and the WHO's guidance prevents that.
This argument does not pass smell test. In countries where masks were mandated, there was simultaneously lock on medical masks. People used homemade ones at first and then later you could buy non-medical cloth masks.
> they only really help if you are symptomatic
This does not make sense either. You spread virus before having symptoms. Asymptomatic people spread virus too.
> This argument does not pass smell test. In countries where masks were mandated, there was simultaneously lock on medical masks. People used homemade ones at first and then later you could buy non-medical cloth masks.
Right, and there are no studies that I'm aware of showing that cloth face masks are effective at stopping the spread of covid-19. They're good at stopping large particles (which afaik you only really have if you're coughing), but not small/aerosolized ones.
Again, if you're being careful with your mask and making sure to clean it regularly and treat it like a dangerous object and washing hands after using it etc. It might help. If you aren't, it might hurt. Hence the WHO's guidance.
To be clear, I'm not saying "masks are bad", or even "masks aren't good". I'm saying "the evidence that masks are helpful is not strong enough to decry an organization that doesn't recommend them."
> which afaik you only really have if you're coughing
Which is something people do. The general advice is changing last weeks, it is more and more recommended to wear them even in countries that were super opposed a month ago.
You dont need mask to be 100% effective to be useful.
In the USA, if travel restrictions hadn't been put in place in late January (going directly against WHO recommendations at the time), the virus would have propagated much quicker into the country and the US would have been in way worse shape today than it is now.
You don't know that. Italy had early travel restrictions, and had it very bad. Canada had no travel restrictions until much later, and has it better than (parts of) the US. That so many believe the travel restrictions were warranted seems to solely be the product of them having been considered an outsize response at the time, rather than evaluating the arguments against them not qualified on the danger of the pandemic.
In particular, travel restrictions become actively harmful when they reduce the capacity to detect and therefore apply extra scrutiny to those travelling through affected countries. Insofar as people will travel anyways, they only serve to hide that fact from authorities. This of course does not apply to the US, which had no testing capacity at the time. But we can no more suppose that the US would have been worse off as we can suppose they would have been better off.
Do you have a standard in mind that's better than the WHO? Would you prefer content prohibited on the basis of whether it sounds right or wrong to a random Google employee?
I would prefer content not to be prohibited at all. Content is not a problem. Actions are a problem. Watch all the videos you like telling you to burn down a cell tower. Once you do burn down a cell tower, then you go to jail. Perhaps we should also then hold the people telling people to burn down cell towers responsible, criminally and civilly, for the people who listen to them.
David Icke might not be so cavalier about telling people to burn down cell towers if he could be sued and/or jailed after people took him up on it.
As a general principle, I think we should focus on actual consequences, not imagined, potential consequences.
This has the effect of also encouraging useful dissent. If you disagree with WHO and you turn out to be right, you can be properly credited with it. You are not automatically punished for the crime of daring to disagree with the WHO, and we all benefit from having more accurate, useful information.
If you’re worried about freedom of speech, then giving more people standing to sue David Icke for taking his dumb advice would be far more stifling than allowing YT to ban people. This would basically allow anyone with deep enough pockets to police speech using the courts.
But there is a big difference between the U.K. and America here; in the U.K. if you lose a litigation, you have to pay your opponents legal bills. In America the cases where the loser must pay are very limited with high bars to clear. This means that it’s absolutely possible to bankrupt someone in America with frivolous lawsuits, so long as those lawsuits aren’t bad enough to trigger the limited exceptions.
If you're going to give people advice, you should be prepared to take at least partial responsibility for what happens when they take that advice.
If a lawyer, doctor, accountant, engineer, or any professional gives you bad or malicious advice, they expose themselves to liability for the results of it. If you want to present yourself as an expert on some topic and expect people to listen to you, put some skin in the game and stand behind what you say. If you can't do that, you shouldn't be advising people on anything.
They could even keep the content available but give it a ranking penalty. This way they stop short of full on censorship, but also prevent the spread of terrible quality information.
I have no idea how you managed to misconstrue what I said so badly that you came to that conclusion, but that is not the case at all. The people in the concentration camps did not get talked to death. They died because of actions that people took.
People are responsible for their own actions. "Hitler told me to" or "David Icke told me to" do not excuse anything someone does. I believe we established particularly after WWII that "I was just following orders" is not a valid defense to committing atrocities.
You might also want to remember that one of the first things Hitler did after getting power was to outlaw any opposition parties and violently break up meetings of any dissenters, then arrest and torture anyone who was promoting anything other than the Nazi party line. Hmm, sound familiar?
Is giving a speech a crime? Which speeches are crimes? Who is going to determine that? You? More importantly, who would you like to put in charge of determining whether your speech is a crime?
Contrary to what is expressed above, Hitler did much more than give speeches. He also gave orders which is a different thing entirely.
Saying "Gee I wish so-and-so were dead" is not a crime in any reasonable democracy. Telling your subordinate "I order you to go and kill so-and-so" is. Do you see the difference? The person following and the person giving the order are both responsible.
Are you arguing that the people who physically pulled the triggers or shoved prisoners into gas chamber do not bear any responsibility? At any point, all that was necessary to stop Hitler was for people to not listen to him. What would help that is providing an environment of healthy dissent, not stifling it.
I also mentioned above specifically that we should hold people accountable for the actual consequences of their speech. How you get from that to "Hitler did nothing wrong" is completely beyond me. Actual consequences mean real things that occur in reality. Not "I think something might possibly happen because of this" or "You dared to contradict an authority so you must be silenced".
Supporting the right of people to participate in free and fair elections does not imply that you agree with the outcome of every election. Can you understand that?
The question is where the responsibility lies. Hitler did not elect himself. The responsibility for electing Hitler lies with...the people who voted for Hitler. Where else would you put it?
As to whether someone who "tries to stop him" is a bad person, that depends on what you mean by tries to stop him. One of the benefits of not censoring dissent is that we can hear many different points of view, and hopefully choose better ones. So, of course there is no problem with trying to stop anyone by making a better argument and doing a better job of rallying people to your cause.
If you mean, "Do I think it's OK to murder political candidates as long as I'm sufficiently convinced they'll be evil", no I don't. Keep in mind that there are people who feel about Obama or FDR the way you feel about Hitler and reconsider whether you want to condone murdering anyone you disagree with.
It's not a "marketplace of ideas", in practice it's a used car dealership. Just about anybody with the slightest bit of cleverness and free time can convince any trusting person of anything whatsoever, no matter how horrible, given enough exposure.
Who said that? The range of bullshit information you can find at a moment's whim remains extremely high, in fact higher than it ever has been in history.
That's a sign that the system is working as intended, providing publishing ability to millions that never had it before.
Any time that's not happening, you should be asking:
1) who's gatekeeping this forum? what are their motivations or objectives? to whom are they beholden?
2) who always gets access? who always does not?
3) what personal information or other information do they have to give in exchange for access? who's excluded as a result of these requirements?
4) how much access do they get? how many posts are they allowed to make? how much audience are they allowed to reach?
5) are there hidden reach penalties for certain types of users, or certain types of content? are the rules published and the applications of penalties/boosts apparent?
6) what are they allowed to say? what are they not? are the rules different for different people?
7) who decides when their accounts get suspended? can they be unsuspended? is there an audit trail to make sure policies are applied fairly and consistently, or is it all backroom/hidden?
So how many people have heard of Pizzagate, and how many of them ended up doing something deranged about it? (The article says no one was hurt, actually, but let's say someone was.) Meanwhile, how many people do deranged things because of beliefs that didn't come from the internet—say, they saw someone looking at them and just knew that person was evil, or they had some misfortune and blamed someone else and decided to get revenge?
I submit that the type of person who believes a wacko theory and kills someone because of it is likely mentally ill, and might well have killed someone because of some other belief; the primary cause is the mental illness, while the specific belief and where it came from is not worth dwelling on.
But it is, assuming you are in the US. That is how the legal framework is laid out. It is extremely difficult and near impossible to restrict speech in public forms.
But then we'd learn about all those oligarchs, abuses of the system, tax evasion, astroturfing, propaganda, opposition gate-keepers, distractions, fake conspiracies etc. ;)
Right now in France one doctor (professor Didier Raoult) has been mostly right about the whole thing (in my view), and he became popular thanks to YouTube.
Yet his views are in radical opposition to both the French government and the WHO. Should his videos be removed? He's one of the most published expert on infectious diseases, so who in YouTube has authority to decide that he is more wrong than the minister of health, who is mostly a politician?
> (professor Didier Raoult) has been mostly right about the whole thing
Can you cite some sources? Everything I've seen about him has pointed out how bad his study was, how he has a track record of just plain making stuff up, etc.
The main source would be the website of his own research center
https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/en/ (but it's mostly the content in French that's interesting)
He had a lengthy interview on French media last week.
As far as I'm concerned he got pretty much every part of that epidemic right from the beginning and the facts are now vindicating him.
But that's not really the point anyway. My point is: he went against the WHO and the French government. And at least some people, like me, find value in what he is saying. So who is to judge whether or not he should be allowed to spread his ideas?
Nobody is talking about banning people like Didier Raoult. If you can't tell the difference between a professor and a guy who gives spittle-flecked rants about the lizard people, this discussion will not be productive. For example, we all know he did a terrible job with the hydroxychloroquine study, but of course he retains his position.
Yes, but the effect of this CDC stance is far worse than it sounds. Because of the CDC policy that masks have not been proven to be useful, many health workers have been forbidden to wear them. (source: someone close to me)
I agree with your concern, but I would actually need some examples of YouTube enforcing this rule without nuance.
Questioning the validity of WHO's changing mask guidelines I can't imagine would get anyone banned.
Telling business owners to defy state orders and re-open nightclubs on vacuous constitutional grounds absolutely should get you booted.
If that's how YouTube is enforcing things, I don't see a problem with it. Icke's suspension isn't exactly the opportunity to call YouTube out, because this wasn't a questionable suspension. Until I see a questionable suspension, I don't feel compelled to complain much about YouTube's strategy here.
It's a lot simpler than that, really. YouTube is not "the internet", it's just someone else's computer. That someone wants to be regarded by the general public as a trusted source free of "fake news" (whatever those might be) and as a free and open platform for anyone to post to if they want. That's just not going to work, of course. What's really going to happen is anyone's guess.
Just some food for thought. If youtube was around in the past and doing this stuff they could have deleted videos in support of the following: (these all started as fringe beliefs(1))
Those are ideological beliefs. Yes, at one time they were very widely and strongly held. But they were never remotely comparible to spreading factually incorrect information about something biological.
A simple demonstration to this: even the reverse of these (e.g. "I believe gay marriage is morally wrong") can't reasonably be argued against with "that is factually incorrect".
It's fair to believe that private companies like YouTube shouldn't be censoring speech like this. But these comparisons are bogus and only weaken your point.
The parent comment was comparing against YouTube banning videos that claimed smoking does cause lung cancer, back before the link was proven, in some steampunk world where YouTube existed 100 years ago. That is not comparible because initially there were at least some scientific studies, or even a vague possible link to a rational doctor, between smoking and lung cancer. There is nothing like a possible link between 5G and coronavirus to anyone that understands what a virus is.
YouTube has no problem banning content on ideological grounds, though. I remember last year various news articles about YouTube's removal of white supremacist content.
I don't really see why it's important to distinguish whether the content is problematic "factually" vs "ideologically". Clearly there are valid reasons to ban content on ideological grounds but on the other hand removing any content that has factual errors would be cumbersome (or impossible) to do. You need to also look at other criteria to make a reasonable determination.
You seem to imply that it's okay for YouTube to censor content as long as the content is 'factually incorrect'. What is your definition of 'factually' incorrect content? More importantly, how do you prevent YouTube from coming up with their own definition of factual correctness and start banning content at will.
I'd look up those examples listed in history books if I were you; it was widely taken as fact that non-whites were biologically inferior. Look up Nazi propaganda, or what the US civil war was about. It really doesn't take much research to realize that people were (and are) othered using "scientific / biological facts".
you really think that somebody cant come up with strong scientific evidence to support all of those? cmon, it's a lack of knowledge and imagination on your part. There are plenty of real scientific arguments against gay marriage or gay rights at large. You just dont ever hear them because everyone who ever so much as hints at them gets banned immediately.
I have no familiarity with David Icke, but I wonder how much of his "popularity" was fueled by the Youtube algorithm recommending his gullible viewers more and more of the same kind of conspiracy content. I remember speaking to a Flat-Earther once (yes, they actually exist), and it seemed he basically became a flat-earther because he watched one flat-earth video and Youtube kept recommending him more similar content until he became convinced. He also believed in basically every other conspiracy theory (eg. anti-vaxxing) due to spending a considerable amount of time in this Youtube rabbit-hole.
Perhaps instead of simply blaming and deleting individual accounts, Youtube should accept responsibility for the dark side of its recommendation algorithms and stop feeding people the same kind of one-sided content espousing the same conspiracy theories.
As sibling commenter said, was well known in UK, but anecdotally (from talking to other FB conspiracy theorists, also including a flat earther, and from having a few close acquaintances of that bent) this seems spot on. Literally all of them do the same thing, following YT recs, often sitting for hours.
Specifically re Icke, I've talked to otherwise reasonable people who will watch him _despite knowing_ who he is because he comes across as reasonable (and much of what he says fits a certain worldview -- note this isn't left or right specific). He is a good speaker, which you would expect given he was a presenter before he decided to demonstrate he was absolutely batshit crazy live on TV. For people unaware of this, this demonstration was why he was well known in the UK - he went on the biggest talkshow on TV to proclaim that he was the son of god and that the world is controlled by a cabal of lizard people (and was going to be consumed by tidal waves etc etc). The lizard people cabal idea may seem at first glance to be a fairly obvious crude antisemitic trope, but he seems to be absolutely serious about everything, he literally means lizards.
This really comes down to whether or not all ideas should be _promoted_ equally. Do we think all ideas–even if they are demonstrably untrue-deserve to be boosted to the same level of provable truths.
Should they all be promoted equally and considered equally and taught equally, forever? Do we allow demonstrably false claims to remain at the top to be treated equally, forever? To forever waste time? Every single provable untruth? Millions of them? Forever?
I personally see no problem with demoting ideas which have been considered already. I however would have a problem if these peddlers of demonstrably untrue ideas couldn’t easily go set up their own websites or print on their own paper.
This is why I’m not running around flapping my arms dancing in a panic circle. At this point, people can still:
- easily make their own websites at a cost which is a tiny fraction compared to history
- ideas can still printed and pushed the same as they always could through print
- people can still stand on a corner and yelp out whatever ideas just as they always could.
This is really about how much promotion into consideration these ideas deserve and for how long. How much of our very limited time/energy reserves do every idea get?
I used to naively believe that education and more information will fix a lot of things in the world. People will want to study and think and they will be enlightened.
I don't believe that anymore. For one reason, studying is hard, critical thinking is hard. Even with given free time and privilege (hello UBI?), most people will not prefer studying or thinking critically. They'd rather parrot things from the internet and the media around them.
If it makes you feel any better and it shouldn't, right now and in the past many people have figured out how to effectively deal with "the ignorant". It basically involves death or camps, reeducation, exile, eugenics etc.
The problem is not "idiots", the problem is thinking that other people are the problem.
True, division is the real enemy of the people and it's hard to remember that fact everyday with the assault to your senses from the media about how people are doing bad stuff. Thanks for reminding me.
Yay another extremist swept under the digital carpet, problem solved - well NO.
This will just shift this extremist content to other unregulated and unmonitored platforms that will not engage in debate, but blindly accept such things.
After all, if people believe this kinda stuff, cutting of the head won't stop them believing, just shifts the problem out of the public glare, at least on the surface.
>Yay another extremist swept under the digital carpet, problem solved - well NO.
Well yes, at least partially. Studies of bans on hate communities on reddit have shown effectiveness not only in reducing the total hate, but also, and this is important, changing the behaviour of individual users who were active in the hate communities as they moved towards more moderate, diverse communities.
[...]
"What they found was encouraging for this strategy of reducing unwanted activity on a site like Reddit:
Post-ban, hate speech by the same users was reduced by as much as 80-90 percent.
Members of banned communities left Reddit at significantly higher rates than control groups.
Migration was common, both to similar subreddits (i.e. overtly racist ones) and tangentially related ones (r/The_Donald).
However, within those communities, hate speech did not reliably increase, although there were slight bumps as the invaders encountered and tested new rules and moderators.
All in all, the researchers conclude, the ban was quite effective at what it set out to do:
For the definition of “work” framed by our research questions, the ban worked for Reddit. It succeeded at both a user level and a community level. Through the banning of subreddits which engaged in racism and fat-shaming, Reddit was able to reduce the prevalence of such behavior on the site."
[...]
The studies show that it reduced the amount of overt hate speech on reddit. That's not the same thing as reducing hate speech on reddit nor is it the same thing as reducing hate speech total. The people who left might've ended up creating seeds elsewhere. We don't know that.
Furthermore, overt hate speech isn't necessarily the problem for society. It matters more for society what beliefs someone holds than what they are willing to express. The Soviet Union is an example of that - people outwardly expressed agreement with the government, but secretly were against it.
That's ridiculous. Of course it matters what someone is willing to express. A person willing to express hateful speech is a person who is also more willing to engage in hateful acts.
Making it harder to cross that first line absolutely matters in making it harder for them to cross the line of becoming an active danger to others.
>A person willing to express hateful speech is a person who is also more willing to engage in hateful acts.
Considering how hate speech is a very flimsy term, I don't think that this always follows. I do believe that there's likely a correlation, but I doubt it's strong. Some will say that claiming that there are only 2 genders is hate speech, others that claiming that abortion is murder is hate speech. Not to mention that there are many cases where something clearly not hate speech is labeled as hate speech.
In the UK a teenager was arrested for quoting rap song lyrics on an Instagram profile page. This was labeled a hate crime by the prosecutor.[0] Do you think that this makes her more likely to engage in hateful behavior?
Bullies at school often get away with their bullying, because they bully in ways that are not overtly noticeable. They will use terms that aren't offensive to make fun of and hurt others.
Genuinely curious why you think this is so (is there data about this?). It's entirely possible that letting things out makes people less likely to act on them.
In Myanmar there were widespread street attacks on Muslims actively organized on social media, if you've ever been to a country where minorities are subject to online propaganda and lies and the devastating consequences it has on their safety on the streets you wouldn't even think that letting hate overrun online communities somehow pacifies people is believable.
When I was a public defender I got assigned to defend a number of skinheads. I got a pretty heavy exposure to their racist bullshit and it's one of the reasons I'm no longer a public defender.
Everyone thinks hateful thoughts in brief moments of anger, but very few people ever act on those thoughts or express them. Their whole recruitment process was to get someone to move from just thinking thoughts to acting on them, usually by spreading the message to others. Once you cross that line from thinking to action, the bright line divider is gone--it's all just a matter of degrees of action.
>Furthermore, overt hate speech isn't necessarily the problem for society. It matters more for society what beliefs someone holds than what they are willing to express
What beliefs people hold in their heads is the result of a multitude of factors and upbringing and it's really beyond our ability and probably not a good idea to think we can somehow turn every racist into a non-racist with sufficient facts and thoughts and prayer or personal coaching.
What we can do is intervene when it comes to racists acting on their racism, be that in the form of public speech acts or even violence, that is to say when they participate in public life, for example on internet platforms.
>The Soviet Union is an example of that - people outwardly expressed agreement with the government, but secretly were against it.
And what happened to the Soviet Union when all those people were able to express their dissent? Nothing good. If you're saying that racists are going to be as empowered by lack of supression as dissidents were in the Soviet Union I'm not sure you're making a great case for ignoring their propaganda.
I simply don’t want reddit to social engineer in that manner.
Don’t get me wrong: they can do as they please. I just don’t personally prefer to live in the world where Reddit is deciding what is hate, what is acceptable, etc.
Most stems from ignorance. Of which education and constructive debate style education are the best solutions and what you have left, that is the pure hate that need more than blocking in society.
Funny, it was actually education that removed my racist tendencies yet made me look down on those who are fat. One is genetic and unavoidable, the other is 100% the result of choices made by the individual.
Fat shaming is also normal in many Asian countries where they have some of the lowest obesity rates and the longest lifespans in the world.
I don't believe racism "stems from ignorance," and I'm curious why you think so. What makes you say that? Is there some evidence of it, or are you arguing that from hypotheticals or first principles?
Actually it's been pretty conclusively shown that removing extremist content from mainstream channels pretty much prevents the ideas from propagating in the mainstream. If the cockroaches want to crawl under the fridge there's not much you can do to stop them but you can stop them from breeding on the table.
What if that 'extremist content' is pro-LGBT content somewhere else? What if it's criticism of religion? There's no consensus that those aren't equivalent to extremist content around the world, so such censorship does just as good a job at stopping what we once, in the West, considered abhorrent and obscene, as whatever we consider abhorrent today. I don't get how you can consistently square that circle.
Well, rascist content tends to denigrate and harm people, it causes people to get killed and injured, while pro-LGBT content tends to call for love and allow people to love who they want.
I can see the difference, can you?
You make it sound like some slippery slope fallacy, but it's not the same speech. Calling for hate is wrong and should be shuttered in the darkness.
Perhaps you are genuinely not old enough to remember a time before YouTube and Twitter, but there were way fewer conspiracy theories floating around, and they didn't have nearly the social impact that they do today. A coordinated misinformation campaign could never have swayed elections in the US and UK before social media. Why? Because there were institutions in place that acted as a filter. Say what you will about that arrangement, it was more effective and suppressing Crazy than whatever it is we've got now.
> there were way fewer conspiracy theories floating around, and they didn't have nearly the social impact that they do today
I remember a whole bunch of crazies on usenet in the early-mid 90s but that was an extremely effective filter at keeping them from the rest of the world.
The benefits of smoking tobacco.
The danger of smoking marijuana. (And vice versa, depending on decade.)
The aberrancy/normalcy of homosexuality (take your pick... depends on the decade.)
The vast conspiracy theory that is the Red Mensce. The vast conspiracy that is evil capitalism. (Once again, depends on the decade and locale as to which disinformation campaign is at work.)
Etc.
All of these -- and dozens of others -- thrived pre-internet.
Youtube -- like newspapers before it -- is dying. The ability to host, index, and disseminate video content is spreading st breakneck speed. Youtube is at the point that magazines were several years ago: becoming more and more sanctimonious until it will awake to discover nobody is using their content.
NASA faked the moon landings, UFOs, Elvis is not dead, JFK second shooter, Marilyn Monroe murdered by FBI/CIA. These are examples of some of the most popular conspiracy theories from the US from over half a century ago. Apparently early 19th century US politics was also rife with conspiracy theories.[0] This even happened in Rome: Mark Antony and Octavian battled with each other using misinformation. [1]
You didn't used to be able to find communities of like-minded David Icke fans, either. My father was a big David Icke fan, and he talked to my brother and me about it all the time; I can't even imagine how all-consuming it would have been for him if he'd ever have been able to get on a forum and talk to people about it.
Oh, yes, those lunatics claiming Earth is circling the Sun, and claiming thousands of worlds are out there, similar to our God-chosen . Heretics, society is better without them spreading their nonsense ; deny them their voice, or burn them at stake
When you say something that is inconvenient to those in power then one way for them to deal with is to label you as a conspiracy theorist. These confirmed scientific theories weren't always confirmed and there was a time when they were quite inconvenient to those in power (the church). The parent poster is making the argument that it's easy to label true information as a conspiracy theory too. Even to this day there are many people who think evolution is a lie. What do you think it was like when Darwin was alive? Now think about the fact that many people have been killed because they were accused of practicing witchcraft.
Just be aware that it's a double edged sword. Mass acceptance of censorship makes it easy to stifle societal progress by designating ideas which you disagree with as extremist content. We are lucky that the people currently at the helm of tech industry happen to hold mostly liberal views that we broadly agree with. If that was not the case, the same argument could have been used by them to suppress many left-wing/progressive ideas that you may hold dear.
I mean, there is so much wrong with this statement, and not like thorny philosophical problems to be teased apart with careful interrogation, but just basic definitional problems as well as issues that would make its implementation impossible that are so obvious a kid repeating the fourth grade could spot them toot suite.
Historic hypothetical: Do you think Nancy Reagan could have convinced damn near every conceivable jury in the country in that rap music and the views therein caused damage? What does that do your little draft constitutional amendment there?
I think it would not bebhard to find your view damaging, I'm fact your expression of that view gas already caused specific damage to me because you made me sad for you. As well, such pro-censorship expressions threaten the very core of America The Idea, which idea brings a great many positive things and clarity to the world, the loss of which would be obviously damaging to millions.
How would your subversive and damaging views survive in the dystopia you seek?
You make the mistake of presuming that these human beings are all cockroaches. That's pure arrogance. It's not all 5G Holocaust deniers you're turning away.
You think this is better or worse for a country that is sharply and almost exactly evenly polarized across party lines?
> Actually it's been pretty conclusively shown that removing extremist content from mainstream channels pretty much prevents the ideas from propagating in the mainstream.
Actually, no it hasn't. And for anyone that holds such a viewpoint, I'd strongly suggest reading J. S. Mill's classic, On Liberty[1] -- a foundational document of Western political thought.
As I write my reply, this comment is currently grayed-out from downvotes. I find this absurd. Anyone who has read Mill knows Mill was a utilitarian. He didn't support freedom of speech for dogmatic reasons but for practical ones. Mill didn't really care about the rights of the speaker to speak or write. He cared about the right of others to hear and read. From chapter 2 of On Liberty[1]:
> But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
Mill's point is this: Every time you silence someone, you are preventing others from hearing what that person has to say. Maybe those people want to listen so they can entertain an idea and become convinced. Maybe they want to listen so they can better understand and refute the speaker. Maybe they just find the rantings of a crazy person amusing. Whatever their reasons, the "cure" of censorship is worse than the "disease" caused by letting people communicate. (Note that this formulation also makes it easy to distinguish speech from "speech" such as air horns designed to disrupt a speaker from spreading their ideas to those who want to listen.)
Moreover, censorship requires designating a censor. Is there any person or group who you would grant the power of deciding what you're allowed to read or hear? I certainly can't think of one. I'm an adult and I can decide for myself what is acceptable for me to consume, thank you very much.
Of course YouTube is not a government and they shouldn't be forced to host things that they don't want to host, but following the free speech norm is almost certainly more beneficial to society. Every once in a while, one of those crazy ideas that must be censored— one of those ideas turns out to be true. Just like slavery and the subjugation of women in the past, there are moral errors we are committing that future societies will condemn us for. Censorship prevents those ideas from coming to light sooner and impedes moral progress.
Warning messages before viewing something? Sure. Add links to rebuttals? Fine. Demonetize? OK. But deletion? I'd prefer you didn't.
The very idea of a "filter bubble" is definitionally impossible given a Millian open market of ideas. IMO, it's an ideal worth striving for. Maybe it's easy to draw the line with crazy racists or flat-Earthers, but what about complex social issues: abortion, euthanasia, religions values?
The classic problem - who decides what behavior is benevolent?
"$INSERT_POSITIVE_ADJECTIVE despotism" is still despotism.
So it comes down to each person's belief set - do they believe that despotism is unfortunate when misapplied but is a force for good in the right hands? Or do they instead believe that all forms of control inevitably will get seized by corrupt forces? Or more radically, that the entire concept of control is inherently contradictory when seen in the broader context of us having brains with limited computational power, limited knowledge, forever bounded by time in a locally deterministic universe, and thus any attempt to seize control just furthers the propagation of ignorance that the "benevolent despotists" are ironically trying to eradicate?
I'd be careful with dismissing the giants whose shoulders we straddle. If it weren't for the Magna Carta, the French and American Revolutions, and the Declaration of Independence, most of us would still be living under despotic rule.
The manga carts basically gave power to landlords, the American revolution protected slavery, the Declaration of Independence explicitly stated the slaves were not people.
No one should be beholden to the “giants whose shoulders we straddle”. Note that that phrase is actually applied to scientists who developed evidence based theories rather than old “pure thought” silliness.
As far as despotic rule - England had an elected government at the time of the American revolution (not saying that America wasn’t justified), but it’s also worth noting that a large number of the early English colonists left England because they wanted to enforce religious domination that wasn’t legal in England.
> the Declaration of Independence explicitly stated the slaves were not people.
That is categorically not true. It said some problematic things about Native Americans for sure, but they could never have gotten away with pro-slavery language in the Declaration. It's a propaganda document that had to unite wide swaths of revolutionary ideologies; abolitionists included.
I assume that you are actually thinking of the 3/5ths compromise in the Constitution, which is still more complicated than just "saying slaves aren't people." Counting slaves as people was the slave-owner position, because being counted wasn't about rights or freedom, it was about State power. It was the abolitionist arguing that slaves shouldn't count as people, not to de-humanize them, but to keep the slave-owners from being able to have it both ways.
You're right, it's an implicit assumption in the declaration, made explicit in the Constitution.
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness
Rests on the assumption that slaves are not "men". But something else.
The DoI did not release slaves, which is fairly explicit statement that slaves are people. Of course Deciding that slaves were 3/5th of a person, and slavery was legal is an explicit statement the “all men are created equal” was not something believed by the signatories of the DoI.
That said the “State power” argument in this case has always been the justification for the treason committed by the confederacy. When faced with a legally elected president, making a legal change that they didn’t like, the confederate states mutinied.
They have retroactively tried to call it the “war of northern aggression” (hint, you committed treason, so it’s not). Then they’ve claimed it was about states rights - if it was, then the Supreme Court would have ruled it unconstitutional, they’ve also never mutinied over anything else.
>The DoI did not release slaves, which is fairly explicit statement that slaves are people. Of course Deciding that slaves were 3/5th of a person, and slavery was legal is an explicit statement the “all men are created equal” was not something believed by the signatories of the DoI.
You're treating two different documents that were written 14 years apart by two diffent, though strongly overlapping, groups of people as if they were statements someone made back to back. Did Thomas Jefferson believe the words "All Men" included the slaves he owned when he penned those words? Fuck no! But he still wrote the words in a way that men who did believe that "All Men" meant ALL men could get behind it. Compare this to how he describes the Natives.
"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."
By examining the nuance, you can start to see a fuller shape of the society. Slavery was a hot button issue that was left unspoken until the moment it unquestionably has to be addressed. The Native Americans are considered savage and warlike, and that is an uncontroversial view.
I understand the impulse to fight back against whitewashed history, but throwing out all nuance isn't helpful no matter what cause it is in service to.
It's not a binary. The more places extremists can find like-minded people, the more their worldview is normalized and validated. The fewer places, the higher the probability that they realize (or be continuously confronted by) how far out their views are, and the less extremist a position they'll end up taking.
I genuinely don't think universal free speech is the answer, because people aren't confronted with the counterargument until they seek it out. If you could guarantee that argument, it would be much safer. But I don't think it's possible with today's media; people exist in a bubble of both their own choosing and algorithmic choosing, and aren't challenged.
Agreed it is a hard balance, all gets down to how responsible the average person is and working around that aspect.
Universal free speech as it stands, allows racism and with that, you are not wrong. Free speech within some moral boundaries, though free debate, that is the aspect of free speech to provide balance that is equally important.
When you ban these people you erode something we all hold dear in Western countries, and that’s free speech. Even those who are not aligned with you share that ideal, and we have integrity on this one issue because there’s proof of it - you don’t get censored.
When you do start censoring them, we will all start losing faith in our values as we don’t apply it across the board.
If you look at other non free countries, the average person doesn’t really believe that you have the right to express your views. Take the Muhammad cartoons for example, a vast majority of Muslims in non-western countries think that’s a no go from a rights perspective ( as in, you shouldn’t even have the right to draw it). That kind of thinking extends and extends to all kinds undermining of individual rights. If you look at China, the vastness of inaction to their Internet being censored is another key example of this. It takes a lot to get a society to value it, and we worked pretty hard to get those values ingrained in our culture.
There might be some absolutely abhorrent people in our country, but even they cannot deny that they do have the right to express themselves here. We lose that baseline integrity of our values when we start withering it away, until we ourselves can’t even recognize ourselves anymore, where suddenly we have all these caveats to a principle that defines our society.
Problem solved! Yay another person that thinks if something doesn't fix the issue 100% then it can't be considered.
This is taking away their access to a platform that has global reach. They already had platforms where they didn't engage in debate, btw; they're called youtube channels with heavily-moderated chat sections. Except there they can reach millions of people.
It would of been better to leave it there, but had a disclaimer warning that couldn't be skipped akin to the old piracy warnings on purchased movie DVD's.
You also won't stop such types of content from appearing on said platforms, less popular but still they will appear, get popular and get closed down. But that's an issue with some types of content that all social media platforms have.
No solution will be 100%, let's not presume that there will ever be 100% solution. Though is this the best approach. Exposing and debating head on would be the better solution and this eliminates that.
The key component is them having access to a platform with global reach. Exposing and debating hasn't been working all that well, has it? These 5G conspiracy theories are absurdly easy to bust. Yet here we are, with people attacking 5G towers and threatening employees. 9/11 conspiracy theories are still popular. Moon landing conspiracy theories. Debating in an of itself doesn't work. Humans aren't perfectly logical.
ugh there are literally people who think the Earth is flat. There are literally people who think the Earth is flat!
>ugh there are literally people who think the Earth is flat. There are literally people who think the Earth is flat!
True, should they ban that as well? Though they havn't been going around flattening mountains or any other harm, so there is that.
Not all those who believe conspiracy stuff, act upon it. Some will, those are more the ones who will engage in lesser, more niche platforms in which such content will run, along with more such content. Thus, driving many who will want to watch it to be exposed to other platforms in which such content is less tacked as more echo chambers and this is not something to be overlooked.
Thing is, whatever you do, there will always be some and with so many humans, the odds of there being more than one is a given. Do you ridicule/educate in public or cast aside to dark corners in which they can carry on unchecked.
When flat Earthers start protesting quarantines during a pandemic, try to intimidate elected officials with guns, try to destroy 5g towers, and threaten employees of a private company, yeah we can talk about taking them off youtube. I don't understand how you think these channels aren't echo chambers already. They are... Them being on youtube doesn't change that. It only allows them to easily reach millions of people who they otherwise wouldn't reach.
Sure it allows millions, but how many will take it seriously and how many will be sat on the fence about it. By removing them from youtube you put those sat on the fence down a path of thinking, ok what are they hiding here. You also push those who believe it anyhow away from any exposure of debate towards niche area's, area's in which those sat on the fence may visit and without balanced debate, get drawn into things even deeper.
Maybe the right action for this, maybe not. Hard to really measure it beyond cell tower death rates and I'm fairly sure we have past the peak upon that surge.
The point is to the stop seeds of thought from spreading in the first place.
The way these Youtubers work is to cast as wide of a net as possible as quickly as possible to hook a small percentage of followers who they exploit consistently with newer and wilder beliefs.
By pushing them "under ground" you effectively take away their means of spreading and protect the masses in the process.
This will just shift this extremist content to other unregulated and unmonitored platforms that will not engage in debate, but blindly accept such things.
We already have this. It's called 4chan and 8chan.
And you know what? It's absolutely better to keep this shit to their echo chamber, where they have limited exposure, than Youtube, where they have a potential audience of billions.
Yes. But association with those unregulated and unmonitored sites will hopefully assist viewers with putting the content in its proper context. Having your content on a major broadcast network is different than having your content on public access. If YT decides to regulate content, it may provide a measure of credibility to popular content still on YT, and that is certainly something that may be beneficial to their brand and something they should be free to do.
I don't really get the down vote here, if people think trying to silence someone would actually make conspiracy theorists less likely to believe this guy, then I'm kind of shocked?
I would rather extremists have to go to some other website to get their content, than for it to end up in tens of thousands 12 year olds' recommendations lists on YouTube.
I don’t understand the free speech arguments here. Youtube is an advertising platform. They can do what they want with their platform. If I own a billboard, and someone wants to advertise their bags for dead kittens, I can say no.
There needs to be some sense of proportionality. If the government bashed down Icke’s door and smashed his computer then sure, we should worry about free speech. But getting banned from Youtube?
At some point, organizations get so big and so ubiquitous, that they become quasi-governmental organizations.
Google shares data with intelligence services, they have close contacts in the administration, they are a near-monopoly in multiple areas, they have a tremendous number of government contracts, they spend more on lobbying in DC than any other organization.
If we abdicate our rights to these organizations, the government can simply use them as a mechanism of enforcement that obviates the entire Bill of Rights.
I think it's very curious how we see the same people say that Google Must Remove Disinformation, and moments later they say it doesn't matter anyway. Why ask them to remove it then? And besides didn't you (in the plural sense) argue it's up to them as a private company?
1. Youtube should remove disinformation, because it is harmful to society and it would be wrong for Youtube and the misinformers to profit from it, a special and unique scenario created by the Youtube platform. It is asking Youtube to exert control over their platform in a way that is likely but not guaranteed, to have net benefit, and not create peverse incentives.
2. Youtube should not remove disinformation because it violates the free speech of the misinformers. Youtube the entity has no rights over the content they deliver, in violation of their own Terms of Use. Any content anyone decides to upload should be allowed, including all the truly horrible stuff they content moderate which you never see.
I am actually on record mocking this move by Google. Maybe the consensus on HN is what you say, but this site trends toward groupspeak and mass downvoting for opinions they don’t like. I wouldn’t necessarily take the top comments as the actual consensus.
Free speech is the principle that you should let people say whatever they want without censorship or legal consequences (excluding cases where the speech causes direct harm).
> They can do what they want with their platform.
Of course they can, but they can't then say they believe in free speech. Similarly to "you don't make peace with your friends" : you can't say you're free speech if you only allow information you agree with.
What annoys me is when people think that free speech isn't a principle, but just a law in the US which applies to the government only. It's usually: "Hurr duur, it's a private company so it can practice full communism and we should be okay with that."
(That said, personally I have mixed feelings about this because I feel like it might be causing harm... Same with the antivaxxer crap.)
The argument is that people’s individual freedom to speak anything should be held in higher regard than the welfare of society, regardless of what harmful outcomes may come from that speech.
It’s a core tenet of American racists and fascists (and, I suspect, conspiracy theorists), because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to convert others to their cause without being silenced by their platforms.
You could have applied those arguments to all social progressive movements of the 20th century. Gay rights? Those were considered fundamentally abhorrent perversions, suitable for prison & physical elimination. The 'welfare of society'? We define that as much after the fact as anything else. At one point, that was down to censoring anti-slavery positions. How can you possibly consistently make that determination without censoring, at various points, everything good we've worked for? If you're pro abortion, are you 'converting to the cause' of nihilistic extremism, or are you making reasonable arguments? Who determines that, government censors? Private corporations with effective monopolies on communication channels? That only sounds good if they're run by the people you agree with. They will not always be run by people you agree with.
It’s always possible to make an incorrect decision in service of the greater good, but that’s no excuse to give up concern for the greater good forever.
Your argument also neatly contradicts personal gun ownership: “Someone was shot yesterday by their neighbor during an argument, so we should ban individual possession of weapons since guns have been used to enforce disagreeable opinions on others.”
> Free speech is different from material harm to others.
This is not a universally agreed-upon belief, and is specifically a belief I disagree with.
Free speech is just as sharp a blade as any other weapon. We seem to think that weapons can be carried safely because human beings will use good judgement about when to use them. I hold the same belief about speech: it is dangerous when wielded incorrectly, and societies are uniquely vulnerable to it above all other weapons. It's no more appropriate to me to allow wholly unrestricted use of speech than it is to allow wholly unrestricted use of weapons.
Most arguments for 'free speech' try to avoid the ethical debate about where the line between 'freedom to say anything' and 'harm to the greater good' is. I consider that line the most critical debate of all. Arguing that speech must never be restricted is just as extremist a view as arguing that speech must always be restricted. I much prefer the position "speech generally doesn't need to be restricted, but I'll make an exception in cases of significant risk/harm to societies".
The 'greater good' doesn't exist outside of what we say. If we're forbidden from expressing our views on what it should actually be, if you can't find others who express the same views, how is that not equally serving whoever is in power and simply disagrees with what you think is right? The 'greater good' seems far better served by designing platforms to encourage healthy debate rather than playing whack-a-mole with whatever the issue du jour happens to be. For the same reasons we tend to not ban political parties, and hopefully recognise that it's better simply to design superior systems - e.g. not using first past the post or having an independent electoral commission. Censoring to act in the 'greater good' is foolish hubris that can only end badly for those it purports to help the most. And, crucially, when it does start to harm you, how will you speak out about it?
Wouldn't we want the exact opposite? Slavery was once the norm, talking out against it was how we actually changed it. Trying to imply that we should censor all those who go against the group is no better than if everyone who was against slavery was killed.
It makes no sense in any "free" America where censorship of differing ideas is something we should strive for. When did the public suddenly get too sheltered from reality?
>I don’t understand the free speech arguments here.
It's pretty simple. Many people rely on youtube's platform to reach viewers. This is the case for youtube recommendations, but also for subscriptions. When youtube bans someone, that person will reach a vastly smaller audience, in effect censoring them. Questions?
>I can say no.
That is a free speech issue as well. We might decide that you chose correctly, usually on the balance that the dead kittens advertiser has an equivalent platform available to them, but that doesn't rend it out of the arms of free speech
>If the government bashed down Icke’s door and smashed his computer then sure, we should worry about free speech.
Free speech is not only a concept in law. Freedom refers to the ability to do something, not only the legal right to do something. Free speech refers to the ability to reach an (non-captive) audience, not a legal right to say things in an empty room.
Thanks for the response, I do have some questions.
How do you decide what constitutes 'many' people?
Is vimeo deserving of similar scrutiny or doesn't it reach enough people? What about the video site someone started yesterday that has 2 people on it? What about when Youtube decides not to upload a video because it is in the wrong format? Should we force Youtube to host every video anyone decides to upload?
Why does Pornhub not allow David Icke conspiracy videos? Hypothetically speaking, if David Icke uploaded his entire canon to Pornhub, and Pornhub took it down, is that a violation of free speech?
What about letters to the editor in a newspaper, are they 'censoring' all the letters they don't publish, or should they start publishing issues that are 300 pages long and cost $10 to include all the letters?
Is it really true that I can be obligated to accept an advertisement regardless of the content? How do the free speech Gods 'know' why I didn't accept the advertisement? Perhaps I just don't want to bother dealing with the complaining phone calls, or I am worried about jeopardising future business from pet shops. All these personal freedoms are obliterated in the service of free speech?
As I said, I really don't understand the free speech arguments here.
To be honest there's a lot of talk about freedom of speech here, and the dynamic of freedom of speech vs private corporations right to determine what they allow on their site. Personally I think that this issue is not actually as important as people think, and this problem is just one of several that emerges from a different problem. Our real problem is a lack of competition. There are a tiny number of social media sites that exist at scale: There's Youtube, there's Facebook, and then Twitter.
If we had 15 social media platforms, it really wouldn't be much of a problem for them to make decisions about who they wanted on their platform - whether that be through Terms of Service or crappy DMCA implementations. And that's not even taking into consideration the fact that they're all run by the same handful of people who bump into each other at the local Whole Foods.
The problem isn't censorship, it's the fact that we've got Standard Oil and no one sees it as a problem.
Googling "social media sites" gives me far more than 15 alternatives to Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. You're like people arguing that Youtube has a monopoly because no "serious" competition exists, only the weasel-words you're using are "at scale" to pretend the entire rest of the social media ecosystem doesn't exist.
Wasn't it a meme not long ago that young people didn't even use Facebook anymore, that it was turning into the "old people's social network?" How does that happen if Facebook is Standard Oil and no competition is possible? I guess all of those other sites and apps simply aren't operating "at scale?"
The discussion of whether and how social media affects political and cultural discourse, and especially how the gamification and incentives of social media do, is worth having. But the tendency of arguments to depend on slippery slope fallacies which assume the entire web beyond three or four popular sites simply doesn't exist or doesn't matter is incorrect.
If spreading misinformation is a valid means to shut down a channel then why do channels like Spirit Science remain? They got about 900k subs and spend the whole time spouting the most insane claims you could possibly think of with absolutely no evidence to back it up and yet they continue to remain.
I think the censorship is for political reasons rather than for misinformation. David Icke has been spreading misinformation for years (e.g. lizard people) but that isn't political. COVID-19 is.
The entire text of the first amendment, seeing as it seems like a lot of people like to reference it without actually knowing (or pretending not to know) what it says:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Been saying this a long time. The top tech companies aka FANGs are too big and just booting people off regardless of if they agree with msg is is not right. This was happening with apps before, now videos and WhatsApp msg throttling. Soon it will be email filtering and then we can say we officially have the great freedom firewall of America. Any means of discovery and communication digitally is now strictly controlled under the guise of fake news. Content was already being ghosted or shadow banned and now it is simply booted. No one should attempt to build any company unless they are heavily funded on these platforms. Add trailers, preview content on them and if possible self host.
I see a lot of comments suggesting YouTube is a large & monopolistic enough platform that they have to be held to a different standard than a private company, more like a public utility.
YouTube is a private company, and they're hosting exabytes of video content for free. You don't need to pay (with money) to upload terabytes of video and have it streamed to millions of people. Just 20 years ago that would have been unimaginable. Even today I think it's taken for granted a little too much.
If YouTube did what we want, I reckon they'd be out of business pretty fast as they get overrun with the kind of content they currently don't allow.
Especially right now, communication is moving more and more online. Online communication is increasingly mediated by corporations.
If our speech is mediated by corporations, and those corporations tell us what we can and cannot say, what good is freedom of speech?
Companies like YouTube take advantage of their economies of scale to offer video services for free. To be able to do that, they had to dump services at a loss for years funded by venture capital.
How can you build a meaningful paid platform, while a VC-backed company spends tens of millions on R&D at a loss?
The argument thus far is that this is in the consumer's interest - free services at a high quality. That dumping being good for the consumer is contingent on the business being able to monetize with advertising.
If YouTube couldn't make money with ads, they'd have to charge for their services - opening them up to competition. VC backed businesses offering consumer products for free is most certainly dumping. So far, that dumping has been to consumer's benefit. YouTube's behavior is reversing that benefit.
There's also a lot of other options they could go with, all of which would be far less un-American.
1) A Reddit-like quarantine system, and eat the cost of hosting (like Reddit does)
2) Require Ickes to pay for his own hosting on YouTube, at YouTube's favorable pricing and peering contracts.
3) Enable a separate ad ecosystem for quarantined content.
There seems to be quite a few YouTube videos of charging phones in microwaves. Are these videos being removed from YouTube too? And I've heard stories that some people indeed believed that and broke their phones. Can YouTube be held responsible for damages?
“As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”
While I generally agree that censorship is not ideal, I think one big issue here is that YouTube is already in the business of influencing what is watched on their platform. Popular content is recommended more. In effect, content becomes click bait that's meant to invoke emotions. I think some blame can be put on YouTube for driving people to listen to fanatics, so this seems like an effort to right that wrong.
I'm not a fan of popularity-driven recommendations unless they're from a community like HN that has a high-bar for useful content.
Inevitably on a moderation question on HN People will argue for “truth” to fight with misinformation.
Please know that this stopped working the moment we went past the artisanal era of content moderation - which was before the Cable news cycle effect.
At the scale we operate at now, not moderating content guarantees that malformed information Packets that take advantage of neural and social weaknesses will proliferate over “truth”.
Interesting. Private companies have now become the moral arbitrators and censors of the global social media platforms they control vs in China where the government takes on this role. Wonder which is more dystopian.
Icke's Conspiracy theories are displacement of class discontent 2005: The Reptoid Hypothesis. In this context, Google has just silenced a form of dissent or at least evidence of dissent building. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20718709?seq=1
If Youtube really believes this is the right course of action, why doesn’t it’s sister company Google remove those items from search as well? If this is really a principled action, then let’s see some follow through.
They’d never do that because that is the very definition of internet censorship as we know it today.
That’s how close Youtube is with this dangerous game.
Google already modifies it’s search results. Try searching for “Clinton Epstein” and see if the first page of results gives you unbiased sources from all viewpoints.
What he says reminds me a lot on religious teachings. They are still allowed to spread their bullshit.
Esp. it reminds me on Scientology. Which is allowed in many countries to teach the very same bullshit.
Censorship is violating fundamental rights. Somebody should fight them, Facebook, Google, Twitter, in court, but nobody will for these nutcases.
Freedom of speech is quite different from freedom of the press.
You can say what you want, but I don't have to print what you say if I own a newspaper.
That being said, if Youtube and such are now going to start curating content (by pushing "recommended" content and by removing content), we may need to revisit those particular platforms' classification under Section 230 of the DCMA.
that person didn't realize the damage propaganda could do with modern tools. Unfortunate reality is our cognitive biases can be exploited, and complete freedom of speech is not in the best interest of the majority of humanity.
This is a "loophole" that is exploited over and over again by climate change denialists, cigarette companies, nazis...
"Modern" tools are anything but. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, and to some extent thereafter (less so as civil-society norms developed, and a shared sense for "reasonable" political advocacy along with those), extremist pamphlets, chapbooks and other printed materials pushing outlandish conspiracy theories were incredibly common. Anyone advocating for freedom of the press would've been familiar with the stuff.
This absolutism is unnecessary. Plenty of modern democratic countries have limits on acceptable speech (France, Sweden to give you a couple examples) and they are not less democratic than the US (I would argue they are more).
Limiting speech within agreed boundaries is not problematic as long as it's a decision taken with a good criteria and with a good goal in mind. It's no different than any other decision we make on how we setup society.
What is or isn't acceptable at the time is largely a matter of fashion and opinions. As an example, have a look at the ALA's compiled list of banned books (some of which are banned for ridiculous reasons): http://www.ala.org/advocacy/sites/ala.org.advocacy/files/con...
I don't think anyone is arguing about the damage of propaganda here. The discussion here is more-or-less Youtube choosing which propaganda it wishes people to see.
To use your idea here - the cognitive biases being exploited are being exploited by youtube itself. In this example, Icke is a relatively divisive character even on the right wing. So it becomes important to ask - of the controversial figures that remain (on both sides) what cognitive biases is Google/Youtube aiming to exploit by allowing them to continue?
The most dangerous mindset of this era is the fallacy of symmetry. That the wrongs of one side are qualitatively and quantitatively mirrored in the other, only in different forms.
If we're not allowed to entertain that one side might simply be wrong enough to need its own correction, then we allow it to continue to march off the cliff. Dragging the overton window down with it.
It is simply not a given that the existence of a piece of propaganda implies that the absence of it (or intolerance of it) is equivalent to propaganda for another side. If I'm corrected from claiming 1+1=2, the other side rests on more than propaganda.
> that person didn't realize the damage propaganda could do with modern tools.
No that person did. It's precisely why he was against censorship. Propaganda is rather useless without censorship. It's why china, north korea, nazi germany, etc had censorship.
> This is a "loophole" that is exploited over and over again by climate change denialists, cigarette companies, nazis...
Right. Imagine if cigarette companies and nazis had the power to censor...
Your comment is actually in support of free speech but you are so blinded by agenda that you can't see it.
Nazis supported censorship and used your exact reasoning to censor. Think about it. The chinese government uses your exact reasoning to censor. Think about it.
And to add another, “When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”
I don't know who David Icke was or what he was saying (according to comments here he's a 5G conspiracy theorist), but deplatforming him won't have the intended effect.
I agree, but at what point does speech cross the threshold of harmful? If I post a video with fake research and claim drinking Clorox cures cancer, should that be allowed to stay up? What we are talking about in this particular case is not a battle of ideas or opinions, but complete fabrications.
I don't know what the answer is, but I do know people who believe some of this crap and will not listen to reason. At least for them, it would have been better if they never heard this stuff.
Uhhh... fraud has legal definition, as does libel - these are _civil_ issues not _criminal_. That being said, the right to actually say the words is still protected and nobody is allowed to take that right away.
He can still say what he wants. Constitutional law is pretty clear that you can say what you want, but you do not necessarily have a right to how you get to say it.
Newspapers are not required to publish every single letter they get. In the same vein, Youtube has no legal obligations to anybody to let them on their platform.
I disagree with this "Telling people to drink bleach to cure COVID-19 is not protected under free speech.". It is a separate question whether Youtube's actions are limited by free speech protections. What he said would have all kinds of lies, including religion, not be protected under free speech.
If you follow your line of thought then David Icke should be prosecuted. And then YouTube is still wrong here, acting as a judge, jury and executioner vigilante.
No, they just decided, as a commercial entity not under the jurisdiction of the First Amendment, to stop cutting him checks. Get a grip, they're not executing him.
It's not censorship by any means; YouTube isn't the government. David Icke and his ilk should feel free to take their lunatic fringe theories to the lunatic fringe corners of the Internet like Breitbart etc. They won't be "censored" there.
It's quite literally in the definition of censorship, and has been since its origination in Ancient Rome. More importantly, the restriction on censorship has been tied to government action since it was first enshrined in the First Amendment.
A private party can choose not to spread the content of a third party. That is not censorship. That is one party choosing not to spend their own resources to further the interests of a different party. If the third party has an issue with that, they can spend their own resources creating their own platform to spread their own ideas.
Ah, the etymological fallacy. Certainly the office of censor started in ancient Rome. However there have been plenty of other censors throughout history, and many that currently exist.
None of them are governmental. All exist to police speech.
In general, merely declining to publish something should probably not be called censorship. It is indeed a fine line between maintaining editorial control and suppressing speech. However, when one publishes just about everything, but excepts certain viewpoints with the explicit goal of suppressing them, the term starts to fit a lot better.
Is any of this against the First amendment? Of course not. But it's still clearly censorship.
If you want to get technical about it, the Catholic Church was deeply embedded in most European governments when the Index Librorum Prohibitorum was issued, and was the official state religion for multiple kingdoms.
The Hays Code was issued by the MPAA as a voluntary set of guidelines governing the then vertically-integrated studios and theaters. Importantly, they were not prohibitions on movie content. Many film productions did not adhere to the Hays Code and many independent theaters similarly ignored it. Indeed, the body established to enforce the code did not even how the power to order studious to cut material... The only instance of the Hays Code having an impact on films was during the short Breen era, which lasted only 6 years, and this only affected films shown in vertically-integrated theaters owned by the studios. Independent theaters continued to ignore the Hays Code, as they always did.
And the Broadcast Standards was a decency code intended to mollify advertisers, i.e., other private parties, who generally did not want to be associated with certain types of content. As with the Hays Code, it was a series of guidelines, not a prohibition, and late-night shows generally flaunted the Broadcast Standards with impunity.
In other words, not censorship...
Just private acts of self-interest to protect their market position.
YouTube is a de facto public utility at this point. IMO if they want it to be a closed ecosystem, they should not allow public access the way they currently do. There's no good alternative to YouTube (yet) but I hope there is some day.
Pushing people to the fringes just breeds more hatred, outrage, misinformation, and extremists.
Imagine if there was just one phone company and they only let people who they agree with have phones.
The whole rest of the Internet is flush with video content -- it's no monopoly like the phone company used to be.
YouTube is an offshoot of an ad company. A private, for-profit enterprise that uses video content from its users to sell adverts.
Now, if you want to say the Internet is a public utility -- that's getting closer. And if the Internet writ large somehow managed to block certain content, that would be of great concern. That would require government intervention, like you see in China and some other places.
YouTube is not a de facto public utility. It is not currently used as the primary means of news by any segment of the population, by any government entity anywhere in the world.
It is not a means of communication like Zoom or the telephone. It's just videos. Lots and lots of videos. It provides entertainment to billions of people, but that doesn't mean YouTube is a utility. It just means its very popular.
> It is not currently used as the primary means of news by any segment of the population
This is wrong. I'm ~19 in the UK. My entire demographic gets their news from either Google, YouTube, Facebook and word-of-mouth, younger people even more so.
I don't doubt that people that are 19 hear things through the rumor mill. That is how the 5g rumor spread and why the UK has so many destroyed 5g towers right now. But there is a difference between the gossip spread through social networks, and news.
Also, to note--Google doesn't generate its own news. It sources it to news organizations...Similarly, YouTube News coverage are just segments of news broadcasts by news organizations...
Google News for sure, but non-mainstream YouTube sources (so called independent creators) are collectively more popular than BBC or newspapers. Again, at least in my age group.
I agree, OP is just out of touch with current realities. Sorry but I will side with the the notion that Youtube IS a public utility. The free market allowed these monsters to grow (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc) and become extremely powerful. They cannot now to claim "they are just another private company" when people are totally marginalized from public discourse if they dont play along.
The other thing is the partenalistic stuff, please remove the content so those brain dead morons(not me) dont get influenced.If the ideas are so wacky, you need more light and debate and shame, not censorship and secretism. Maybe I am one of those brain-dead morons, but for me the standard is very clear, if a video/tweet is illegal, remove it and block the account, otherwise, let it be.
I predict a near future update from David on how the Lizard people plotted against our enlightenment once again by blocking him from us. Fear not, he has found new ways to make us aware of the consciousness field, saturn, and 5G its emotion affecting effects.
While channels with extreme stance that have public health repercussion are easy enough for them to shut down, I worry more about amateur channels with conspiracy-oriented bating materials that polarize people to either extreme.
Although I welcome deletion of David Icke account, I am afraid that now he will play on a card of suppression, scoring even more points for his conspiracy theories, fueling even more flame of fear and hatred.
Throwaway. I worked at an event David did many years ago. I used to be a big fan.
My wife and I watched his 3 hour interview last night after hearing about these bans and discussed this a fair bit.
For those that didn't watch, he categorically denies the existence of Covid-19, calls the entire thing a hoax and said that Gates is a psychopath who wants to vaccinate the entire world with nanobots that will eventually enslave us. 5G doesn't cause Covid-19, because it doesn't exist, but 5g can activate the nanobots and at 60ghz can cause respiratory problems similar to what we're seeing. This is orchestrated by a shadowy group called The Cult. We should rise up against our governments and the 'technocrats' of silicon valley (the 1%) to solve this.
It may sound ridiculous, but he mixes in enough truth (often in the form of things you will have seen on the Internet) and cleverly spun arguments to make the 'lies' believable. He does this over a long enough time period (yesterday 3 hours, but his talks are often far longer), that you come away believing what he's said, that's he incredibly clever, and that he's fighting for the "real man on the street" against the 1% and a government that's done nothing for you. Social media has been very dangerous in this respect.
A few days ago I saw someone on twitter saying that rather than deplatform, Icke should just be beaten in debate. The problem is you can't beat Icke in debate without making his followers dig in further. Like any conspiracist, the retort is "that's what they'd want you to say". It's similar to arguing with someone about the existence of God. You can't prove there is no God, I continue to believe and tell you he exists.
My wife just thinks it's all ridiculous. I think with the vaccinations, it's dangerous. But then I have kids now, both are vaccinated. The concept of censoring people scares me, but the idea of throwing away a hundred years of science and medicine because people are worried about being being controlled by Gates's nanobots scares me even more.
The root of the problem seems to be the inability of people to correctly judge the likeliness of David's arguments to be true. This is not a problem that we're going to solve by banning David's content.
>This is not a problem that we're going to solve by banning David's content.
Ok. How are we going to solve it by guaranteeing that his content proliferates as widely as possible, or even as some have suggested, by having governments force platforms to host it against their will, in the name of absolute free speech?
The principle that we can debate the merit of ideas only so long as we never prevent any idea from spreading only renders debate meaningless. It's implied in the concept of a marketplace of ideas that some ideas will have value over others. And so it seems implicit to the concept of free speech that one should have the freedom to accept or reject an idea, or try to disabuse someone of an idea you deem fallacious.
This is the root of the problem. The fact that his content is on YouTube does not imply that it will proliferate.
> How are we going to solve it
Critical thinking skills are apparently undervalued. This is a problem that is hopefully solvable by education and public debate. Even if not, the situation in which a small part of the population believes in David's ideas seems preferable to me than one in which a small group of (non democratically chosen) people decide what is acceptable content and what is not.
> It's implied in the concept of a marketplace of ideas that some ideas will have value over others.
I agree, but different people will have different definitions of value.
> And so it seems implicit to the concept of free speech that one should have the freedom to accept or reject an idea, or try to disabuse someone of an idea you deem fallacious.
I agree, but censoring someone goes much farther than to disabuse. Too far, in my opinion.
>The fact that his content is on YouTube does not imply that it will proliferate.
That's not what I meant. In a world run under free speech maximalist principles, one in which society is only allowed to debate and criticize ideas like David Icke's, but no platform is allowed to choose not to host them (because that choice amounts to censorship,) those ideas would proliferate because mere criticism and debate are not sufficient to prevent their spread.
If it were, there would be no anti-vaxxers or flat earthers, or people who buy into most conspiracy theories, because those people are aware of the arguments to the contrary of their point of view, and they choose to dismiss those arguments. They don't respond to criticism with sober introspection and logic, they respond with ridicule and sometimes violence.
>Even if not, the situation in which a small part of the population believes in David's ideas seems preferable to me than one in which a small group of (non democratically chosen) people decide what is acceptable content and what is not.
Except Youtube isn't deciding what is acceptable for society, they are deciding what is acceptable for themselves. David Icke's delusional followers are free to continue to be deluded, but he is no longer allowed to host content on their platform.
>I agree, but censoring someone goes much farther than to disabuse. Too far, in my opinion.
I disagree that David Icke's been censored. He doesn't have a right to a Youtube account, any more than he has the right to break into my house and start ranting about lizard men. Youtube isn't public property just because it's on the internet.
The problem is that it's impossible for the marketplace of ideas to reject anything without it being interpreted as censorship. That's a slippery slope no one wants to recognize.
I see a lot of people not wanting to offer alternative solutions to the treatment of this particular individual's content: if you're not in favor of removal, then what? This content can't be allowed to stand as-is.
I'm sure you'd complain about any measure other than leaving this individual alone. If so, you deserve to be angry, because you're part of the overall problem.
Edit: To remind all of you, downvotes should be reserved for things that are strictly disruptive or not contributing to discussion. Unless we're free to disregard the rules, now.
We could not tie hosting and media discovery and ad sales all together. No “social” crap or “you might also like” bubble-prompting algos on the site hosting the video and also selling the ads. That’d be a good start.
Same as “it sure sucks that Facebook has to abuse low-paid workers with gore porn but what else can we do?” I mean. We could not? Allow sites that require doing that to exist? Just a thought.
[edit] my point is that we look at these problems through a very narrow lens that excludes solutions that serious harm the profits of Internet giants. I think that’s silly. If their business model causes awful things maybe it shouldn’t be possible to have that business model.
Don't consider the downvotes as not contributing to the discussion, think of them as ... deplatforming your idea. It cannot be allowed to stand as-is, after all.
> if you're not in favor of removal, then what? This content can't be allowed to stand as-is.
have youtube put on a warning saying that this content is misinformation/wrong. But not censored because censoring "wrong" content just gives those who blindly believe it to feel that they're being targeted - it doesn't change their mind.
Censoring it is just promoting it to other underground channels that are more difficult to censor.
it looks less conspiratorial. if you see a warning, but you have the freedom to view it, you won't get emotionally triggered to think that you're being attacked. it's like banning books, vs putting a warning out about it, but continue to allow it to be sold and read.
The question I am not seeing addressed in the many, many comments below is: why is there such a large pool of people willing to believe, and act on, ideas like "5G causes COVID-19 symptoms", "vaccines are harmful", anything by Alex Jones, etc?
It is because people are afraid, and because there is a breakdown of trust in Authorities and Experts to tell the truth and keep people safe. Governments and intelligence agencies lied about Iraq and beyond. Large corporations were the only ones saved in 2008. There is a reproducibility crisis in science, which it pays lip service, and lip service only, to solving. Newspapers have become partisan, ad-driven shills. Corporations buy politicians, and together they invent truths as needed to further the bottom line.
This is the context in which people are increasingly skeptical of Authorities. "5G causes coronavirus", I think, like flat-earth belief, is less an actual belief a person could actually have, than an almost symbolic statement of distrust in Experts. The specific belief is completely unfounded, but the feeling behind it is not.
In this context, I fail to see how corporate censorship could possibly be the answer. At the very best, it is a band-aid. The necessary solution is for our institutions to regain their credibility. The first in many steps will be for them to show some humility and acknowledge that they have failed us badly. Until that credibility is re-established, they need to use a softer touch, rather than doubling down on the obviously false idea that their words are the Infallible Truth.
Can this be true? Does David Icke have a following that isn't just laughing along with it? I remember his reptilian shapeshifter theory being a running joke from back when I was in high school in 2005!
Surely, someone else must have started the whole 5G conspiracy theory, right? Icke just latched on to it?
I like flat earth because it's relatively harmless, while also being wacky as all hell. Of course it attracts a bunch of people who are into other, actually harmful conspiracy theories too.
I miss when it was all flat earth and aliens and bigfoot, rather than white supremacy and denying the validity of a global pandemic that's actually killing people.
My friend group were joking about it before we knew it was an actual conspiracy theory. This stuff is extremely predictable - Anti-5g, Anti-vaxx, Anti-whatever people will claim that everything bad is caused by the thing they're worried about - it was inevitable for the two to get linked imo.
The case for a free and open web is terminal. Assange, christchurch, numerous political commentators. Liberty is deflating into traditional culture and we are all being pinned down into our most basic identities for the sake of the coming command economy in the 2040s. Sic transit gloria mundi.
It all started with Alex Jones, and everyone cheered...
YouTube is a private company, and yes it can choose who it wants on its platform.
On the other hand of the argument. When do we determine that a company's platform has become so big, that it is a public space and it should just "maintain" the platform and make it as inclusive as possible? For example, we had Alexandra Ocasio Cortez blocking people on twitter, and it is a private platform that a public figure is using, however it was deemed illegal, I'm not sure if it is the same thing that happened with Trump and a few others.
I'm not an US citizen, and I don't live in there, however it's so important to see people's views, no matter how stupid or ridiculous it can be. I want to be able to make up my own mind, some views may be terrible and we should be able to hear them. Be curious in pursuing these things.
David Icke, from the little I know is crazy, and says some ridiculous things, but he should have be allowed to voice them.
Irrespective of if they are right or wrong, and if others think it's stupid. Everyone is free has the right to speak their mind, and they must also understand that they must be accountable for what they say.
People who want to cancel others because they have a dissenting thought they want to say are ultimately terrible human beings.
"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives."
It is like fun control isn't it? You can own firearms for self defence. But if you murder someone else cause other negative consequences, you need to take responsibility. Free! = irresponsible.
I, for one, welcome corporate censorship of the public discourse. Because if there's anyone I can trust its my local, multi-national brand. I love you brand!
Also, spare me the asinine "you're free to speak on public property" responses. Public discourse has de-facto moved into private custody. There is no "escaping it".
I'm going to paste here something I wrote a while ago. This is an technological thought experiment and an allegory for fake news and modern propaganda. I use a technological hypothetical to remove the question of if people have any agency in falling for it and the question of if it is necessary to put up with fake news as a form of free speech. With those two questions settled in the premise, we can think clearly about the core issue of the threat of effective propaganda to democracy.
Suppose neuroscientists and neural network researchers found an adversarial image which worked on humans. Not all humans, but at least 15% of them. The technology is developed such that by including a specially crafted banner ad image next to an article you could put an arbitrary thought in the persons mind. This opens up a very serious hack in a democracy. The technology is hard to build, but a nation state actor like China or Russia could easily replicate the technology themselves and use these banner ad images to sway elections. Like a psychological atom bomb, it is just a matter of time before every major player has it. 15% of the population is larger than the margin on nearly every election ever. A democracy which wants to survive only has two choices:
1. Criminalize the adversarial images and censor them from the web. Congrats. You are now in an arms race with one side making better adversarial image detectors and the other making better hidden adversarial images. In the mean time you've built an insanely good machine learning based censorship apparatus which sits on top of all internet traffic. Eventually the technology gets to a point where the cognitive basilisk isn't obvious to the unaffected and people are worried that some images are being censored for their substance. The adversaries intentionally hide the patches in posts / ads about wedge issues like guns or abortion so that taking it down looks like political censorship. While everyone agrees censoring the thought breaking images is necessary, people are rightfully scared about this apparatus being abused.
Maybe the cognitive basilisks are de facto censored in the sense of being de-platformed by the media (both traditional and social variants). Maybe they are state-capitalism censored in the sense of de-platforming under threat of regulation if they aren't. Maybe we go full China with it and have a top level federal internet censor. The only real difference between these mechanisms is the technical issue of legality. For our purposes the implementation does not matter.
2. Don't let people in the 15% vote. People are again rightfully scared that it could easily expand beyond 15%. A very small, very educated, very detached from the average class of people (neuroscientists) is now trusted to decide who gets to vote. All of the 15% (and quite a few in the 85%) are suspicious of them abusing this power to forward their personal political preferences. Disenfranchising people based on inherited neurological traits is extremely contentious. The question of if it is the right thing to do becomes the defining social issue of a generation.
A political fissure opens up. Some people prefer option 1 because they don't consider the adversarial patches to be "speech" and thus don't think there's a free speech risk in censoring them. Some people prefer option 2 because they don't think it is possible to win the arms race in the first case and so long as we don't let the disenfranchisement expand beyond 15% the sin is forgivable. At the very least they think option 2 is a less slippery slope than option 1. Some people like option 1 and 2 at the same time because just do whatever it takes to fix the problem as fast as possible. The people in the 15% think the cognitive basilisks are just a made up conspiracy by the elites. Of course they think this because the cognitive basilisks told them so.
Then comes the disingenuous part of the fissure. Some people like option 2 but their unstated reason is because they looked at how the 15% currently votes and they think disenfranchisement will finally lead to their political party winning. Some people secretly want to keep the exploit in place because their political party happened to benefit from interference in the last election. They don't actually have a solution but instead constantly remind you how risky and undemocratic the two options are and insist we do neither. None of the disingenuous advocates are ever moved by any arguments because their purported beliefs were always just a fig leaf over their unstated wants.
The debate over how to deal with this technology takes on an impassioned, repugnant, culture-war tone that we have all grown to recognize by now. What happens next I don't know.
What I am proposing is that if cognitive basilisk's exist then there is a contradiction of wants within Democracy. You must pick at most 2:
-Everyone gets to vote.
-Nothing is ever censored.
-The internet has no borders.
The only remaining question is do fake news and AstroTurfing bots count as cognitive basilisks?
The reason why we cannot get the right balance between freedom of speech and the right to silence the "abusers" is that by trying to do that we are uncovering an inconvenient truth.
It would not be a problem to let the conspiracy theory people or ultra-left, ultra-right people speak freely if an average person would have healthy mechanism to counter the disinformation. Unfortunately those mechanisms were dismantled by the classical media in an conscious effort in the last 7+ decades.
Face it - the average person is taught how he should think not by the educational system, but by the media. Our current predicament is only due to information centers hoarding power that they should never get. Not saying that the educational system is great, I think it's even worse to some degree, but we have given up the control for convenience.
Instead of creating a basis from science, we created a system in which the buzzwords spat out from "journalists" mouths are underlying the whole social discourse.
We cannot get the balance in the "new media" right, because now everybody is granted the power that no one should have in the first place. We are trying to optimize the wrong parameters.
Bad. Stipulating that you're correct in your assessment:
* the opportunity to drive trucks through and over the holes in the reasoning and teach people something through a "Stuff David Icke Says" parody channel is snuffed.
* Icke gets to assume a martyr pose.
* YouTube looks a trifle authoritarian.
The truth doesn't have to resort to heavy-handedness to prevail. Newton's Third Law applies (in a social way) in these forcing situations.
It has worked well in every fascist/despotic state that has implemented it.
Free speech, even outright lies, racism, etc. must necessarily exist in the public forum if a society is to remain free.
For now, the silencing is "friendly" in that it only destroys livelihoods. If we allow it to become a norm then how long will it take a populous - now so used to being silenced - to agree to let the government silence the "other"?
Once there is a "party" line, as in China, only suffering follows.
“Contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilising anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech.
“Pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigour.” [1]
"In the decade from 1923 to 1933, the Nazi propaganda magazine Der Stürmer — of which Streicher was the executive publisher — was confiscated or had its editors taken to court no fewer than 36 times. The more charges Streicher faced, the more the admiration of his supporters grew. In fact, the courts became an important platform for Streicher’s campaign against the Jews." [2]
It really doesn't though. I run a pretty big social platform based on 'free speech', every time a site like Youtube or Facebook goes on a purge like this our membership increases and we make bank.
> the opportunity to drive trucks through and over the holes in the reasoning and teach people something through a "Stuff David Icke Says" parody channel is snuffed.
I wish reasoning worked. I know people who follow nut jobs like Icke, are anti-vaxxer, think COVID is 'just a cold', etc... and no amount of reasoning or data will change their minds.
Whether or not you agree with him is one thing. Youtube, Facebook, and other companies are treading a very thin line around Provider vs Publisher. Sure, most people might think that Icke doesn't make much sense, but how long until something _you_ like is censored off the platform?
If you truly do believe in a table for rational discussion all ideas should be considered regardless of how far-out they may seen. By banning various controversial figures from one side, but allowing other controversial figures from the other side to continue, is diametrically opposed to the idea of "open discussion" you claim to be supporting in your argument.
You may not care. But then you are not a proponent of free speech on a platform. When the platform becomes a global nerve center for content the argument "they are a private company and can do what they want" must be looked at with significantly more scrutiny. It would be extremely naive to not believe that YouTube not only knows they have this level of control, but are actively seeking to exploit it.
A service used by literally billions of people is a propaganda machine for those that control it. It is not a private platform anymore. Youtube can influence public opinion in one way or another by simply manipulating their ranking algorithm. I know it's probably hard to choke down, but YouTube can swing elections and change policy with a click of a button. There are significant regulations on television. We can apply these same regulations to YouTube.
It would be extremely naive to not believe that YouTube not only knows they have this level of control, but are actively seeking to exploit it. Assuming they are a rational actor this is precisely what they would be doing.
EDIT:
What I am saying is simply this: if their aim is to remove controversial characters then remove all of them. If they selectively ban controversial characters that identify with only one side of the horseshoe, then they are manipulating public opinion.
It is always only the people that I dont agree with. If you censor other people is totalitarianism and a scandal. That is why I laugh when techies criticize politicians. As abysmal and corrupt as the politicians are I would prefer 100 times to live in this world compared to one ruled by "benevolent" techies. Can you imagine, Facebook, Google, the Ycombinator partners, Thiel and company setting the rules and managing the government? Shudders!
Fascistic/authoritarian control of platforms is not compatible with the principles of free speech that allow our society to be free. Calling for censorship based on any wing, is wrong. People should be allowed to express their views, and platforms which repress that should be avoided.
You are right that it shouldn't be relevant. I believe that in practice, it is. There are censorious free speech hating people on both sides, but the left-leaning ones seem to have much more power in the US in the last decade than the right-leaning ones. There are cultural issues here, and political allegiance is not irrelevant to the motivation, the rationalizations, or the power dynamics.
This kind of language is not acceptable in this platform.
> have no place at the table for rational discussion
David Icke is a citizen of the United States. His speech, rational or not, is free. YouTube is a company founded and operated within the United States. I argue that his rights to speak however he damn well pleases should not be infringed on a "platform". If YouTube wishes to be considered something other than a platform (a publisher!), then they can promote/limit whatever they please. As of now, they continue to insist they are a "platform" and are therefore not responsible for what is posted (unless it displeases the advertisers).
Discussion of irrational speech is how Marxism and other broken ideologies are seen for what they are.
Rather than tell the man to disappear, why not address what he says using the "rational discussion" you mentioned? That's exactly why we have rational discussion.
>David Vaughan Icke (/ˈdeɪvɪd vɔːn aɪk/; born 29 April 1952) is an English conspiracy theorist, and former footballer and sports broadcaster. He is the author of over 20 books and has lectured in over 25 countries.
Where and when did you hear that David Icke became a US citizen? Citations, please.
Are you a citizen of the US? I ask, because you obviously don't understand what the First Amendment actually says.
Man, this comment thread is really harshing my buzz.
So many folks here seem real eager to hype their systems and methods for ensuring all this oh-so easily identifiable misinformation has no route to most, which when implemented would stop this huge threat to our civilization. Typing up their clever ideas, full of good intentions (not being sarcastic, my default presumption is you all mean well), each author implicitly assumes their superiority over the masses who are so easily duped into believing awful and dangerous mistruths based on a few headlines boosted on Twitter. The mindset, stripped of all the complications and rhetoric and real positive intent, boils down to this: "These poor fools are completely lost, already in a world of hurt, and their naivety threatens all we hold dear, and so we must protect them from themselves."
Already in this thread, all the usual quibbles & arguments for & against this particular form of censorship are being studiously re-litigated. I feel strongly enough to write internet comments about very few issues and my feelings in favour of free speech fundamentalism are making it difficult to stay out of the fray. But I will restrain myself--not because it's a bad thing to do, but just because the ROI on everyone's time is so low, considering the tiny likelihood that all these words spilled out here will change even one mind.
Instead, I will ask a question that thus far has not been raised, and that I think is fundamental to this issue:
Q: What problems are we trying to solve here?
It seems that somewhere in the recent past (if I had to ballpark it, I'd say this all began to rise sometime around 8 Nov 2016) basically everyone in society came to the agreement that misinformation is running rampant, so rampant it may be the #2 item trafficked on the web, King Porn secure in his crown. Not only do we all seem to agree that misinformation is everywhere, but we all seem to also agree that this misinformation's impact is a massive threat to our society--the camel's legs are shaking under the strain, and Zuck's machine just keeps throwing straw.
This seems quite bizarre to me. Can someone here who's proposed one of these Democracy Protection Apparatuses tell me what it is y'all're trying to fix?
Make no mistake--I am quite aware that basically every public communications channel, not just the web but every channel, is under pressure from a constant flood of messaging aimed at literally changing minds, changing what and how we all think about this concern or that. I am quite well apprised of how the anti-vaxxers spread their wild, unbelievable propaganda, leveraging facebook moms' groups and instagram knitting forums to spread their evil & subversive messages. I know all about how the wily Ruskies have become the world's greatest social media influencers imaginable, who can take a shoestring budget that couldn't cover a major campaign's one day hotel spend and swing the most important election on earth.
Of course, as with the printing press and radio and television and fax machines and even pagers, I completely believe, based on solid evidence, that power factions attempt to leverage all broadly-adopted comms channels to their own selfish ends. I'm not denying that.
But can anyone here clearly identify what problem is right now such a huge concern that we should cheer on a corporation--one that wields power over our lives like no other ever has--as it unilaterally decides what we can and cannot here?
I mean, Susan's big reason here has been laid out explicitly: The 'rony pandemic is of such great concern that our ears should be blocked off from any sound that doesn't emanate from Official Authority, in this case, the WHO, an organization which five months ago nobody cared about at all and now everyone knows is about as credible as The National Enquirer (todo: insert BatBoy joke).
I mean, to me it is clearly obvious that accepting censorship is a huge risk. I'm not crazy, I don't think there should be literally zero restriction on free speech. The world would be a mess of scams were fraud permissible, for instance. But the risks censorship brings are huge and asymmetric--only us little people suffer when the surveillance and enforcement mechanisms censorship requires are abused. The wealthy and connected will always have more access to information than we do. When the abuse happens, it will always be to their benefit, because they either are the censors themselves or they control the censors. As we stand to lose the most when censorship is abused, we should have an extremely high bar for any justification for it. (Just think about that phrase, "dangerous information," for a second--we're not talking nuclear launch codes, we're talking questioning public policy, this is what Susan thinks is dangerous. Clearly she thinks very little of us.)
Censorship is power. Actually, censorship is the root of the power hierarchy. It's the most important tool in the shed, as a tractor is to a farmer so is censorship to Team Elite.
They want to control our minds. And many people in here are cheering them on.
There really is no need for hysteria here. If YouTube began issuing a million times more bans, it might approach the quality of an average newspaper in terms of accuracy. Would we be living in a dystopia at that point? No, we'd be living just like we did in the year 2000, when YouTube wasn't around but newspapers were. Just like a nutjob in 2000, Icke still has print, radio, TV, going outside with a megaphone, and going door to door with pamphlets to promote his message. In fact, he's even luckier, because he still has access to the entire rest of the internet.
But wait, you say: in the year 2000, Icke wouldn't have been able to get a following of millions on print or radio! They wouldn't have let him on! Indeed, so what this actually proves is that in 2020, there is far more free speech than there was in 2000. We are at historically high levels of free speech. Freaking out over this is like thinking we've gone back to the Bronze Age every time the stock market goes down 1%.
I won't quibble the strange comparison between YouTube, whose second-most content producer is a man dubbed PewDiePie who talks about video games and anime memes, to news organizations, though it is quite tempting.
This is what I find so strange. Literally zero people on this forum have indicated they are in sync with this dude's views (I hadn't heard of this guy until now, I have no idea what he's about), and from what I can tell, the crowd here, which I'd judge is a cut or two above the average web forum, finds whatever his views are absurd and his argumentation unconvincing.
And so, since he says things we may all agree are wrong, we think it is the right move to remove his views from where they can be found? I mean, YT has created for itself many many mechanisms through which it can shape the messages emitting from its platform, from the blunt-force banhammer we're all here yakking about, to much more subtle though nearly as effective, like how if I watch a video by Bon Appetite, the autoplayed Next Up video is always another video from Bon Appetite--if I watched for an unbroken day, I'm sure it'd be 24 straight of test kitchen hijinx.
The internet's promise was the democratization of mass communication. This entails both sides of the table, producer and consumer. Infinity websites means that I'm not stuck flipping between only 120 channels if I can't find something I like, a massive improvement over television's narrow and excitement-filled band of allowable opinion.
OBVIOUSLY I don't think any crackpot should be somehow guaranteed to have his views pushed onto millions. But the reason the internet's promise was so great was that it allowed us the choice--we could, if we'd like, write and publish a piece detailing the malfeasance of my corrupt municipal government without ever needing to consider much less engage the editor in chief of the only local paper, who let's face it, could probably be easily convinced by the rich local businessdude, given his poverty-level wages.
But this is why I think this is so fundamental an issue, and why I am puzzled by your response and that of many here. What damage do you really think David Icke is causing?
So I gather that he's espousing a view that states that quarantines and lockdowns are terrible and ineffective, and encouraging people to ignore them and freely associate.
OK. I understand that you believe the expression of that view could lead to many people deciding to ignore whatever orders or ordinances that have been imposed upon them.
If you don't want to click the link, the picture shows an urban park packed with people, mostly young men, sitting and standing on the grass, wearing summer clothes, most appear to be in some state of enjoyment--it's definitely not any kind of overt protest, it's just a bunch of normal people who got out of their apartments and are hanging out outside as everyone wants to do on beautiful sunny days.
Do you think all of these people influenced by YT or other social media content to subversively break the lockdown orders? If it were possible to prove it, I'd bet a significant chunk of my net worth that social media had basically nothing to do with the appearance of this crowd. All it took was some mercury rising and a clear sky.
And so you believe that this Iche guy's messages about coronavirus and lockdown are so incredibly risky to broadcast on any major platform that his views and any like them should be verboten on major platforms--it seems you cheer this censorship on, hooray for the good guys, we killed off yet another misinformation peddler whose subversive views could have killed us all!
...and whose subversive views are by default what literally all the people in the picture, the thousands of normal people who probably like me never heard of this Iche guy before, who all it took to convince them to go outside some light and heat.
Think about that: Yay Google! Continue on your path of determining what messages are acceptable not just on your platform, but by extension, setting the position and width of the overton window for maybe a majority of the population.
If that doesn't seem like some hollow-ass justification for censorship, I dunno what to say.
> So I gather that he's espousing a view that states that quarantines and lockdowns are terrible and ineffective, and encouraging people to ignore them and freely associate.
> I understand that you believe the expression of that view could lead to many people deciding to ignore whatever orders or ordinances that have been imposed upon them.
That is not at all a representative summary of his views, or mine. I see hundreds of people arguing against lockdowns every day, on sites all across the internet, and it's just fine, and nobody is being censored for it. It's so mainstream that even the NYT is publishing opinion pieces about it, e.g. when comparing with Sweden's response.
The actual problem with David Icke is that he espouses conspiracy theories, of the form "the lizard men, Bill Gates, the aliens, and the liberals teamed up to create 5G to wipe out the human race". Stuff like this leads to serious consequences, such as the Congressional baseball shooting, the Pizzagate shooting, the Youtube headquarters shooting, and the armed takeover of the Michigan statehouse.
That is a really insane justification. Also strange that what I gather to be a right-wing internet figure would somehow inspire a shooter to go and try to kill a bunch of republicans as they perform baseball?
This week there were not just one but an entire carpet bombing mission's worth of bombshells about the case of general Flynn. Every headline about that guy, his guilty plea, was a total lie. There was no journalism done during the entire course of the process, and the FBI from director on down planned his destruction and did it, knowing full well he was innocent.
This is provable with court documents that are irrefutable.
So we can now throw WaPo and the fancy pulitzer they got for the Flynn fake news out with Icke right? I mean it seems to meet your standard--huge damage to a really loyal American and his family, bankrupt, house sold, son and family threatened to secure the plea the ratfuckers needed.
You'd throw all those people and all the conspiracy nuts like CNN and MSNBC and Fox News that pushed that dangerous propaganda, right?
Oh, wait, no you're saying those same people, or at least people in that same group, you want them to do all the censoring.
Oh. Cool.
(Btw, if you think the above bombshells are not true, I can provide you all the documents, which are easy to validate given they're hosted on various official DOJ servers, and I'm willing to bet you that Flynn's case is dismissed.
Team Elite are these kinds of people. They'll tear anyone or thing apart to fulfill their stupid goals.
Let's cheer them as they mindfuck us into thinking their censorship is a great idea.
he deserved to be kicked off for his virulent antisemitism and Holocaust denial a long time ago, guess the pandemic conspiracies did him in. Good riddance.
I despise David Icke but I think platforms like YouTube or Facebook should remain neutral. It's not their job to tell us what people should be looking at or not. Then what? We end up like China where we can only browse government propaganda?
>It's not their job to tell us what people should be looking at or not.
That is their job. That is literally their job and business model. They have never been neutral, they have always used moderation, demonetization and algorithmic sorting to tell you what you should be looking at. And they've always banned accounts at their discretion, often opaquely and without apparent rationale. It's always been their platform and their rules.
>Then what? We end up like China where we can only browse government propaganda?
No, because, despite the popular FUD narrative that HN spins in every single one of these threads, Youtube isn't a government. It doesn't have the power of a government, nor is it more powerful than a government. It doesn't have monopoly control over the internet, over video, over social media, or over the dissemination of information.
I don't believe slippery slope applies in this situation. For the most part Youtube has been fairly lenient as to which accounts get heavily moderated and/or removed. I may revise my opinion if it is ever shown that they become more aggressively restrictive to what is hosted on their platform - but for the most part you seem to be given a wide berth to upload what you wish.
The worst I've seen so far is that their video promotion algorithm can be used to "shadow ban".. but I personally believe they have every right to decide how their internal advertisements work.
There is also still the free and open internet as a general platform. Torrents and direct downloads are available as a distribution method if there is truly no other platform willing to host your media.
Nobody complains when the most blatant kooks get disappeared (Alex Jones), but it's absolutely affecting more mainstream content creators, who can't even produce opinion pieces reporting on related news without their videos getting deleted or forced into Private.
This slope isn't nearly as slippery as you think it is. If YouTube began issuing a million times more bans, it might approach the quality of an average newspaper in terms of accuracy. Would we be living in a dystopia at that point? No, we'd be living just like we did in the year 2000, when YouTube wasn't around but newspapers were.
You cant have it both ways. Either youtube is relevant and important in the public discourse and you agree with them there is a risk that vast portions of the population will be misled by those videos , or Youtube is an incosequential player so it does not matter what publishes. If you agree with the second point you should not care what it is published there, the same reason you dont care about the contents of the "monthly bulletin of the crypto-anarchist Fidjian association"
But I do have it both ways. Youtube is a large provider, which is why I'm glad it's kicking off bullshit. But it's far from the only provider: without Youtube you still have print, radio, TV, going outside with a megaphone, going door to door with pamphlets, and the entire rest of the internet.
So you are OK if tomorrow Youtube, Twitter and Facebook decide tomorrow to erase any mention of Snowden,Chomsky and Assange because it is "bullshit". Because if so, that would be a nasty world. I do not want to live in that world. Give me Icke on Youtube any time of the day. I wont watch it and I wont be arrogant enough to believe it will "wash the brains" of other adults.
I'm sure there's plenty of online communities out there that you can watch/read right wing conspiracy nutjobs opinions on. This is not comparable to China - YouTube is not the government. They're a private company choosing not to host this content.
Where are all the free speech advocates complaining about YouTube not hosting porn, or demonetizing videos with swear words in them? Why do you only come out of the woodwork en masse when it's the right wingers being censored?
Would that have happened if these platforms "organised _the world's_ information, and made it _accessible_ and useful" instead of using engagement driven filter bubbles?
Yes. This inevitably results in all mass-adopted systems, even messaging services where people just talk to each other. It's not the systems, it's the people.
Isn’t the real problem that YouTube is basically a utility service, but one that makes a loss for the parent company.
The discussion we should be making is not if YouTube should censor people, but if it should be turned into a regulated utility like a phone or electricity company. Of course if this is decision we make don’t be surprised if Google shuts down the service.
> YouTube has clear policies prohibiting any content that disputes the existence and transmission of Covid-19 as described by the WHO [World Health Organization] and the NHS [the U.K's healthcare system] [emphasis added]
The WHO at least has been flat out wrong several times during this pandemic, such as telling people not to wear masks. Anointing one agency as the sole source of truth and censoring anything that contradicts it is not going to lead to a good outcome. People need to be able to question authorities.
> A truly free being does not need an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to protect their mind from David Icke. A truly free being does not want an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to exert any control whatsoever over what ideas they are permitted to share and what thoughts they are permitted to think. A truly free being opposes with all their might any attempt to lock in a paradigm where human communication (and thereby thought) is controlled by vast unaccountable power structures which benefit from the absence of dissent.
> Be a truly free being. Oppose this intrusion into your mental sovereignty.
Booting people off of platforms merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them.
COVID-19 has added the additional element of this new concept of "disinformation". The argument is seductively simple: "being exposed to this information could lead you to engage in patterns of behavior that harm society. Therefore we can conceptualize this speech as being an indirect form of violence/negligence and therefore we have a moral obligation to remove such content".
Many may disagree, but I think we need to throw out this concept of "disinformation" entirely. I don't believe in fighting "bad ideas" by suppressing them, I believe in shining a light on them. Let the truth fight for itself. (And of course now comes the classic counter-argument: that the evils of disinformation possess a virality that makes them spread far more easily than the truth, being that truth is nuanced and difficult to acquire whereas bad information is seductively simple. I won't address that argument here but personally I think it's a very dangerous way of thinking)