All: please don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments. Unfortunately the two top subthreads have become so large that they fill out the first page entirely. You have to click 'More' at the bottom to see the rest (there are almost 1000 at this point).
The "more" pagination button appears to only be visible on the first page of comments....you need to update the URL manually to get to comment pages 3+
Oh! The second page was crashing. It should be fixed now. Eesh; I'm sorry.
There's a bug that we haven't fixed yet, the workaround for which is to restart the server after renaming an account. I must have forgotten to do that.
It might be nice to keep everything mostly collapsed by default, except the top 3 replies for the first level, and 2 replies for the 2nd, 1 reply for the 3rd.
Speaking of meta-issues, this article seems to have just dropped to the second page, and is sitting below older articles with 10-15x fewer votes. Perhaps worth checking whether any jiggery-pokery is going on.
You can't derive story rank from timestamp and point score alone—the system is more complex than that and includes many countervailing factors, including user flags, software downweights, and moderation downweights. All of this is to try to prevent the front page by being dominated by the few hottest and most outrageous topics of the day, which is what would happen without them. I've reduced one downweight, though, so this one is back on the front page now.
There was a huge thread earlier about the rank of this thread and related ones relative to others, which you'll find somewhere in these pages.
I think a more fundamental problem is a single private company having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels, and having financial interests in various global dictatorships.
The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.
Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply.
At risk of nitpicking, why do say "controls" rather than e.g. "services" or "handles"? When you say "controls" it's like you're saying Google has some kind of monopoly power that makes it hard to switch. And yet anyone can easily switch to e.g. DuckDuckGo. If that's a monopoly, it's not quite the kind of a monopoly we should generally be worried about.
Browsers would be a different issue. In that case, there are network effects like about what standards are supported and how, which make it difficult to launch a competing browser, even with technological superiority, and in that case, it would be reasonable to worry about too much market share.
They do in fact control Android. The open headset alliance means Android is open source in name only. Only tinkerers/hackers use ASOP derivatives by itself (or some foreign manufactures that cannot to offer Google Play services .. or Amazon Fire makers).
They dominate the software ecosystem. Although it's not difficult to load 3rd party applications, it's certainly not common. Their removal of the Podcast Addicts app is a great example. Also you cannot interface with things like Android Auto without getting Google's golden approval (so no Android Auto for F-Drop apps)
> If that's a monopoly, it's not quite the kind of a monopoly we should generally be worried about.
It the same monopoly that a town center has in term of political activities. Anyone could easily choose to switch to hold demonstrations somewhere else, but the result of holding it where only 8% of people will see it will make that less of a choice for the ones organizing the event.
As a society where I live we recognize the benefit of political diversity, and we acknowledge that the disruption that such political activity bring is usually minor. As long it does not cause prolong and significant disruption to everything else then the benefit of giving everyone equal right to demonstrate in the town square is a benefit.
I do agree however that Browsers are more similar to regular monopolies worries. One company in control of the market will increase prices, decrease innovation and create perverse market incentives.
While people can be physically only in one location, they do get their information from a variety of source online. Comparing Google to a town square is dumb, when you account that Facebook has much more engaged users than YouTube.
At the time of writing I'm reading stuff on Facebook, Reuters, Yahoo Finance, Twitter, Reddit and watching YouTube videos in between.(HN as well) I'm present on all of those "squares" at the same time.
I guess people has a bit different view about how sticky platforms are. If I imagine that google would take a political side in the US election and ban all site and comments of the other side, my belief is that it would have a direct impact on the election results and there would be nothing that the banned party could do. Politics right now depend highly on being visible on google search, Youtube and google ad network. A small but noticeable portion of users would move out, but it would not be close enough to compensate the loss and the impact on the political climate would take years to recover.
I would like to be wrong on this and that google do not have this kind of power.
While this is true, I do not think this applies to the point that GP was making wrt influencing election results. Taking a public stance and enforcing said stance on communication through their services is a far cry from an internal discussion within a company where most employees lean towards one side.
I'm not saying this is okay--it probably could've been conducted in a more (politically) inclusive manner. But my argument is that this doesn't apply to the GP.
Edit. Also of course the main post about comment censoring is troubling.
All analogies fail given certain conditions. However for the choice of which search engine to register with and which ad company to choose, most companies would choose G first. So, back to the analogy (which I found strange, but certainly not dumb) a company (or person) looking to be heard would certainly have far smaller reach if G actively blocked them from their services.
The assumption was:
"Anyone could easily choose to switch to hold demonstrations somewhere else, but the result of holding it where only 8% of people will see it will make that less of a choice for the ones organizing the event."
So, no. One square dominates viewership (ie the town square <-> Google). You can switch to another square (ddg) if you want, but you don't get the viewership that you'd want to get the reach that you need.
This is the perennial discussion on HN as HN'ers get popularity confused with monopoly. I get the anti-Google sentiment but outside of the Play services agreements that Google got dinged for with Android manufacturers, they're not being anti-competitive.
If Google were to block search results to DuckDuckGo for example, that would be monopolistic and warrant antitrust action. As it is now, Google isn't blocking competition, consumers are choosing to use Google despite the privacy-oriented preferences here on HN.
The blocking of competition was mentioned several times in the links I posted. Here's a couple of quotes:
> Google required direct partners to exclusively use Google's AdSense and could not engage with Google's competitors
> Google required that partners take a minimum number of Google ads and predominately place them above any other advertising, nor could place ads from other services above or alongside Google's ads;
> preventing manufacturers from selling smart mobile devices running on competing operating systems
> Google entered into anticompetitive exclusive agreements for the distribution of Google Search on both desktop and in the mobile arena
> The Commission’s complaint alleges that Google reneged on its FRAND commitments and pursued – or threatened to pursue – injunctions against companies that need to use MMI’s standard-essential patents in their devices and were willing to license them on FRAND terms.
Huh, I did not know about the Adsense one, that's news to me. Interesting to see if it's relevant in the U.S. because it was only with large partner contracts and Google stopped it before the E.U. investigation even began.
Again, the EU anti-trust law is different from the U.S. I already mentioned the Android Play services case already.
Anecdotal evidence, but if you don't offer GoogleADX inventory, your site gets de-ranked in searches. I am very interested in the anti-trust probe for that reason.
They do deliberately slow their sites on Firefox, as has been discussed in many past hn articles. YouTube for example. Pardon my lack of references, you should confirm for yourself with a hn search in case I am mistaken
This is my biggest issue. I tried using Firefox exclusively for a period of time but experienced a 10x increase in the number of reCaptcha manual verifications I had to complete. Going to the same sites on Chrome has no reCaptcha.
For me, this is blatant anti-competitive practice and should be punished.
I've used both firefox (dev edition) and chrome pretty evenly for a long time (work stuff in chrome, personal in ff), and I haven't noticed any more reCaptchas in firefox than I get in chrome. If you just started using firefox, I could see the extra captchas being due to having "too clean" of a browser, or a different browser that was never used before tripping some sort of anti malware or suspicious login system.
All just speculation, but I haven't noticed the same issue.
This is exactly it. Modern recaptcha is "reputation" based. So if it fingerprint matches you against a known profile, you never see the captcha. One could argue that a residential ip block combined with a common browser should be sufficient to filter most bot traffic, but it's not exactly in googles interest to worry about non-chrome user experience.
As a regular user of multiple browsers, I haven’t noticed this. Could you show a few examples? I’m not doubting your experience at all, I’m just curious to see if there may be a common thread.
Of course it was a bug. It could only be a bug. Would they really admit if it was intentional? Would they admit that their internal testing around Firefox is not as robust as Chrome? "Oh, whoopsie, no one here uses Firefox so we didn't notice it."
My understanding is that the "deliberate slowing" reported, was such that if you have firefox send a chrome user agent, that one gets faster (and functional) results.
Is that consistent with the "it is because FF doesn't support new thing yet" explanation?
I believe it was that YT was using the legacy v0 shadow DOM API that only Chrom[e|ium] supported, with a slow polyfill for other browsers, rather than the much better supported v1 API that all other major browser makers agreed to implement.
>consumers are choosing to use Google despite the privacy-oriented preferences here on HN.
I'm not sure I'd agree with the word "despite". I still think the majority of the non-tech world is still oblivious to the privacy implications of G,FB,etc. Sure, I'm sure there's a percentage of people that have made the decision they don't care and are fine with it, but there are definitely don't know/understand.
No. It's in all the news. But the truth is people love Google. Google gives them so many services for free that they didn't have before.
In many 3rd world countries, smartphones were the "couple months salary" iPhone or an Android that's literally a tenth the cost.
To most of these people, Google has been an unalloyed good. Google is probably one of the most resilient brands worldwide. Even in America it's well trusted. For good reason.
> Google is probably one of the most resilient brands worldwide. Even in America it's well trusted. For good reason.
Two types of trust though. Trust in the products which they've earned in spades, and trust to moderate political speech which they have not.
This story is suggesting that they are willing to enforce standards set by the Chinese propaganda departments - which is to be expected, really, given their interest in regaining a presence in China. They aren't trustworthy in the political sense.
Huh? So we're supposed to thank them for the cancer they have wrought? Search was a good thing, then it got bastardized into a gaming system. Free email? Sounds great until the day you find out you're not the only one reading the email. Android is an interesting side project that has proven a useful alt to some. Again until you realize it, along with all of the other "useful" products, was just the long con into gathering all of the data to make Ads viable. If these products were just the products they appear on the surface, then maybe I'd say Google was reputable.
And most people are completely fine with having ads targeted at them.
You're just raging that other people have a different opinion about their online activity.
Now imagine you quantify the cost of having Google Search. If you search for florist - Google could charge you $10 for the results(florist CPC is very high) and up to $30 per search for a hotel in NYC.
So dramatic. It's an amazing product that billions of people depend on that you don't have to use if you don't want to. Pretend it doesn't exist if it makes you feel better. Try Bing and Proton mail on an iPhone and never look back.
>If these products were just the products they appear on the surface
They're not a charity. If you're not paying for it upfront, you're paying for it with your eyeballs. Don't like it? Take your eyeballs elsewhere.
Right, hence the statement about anti-competitive behavior. GP is saying Google is a monopoly based on marketshare though, not monopolistic action, which is not correct.
As of some recent update on the ps4, at least since january, I am unable to enter any text on duckduckgo's search bar in the built in browser. The keyboard pops up briefly then vanishes. It likely works with an external keyboard, but the onscreen one refuses to appear. Google's search bar work's fine, the PlayStation's built in search works fine(but uses google), in site search engines powered by google work fine. But I have been unable to use duckduckgo on the ps4 since at least then.
I was capable of doing this before and regularly did. But, from what i've been able to tell, my web searches must all go through google now, either through the built in search feature or the browser.
Well I never tried because the idea of using Microsoft's search wasn't much more appealing and honestly, I just never think about or consider them and kind of forget Bing exists. But it'd be interesting to see if it worked. They're more of a direct competitor to Sony at least in the console market.
Okay let me explain why this is a "control" rather than "service" or "handles". Say I am running an Ad using Google Ads. I get to reach all those people who are using Google services. And since Google has majority marketshare I can easily reach my customers and scale them as much as my budget allows. But at the same time I am bound by an ever-changing Google Policy that dictates what I should put in the Ad and what I shouldn't. Imagine that I or someone in my team pushes out an Ad that violates their policy somewhere. Depending on the scale of violation they can ban you form Advertising on Google platforms ever again. Now, you say that is a good thing. It keeps the bad guys out. I agree with you there. But it is not fool proof. I have seen Ads get rejected for frivolous reasons (like you can't have two different links in the same ad group). Now these rejections stack up and can get you a ban too. Have missed a payment because of some issue with your credit card or bank? Account suspension is a real possibility. Have you used the same credit card for two different Ad accounts? Be prepared to get suspended. Same mobile number for two different Ad accounts? Be prepared to get suspended. There are so many ways you can go wrong and get banned from ever using Google Ads again. Now this is where the danger is. If your business is highly dependent on Google Ads you will lose out on that huge marketshare you had earlier. I don't want my business to be affected because of some stupid policy violation that caused my account to be banned.
Found the google clown, I’ve been pissed at google for nearly a decade, and yet still continue to use my gmail address, because it would take me literal weeks to detach from it... and I’m actually technically capable of understanding what I need to do to separate.. 99% are not, they “control” these markets.
Thought experiment: Google controls 90% of the search market, the 10% (or 1%, whatever) they don't serve being made up of people who are oppressed in some way by the 90%, deliberately or otherwise.
Google censors information relating to that 10% for everyone else. They don't care enough to switch.
Centralization is an issue _a priori_. It's giving power to a single entity that we have no reason to trust will act in everyone's best interests.
Google Search is a consumer focused product, if they don't serve up the stuff that the users want - they loose viewers. No viewers - no revenue. Their bottom line depends on giving each person the best search results possible.
Pretending that they'll just decide to cut off even 1% of users is insane.
No. You're assuming that a particular sort of imaginary market dynamic overrides any and every other motivation anyone might have. That is nonsense.
If they can make 2% more by selling out half their users and giving them inferior results to serve the interests of somebody or something willing to pay Google money to screw over the users, they will do that without an instant of hesitation, in the absence of oversight. They are in an absence of oversight.
You are wildly in error to believe that people magically can tell they're not being harmed. People absolutely have no idea whether they are being 'given the best' anything possible, much less something like search results (or information in general).
It is highly profitable to screw over mass audiences for one's own benefit and there's largely no mechanism to prevent this… again, in the absence of oversight.
The citizens get to decide what their best collective interests are. They do that by, among other things, electing representatives that appoint officials to anti-trust committees.
> When you say "controls" it's like you're saying Google has some kind of monopoly power that makes it hard to switch
No, "controls" means decides the rules and what is happening on that part of the market. Any number that is not 100% automatically implies it's not a perfect monopoly and it's possible to switch, but once you are within the area controlled by Google, it's Google's rules. Including removal any content Google doesn't like for any reason, blocking any action Google doesn't like for any reason, etc. So for 91% of the searches, Google decides what you can and can't see.
Google hasn't leveraged their ownership of the browser to enact censorship (frequently on behalf of most vile dictatorships) yet as far as I know (surveillance is another mater) but it certainly did and is using its control over search, advertising, video hosting, etc. markets to do that.
> If that's a monopoly, it's not quite the kind of a monopoly we should generally be worried about.
All available search engines run on ads and offer roughly the same service. There is no competition in the market from the perspective of the consumer. How is this healthy?
> And yet anyone can easily switch to e.g. DuckDuckGo. If that's a monopoly, it's not quite the kind of a monopoly we should generally be worried about.
Because people are conditioned by defaults. Google knows this, and so does every other business. Google had a good product, but Google also bought market share by bundling their products with random software (like adobes flash player, which later they unsurprisingly tried to kill), making a deal with Dell to bundle their software/toolbar, etc. Yes anyone in theory can switch, but its not really how people think. People are not as informed as we think they are, or aware of the pros and cons of various competing services and products. That includes most people, even people on this site, so its really not an elitist thing.
Exactly, Google provides a lot of value. Stop acting like this is a one sided transaction. If you don't like the value proposition, you're free to leave anytime.
Just like everyone is free to leave their power company and install solar panels, just like everyone can leave their water company and have water tankered in. Just like you can leave your telecom company and use satellite data.
Just because a company is providing value that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be regulated. Just because you can technically leave a service doesn't necessarily mean that you aren't realistically locked into it and that that service isn't going to exploit that fact.
I don’t think it’s a nitpick at all. I agree that google is a private company and searchers have the option of using a different search at the click of an icon.
Usually I consider terms like “control” to be hotheaded but if you substitute “is in control of Which results are returned” you can see the consequence could be nefarious. This understanding informed antitrust theory up to the 1980s.
I don’t use Google for anything myself except for communicating with my gf’s kids’ scout troop. That doesn’t mean I think they have a bunch of evil geniuses cackling and rubbing their hands in building 42. The rehetoric makes me think some people do think this.
The cackling and rubbing of hands is an exaggeration of course but if anyone were going to be doing that it would be Google's customers, not Google's employees.
Tell your legislators you want to see antitrust action taken against Google!
They're abusing the hell out of their status. AMP, removal of adblock capability, driving web standards to potentially be more opaque, walled gardens, automated removal and takedown, etc.
If you're using adblock on my website - you're an asshole. You're consuming my work without a just compensation.
If it were easy, I'd have my server not serve anyone using an adblock... and instead present them with a paywall... Which you would probably bitch about.
If I could snap my fingers and remove all of the paywalled sites from the internet, I would. People continue to post them, and all they do is jam the signal. I should be compensated for time wasted clicking on these links and then again on the back button.
Until the industry adopts either microtransactions or federated publishing, I won't pay or sign up for most content. It's too inconvenient, and information is nearly infinite. You're just making the opportunity cost differential higher. I have better ways to spend my time.
And speaking to the advertising issue, I've never personally bought anything from an ad. They're annoying viruses being leveraged against my consciousness that I didn't consent to. That's bad enough without mentioning the tracking and deceptive practices they employ.
The whole economic model is a race to the bottom and is fucked. I'm sorry you're working in such a painful industry.
Look at what streaming did to the music industry. It's convenient. I pay monthly and have no ads. Do this please.
Spotify and the likes addressed a need in the market.
Advertising is still completely adequate method for compensating a lot of publishers.
Others, who don't mind giving the aggregators 30%, provide you with the ability to subscribe from Apple Newstand and similar services. There's been a bunch of services that tried to do content access like this... uptake was completely dismal.
It doesn't even include Baidu, which dominates China and has something like >12% of the world's market share for search engines, so how can Google have 91%?
Honestly about a year ago I decided to switch to an iPhone once the "contract" is up. I have used iOS and I didnt find it anymore special, but it isn't really that much different to me to be bothered by using either one. I will also take that moment to ungooglify my life including email and such.
I did the same a few years back, use duck duck go for search, iphone for phone, apple maps for directions, firefox|safari|brave for browser, it is really easy to get google out of your life, only thing I am still looking to replace is mail, if anyone has found something that is free(or relatively cheap) and is reliable I'd love to know.
Didn't happen in my case, but I can't speak for everyone. I tried an e-mail for a month, the trial ended, six months later when I went for the full plan it was still available.
I will sound silly, but I've gone with Outlook, just kinda waiting on them to allow me to use my domain from namecheap. They only support godaddy, if that doesn't change I'll find a different provider, but I went with them because I can get actual Office applications along with ad-free mail. I got an @outlook.com email though, but waiting on their domain support to not suck so much.
Protonmail[1] is a viable free alternative to google/microsoft/yahoo. Also has client-side encryption and is hosted in a mountain bunker in Switzerland, so there's lots of points for security & privacy.
Twitch.tv! It's not just for live streams either. You can watch lots of previously recorded streams as well. It's also not just for video games (though it is predominantly video games).
Apple is only better because it is smaller but it does a lot of the same things and often lies about it... A pure and open Linux phone is the only way that it could get better.
"but it does a lot of the same things and often lies about it"
Can you provide evidence of this? Not that I don't believe you (nor do I have any financial interest in Apple), but I'm not a fan of seeing baseless accusations on HN.
Until there's a proper mainstream one I can buy from my cell provider I don't think I can make such a switch. I need very specific apps on my phone for work.
I've worked at two different places that had very specific 2 factor apps they used. I wouldn't be able to authenticate anywhere without iOS or Android.
Google biggest advantage (and its the same thing Apple and Microsoft are doing) is integration of services that ultimately make the users life easier. Personally I use a Mac and iPhone and all my data is stored in iCloud. I do a lot of my personal work with MS Office and my email is Gmail. But over time I have found that choosing an ecosystem does benefit you. Recently I switched my work tasks to Google suite products and dropped my Apple TV for an android based solution. The main advantage is now my TV, browser (chrome), gmail, youtube are all synced together. I can watch videos on my tv and save others to pick up on my phone later. I can edit my docs anywhere and link them into my emails easily. I have debated moving from Apples Photos to Google Photos so that my images are all centrally located for my own ease of use and cross platform integration. I still back up all files to a secondary drive and forward copies of important emails to my outlook account in case I ever get locked out of my google account, but the integration is really nice.
These numbers are just for the US. Comparing this to the AT&T break-up is not even similar, because Google has but even bigger market share when you consider their international operations as well.
It is not just monopolistic control of their specific areas of interest. They have had pretty tight integration with the State Department, especially under the previous administration, getting involved in negotiations and all kinds of affairs: https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems
(quote from there):
> Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do . . . [Cohen] is going to get himself kidnapped or killed. Might be the best thing to happen to expose Google’s covert role in foaming up-risings, to be blunt. The US Gov’t can then disavow knowledge and Google is left holding the shit-bag.14
Wikileaks has a rather infamous history of overstating the significance and meaning of the leaks they publish in ways that is straight up misinformation, or borderline misinformation. I'd take anything they say with a serious grain of salt.
But is it replaced with "I'm an American company?"
There's a deep rabbit-hole of hyper-nationalism right next to the deep rabbit-hole of hyper-corporatism. Does a YouTube beholden to the US government get banned from being used in China at all? And if it does, what happens when China creates a competing product that is more successful than YouTube, and YouTube gets displaced globally by a product that is beholden to China's censorship policies in general, not just in isolated cases?
Hyper-nationalism is a backlash to globalism due to the recently realized risks of opaque governments exploiting transparent governments.
The intentions were good: Reduce the risk of global nuclear war. The globalism outcome is good for trade and relations with nations that have transparent governments, bad with the opaque.
"Transparent" vs "opaque" governments strikes me as a false dichotomy. There is certainly a spectrum of transparency and I grant that the United States is more transparent than China (at least from my perspective inside the former), but keep in mind that Snowden is still facing charges if he comes home and Manning just got free after her latest round of detainment. Considering the ways national interests interact is more useful than using transparency as your measuring stick for everyone.
Transparency International ranks the US as number 23 and China as number 80 in their list of transparency/corruption. They are not in the same quartile and can't be considered similar in transparency.
Don't overgeneralize: The page you linked explicitly lays it out. Corruption Perceptions Index. Each word is important. In addition, think tanks have biases and TI is no exception. Do you think that the "experts and business people" they interview to calculate CPI have interests which may align more or less with different nations?
In any case, I opened by admitting my perception of the United States is as a more transparent actor than China. Still doesn't make a dichotomy.
Was it really bad for US until China started working on 5G and trying to become independent in semiconductor sector? Because until that time globalism was pretty profitable in terms of trade and relations for US.
>>>Was it really bad for US until China started working on 5G and trying to become independent in semiconductor sector?
Yes, it's bad because "naval strategy is build strategy", and all of that industrial activity and technical know-how exported to China has facilitated the buildup of a massive, modern, increasingly-blue-water Navy and supporting Air Force that is postured specifically to challenge the US. The US Navy's global presence and open sealane patrolling is key to enforcement of the Petrodollar system, and therefore one of the lynchpins of American economic hegemony. Eventually China will challenge the US, and the US will either back down or lose. Either way, expect the global order to change, the Petrodollar to go away, and the US economy to collapse....and we'll have basically spent 30+ years making down-payments on our own destruction.
Not necessarily.
China doesn't really have many options, when it comes to parking USD. If USD collapses, 0 chance of that happening any time soon, then CNY would probably take over the spot... That would balance out Chinese losses.
People have been going on about China in the US since their ascension to the WTO. Plenty of federal politicians have been elected on platforms for pushing hawkwish trade policy with China.
I think that's a bit of a selective history though. In the 1990s there were plenty of politicians that fervently supported it, though the reasons they supported probably had something to do with this[1].
The parent comment implied that the US has done a very sudden turnaround of belief; that's a selective reading of history.
The US has always had undertones of economic nationalism, particularly around jobs getting outsourced to China. It just took a while for the pot to boil over.
It's profitable for certain strata of economic classes and is destructive for most of the rest. But "in the aggregate the pie gets bigger", so Macroecon 101 is conserved. Yay.
You're being downvoted for being right. People without stock market share or who work as FTE for the hyper-successful tech companies are the only ones befitting under the guise of "lifting up underprivileged people around the world". It's disingenuous at best, nefarious at worst.
Comments like these have limited meaning in the context of a conversation about Google and YouTube. Wikipedia does not aspire to be YouTube. Wikipedia does not aspire to be Gmail. Wikipedia does not aspire to be a general-purpose search engine.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.
You may be thinking of the various wiki brands run by the Wikimedia Foundation, which doesn't aspire to be any of these things, either, but at least entertains the aspiration of being a better Google News with WikiNews. (But do not confuse WikiNews with WikiTribune, the latter of which is a non-WMF project of Jimmy Wales, originally aspiring to be news, now aspiring to be a social network).
I think they're saying that wikipedia is an example of media not designed to be profitable. Maybe there couldn't be a similar youtube, but there could be other platforms, like wikipedia, that aren't built for profit but to inform.
I don't consider Wikipedia a valid reference for anything more trivial than sports statistics or Hollywood trivia these days.
I'd imagine the amount of blatant organized 'revisioning' by nation states, NGOs, for-profit corporations, and politically biased individuals is now dwarfing the objective individual contributors who once were the majority of Wikipedia's editors.
> Why have the hypercorporatists and hypernationalists not replaced it???
It’s not profitable.
Nowhere near as many people would donate money/time/edits/content to Wikipedia if it wasn’t a registered non-profit - nor would they receive donated/subsidised hosting services from their providers - and if it’s for-profit they would need to run ads - and there’s no money in generic ads so they have to be either content-based ads (which immediately creates a perverse incentive for articles to be edited or biased in favour of the advertiser, which devalues the content of the encyclopaedia - or behavioural/tracking ads, which won’t be here for long due to expected incoming changes in browser handling of cookies and cross-site content) - which leaves behind only paywalling the encyclopaedia - and we saw how well that worked-out for Britannica, Collier’s, and Encarta.
Wikipedia has a high-value because it’s a non-profit - as contradictory as that sounds.
> Wikipedia has a high-value because it’s a non-profit - as contradictory as that sounds.
No question. It's the primary reason its community stuck with it across the many years it took to build it up, whereas the editor communities abandon for-profit content farms like Quora or Answers.com.
> and there’s no money in generic ads
Wikipedia could operate the encyclopedia side of itself with generic advertising. There is a lot of money in generic ads, relatively speaking, when you're dishing out static text content and some images at a billion page views per day (especially when the bulk of your platform's expansion is over, so your situation re expenses is increasingly stable).
Could you run the encyclopedia thin for ~$20 million per year? Based on their budget history, you absolutely could. So could you bring in at least $20m in revenue via generic advertising, against several hundred million page views that you're able to show ads on (a bit larger than the English edition's daily page views; ie I'm heavily discounting monetizable traffic down from their global figures to tilt this even more conservatively)?
You need a CPM of around a range of $0.10 to $0.15 to at least have a shot at making it work. It's a very low number for a super premium property that sits at the top of nearly every Google search result.
You could make ten phone calls and trivially fill $20m in generic advertising every year. Pick up the phone and call: Google, Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, Coca Cola, Procter & Gamble, Comcast, Unilever, Samsung, AT&T. At $2m each, you'd have to fight them off with a stick at those CPM rates for that reach. Procter & Gamble spends $10 billion globally on advertising, they wouldn't take $2m to slap their brands on Wikipedia? They'd probably take that every month if they could.
Would any and all manner of advertising turn off visitors and editors? Probably. That's the far bigger problem than whether Wikipedia could bring in $20m per year in advertising on their massive traffic base. Not to mention that Google might (would) start viewing them as a competitor and might (would) downgrade their content placement to neuter that risk.
What if the laws against censoring content would be quite strict, then a censoring Chinese YouTube clone wouldn't even be possible.
(In the countries where it's strict. Which could be the EU, US, Kanada, Japan and more. Through it would be more tricky for smaller China dependent countries or autocratic powers. But the other countries could push that through in the way they currently push through commercial interest like copy right).
I don’t consider that likely. There are many Chinese social media properties inside the Great Firewall but they haven’t ever had much success outside of it.
Think about it, if a Chinese social media site could outcompete YouTube, they would just do it already anyway. If they can’t, they have to either block YouTube and have a Chinese clone propped up by an effectively protectionist policy or else try and get YouTube to cooperate with them.
We have loads of communication channel alternatives. People freely choose google and should be allowed to continue freely choosing whatever platform they please. The idea that some governing body can better choose my communication platform for my personal needs than I can for myself doesn't seem logical from my point of view.
Ah yes, the idea that profit driven management is a better juror of freedom than our democratic society.
Whatever they decide, they owe you no explanation or recourse. After all, these people are 'accountable' to wall street.
To them 2008 and Boeing 737 were an unforceable turn of fortune, and they should bear no harm from it.
Please remember that democracy is a way to control a shared resource by the opinion of the majority, and it makes the minority submit to the decision of the majority. A democracy is more free than a tyranny, but it's not freedom incarnate.
If 1.5B Chinese people totally democratically voted to ban particular words from usage worldwide, and were very serious at enforcing their decision, would you conform?
I'd very much appreciate if no society ever chooses things for me, as long as the choice is not of a conflicted shared resource that needs to be handled uniformly to even work (like property laws or traffic rules).
Keep in mind the framers of the constitution in the US realized this type of issue, which led to the Bill of Rights protecting things like free speech and other government encroachments on individual liberty.
I appreciate that corporate platforms are different than public spaces when it comes to free speech, but we've got a long way to go before US society broadly tolerates censorship by foreign entities (at least, I hope).
US Bill of Rights was originally written more to protect the states against the federal government. It couldn't even be enforced against the states until the 14th Amendment provided some vehicles for incorporation, and the courts acknowledged them. And even then the process of incorporation is still ongoing - e.g. the 7th is still not incorporated.
Whatever the government decides, they rarely, if ever, provide an explanation or recourse either: the Patriot Act, Ahmad Arbury, TBTF, the assassination of Awlaki, snooping on Americans, Operation Fast and the Furious, the Pentagon's missing billions, Epstein's death, etc.
I'm as pro-democracy as they come, but the belief that the government is somehow (and always) more accountable than companies strains credulity. Companies are accountable to Wall Street, which implies they're accountable to their consumers too. Shake Shack did not have to return the funds they received recently, but they did, because of media attention.
Accountability to wallstreet = accountability to consumers?
Where is this idea even coming from? Can you name a single instance of Wallstreet punishing anti-consumer practices? Did AT&T selling of customer location data affect stock price?
All your examples are from defence. I've been watching people challenge in court every kind of decision, from roadbuilding to Brexit.
But tech companies circumvent laws, uber is not a taxy company, people driving them are not employees, Youtube is not a media company, etc. Every time this happens, voting becomes more and more meaningless.
Half of those examples have nothing to do with the DOD. One of them (Ahmad Arbury) has nothing to do with the federal government at all. Where did you get this idea from?
Wall Street punishes companies that are not profitable or are losing money. Consumers can make that happen by walking away when companies are anti-consumer. If they do, profits fall and Wall Street would hold that company accountable.
Why do you think Zoom hired security professionals and bought Keybase? Why do you think Facebook reacted after the Cambridge Analytica scandal? Why do you think TikTok separated itself from ByteDance in China?
Even with the most federal oversight, US banks and financial firms tanked the economy and then got paid for it. And it's not a left-right thing; it's a them-us thing. And if you don't believe that, you only need to take a look at the Panama Papers scandal.
I'm sorry.... But what did we learn from 2008? That financial sector is unaccountable or that they own the government?
Boeing was not punished severely enough, because of two things - American nationalism would prevent it from drowning(helloo rescue package ;) ) and belief that they could fix it fast enough.
But as a person holding Airbus stock for a long time, I disagree that Boeing wan't punished at all. Boeing's price dropped by 75%, while Airbus lost only 50%
Companies have a profit motive to upset as few people as possible. Politicians who are democratically elected have incentive to rig things in their favor, especially when it comes to more ambiguous things like gerrymandering.
The argument is a popular Authoritarian viewpoint that isn't viewed as such. Meanwhile the work towards decentralization continues, one day I hope it'll get the network effect akin to Bittorrent.
Laws are written for the sole purpose of serving our needs. "Free markets" are also a made-up concept designed to serve us. If they are no longer doing that we should change it as we see fit.
> The idea that some governing body can better choose my communication platform for my personal needs than I can for myself doesn't seem logical from my point of view.
It's an elected body that is chosen by the people in a fair and free democratic process. Why would they be incapable of serving their electorate?
>Why would they be incapable of serving their electorate?
I'm not claiming they are incapable, but with a constantly re-elected congress that's on an upward trend and just now hitting 30% approval rating it seems they don't serve their constituents effectively.
Well, I don't want to broaden the scope, but what about public communication platforms necessitates that governments cannot adequately protect free-speech as well as provide a fair/balanced service? NPR seems to do it quite well, so does PBS. Not saying they're perfect because nothing is, but the government is quite capable in this regard.
Is someone suggesting that a governing body chose platforms? I haven’t seen that yet suggested.
What I have seen is suggesting breaking up giants like Google and Facebook to allow them to compete more with each other rather than allowing the two fold in any possible alternatives as soon as they become popular.
I don’t think it’s about a governing body making that decision for you.
If all the policies and processes around censorship were laid out in the open for that to be considered when weighing up the options, people would be able to make more informed choices.
I’m always really worried about the unintended consequences of having the government regulate what Google can and cannot moderate on their platform. That strikes me as a larger free speech issue than our current system.
I’d recommend just breaking Google’s monopoly; which is an idea that has more benefits and less downside risk.
We don’t know, because right now youtube is one black box in Google’s finance sheets. We don’t know if it is a loss leader, which I think is very likely. Imagine youtube was a separate company that always ran in the red and another private company solely footed their bill. Would you trust YouTube’s neutrality then? Wouldn’t that explicate why competition is having difficulty emerging?
Or imagine YouTube were to split into two; YouTube the distribution platform and YouTube the recommendation engine. Imagine Youtube the platform had to license content publicly. Now it is much more likely to have competition emerging and end users benefiting from it.
YouTube was much more profitable before the current era of partisan activists engaging in targeted campaigns of harassment against specific brands when their ads appear next to controversial content.
Before, industry players, YouTubers, and users largely didn't mind. Now, there is a systemic chilling effect in the form of demonetization, algorithm shenanigans, and banning.
To recover revenue under this new paradigm, YouTube is catering to "brand-safe" corporate media productions and surfacing their videos much more highly than those of independent creators. There's likely media money involved as well, much like how Yelp and food delivery apps rank restaurants.
That is only the revenue, which is mostly meaningless because most of the revenue is disbursed to content creators. We also don’t know how much the whole system costs to run.
That's not the same thing. They had detailed server utilisation data when I was there years ago, and they had models that tried to translate that into some sort of dollar cost, but that didn't mean they really knew.
You probably can't know. The ground truth would be if YouTube were spun out and had to rent its infrastructure from Google directly via Google Cloud. But GCloud doesn't actually sell the infrastructure they use, as far as I know - for instance the search engine, the ads engine, the anti-abuse engines, Borg, the edge networks. AFAIK most of the stuff that YouTube relies so heavily on isn't actually available to buy at any price.
Pricing is hard work, too. What price should Google charge to license out their search engine tech for competing video sites? There's no existing market for that kind of tech that could provide an obvious price point.
For an integrated operation like Google/YouTube you can't ever truly say if it's profitable or not. The division of costs and benefits will always be rather arbitrary.
I disagree both on knowability and what needs to be known. The point of the exercise is not having a calculation down to the cent. We don’t even know if the order of magnitute of the revenue and the cost is the same. By its nature I would expect youtube to be very IO and compute heavy, which would dominate the cost function, to the point of rendering rest of your list into bells and whistles.
> Pricing is hard work, too. What price should Google charge to license out their search engine tech for competing video sites? There's no existing market
That is precisely the function of making a market, supply and demand meet and iterate over the price. Right now there is no price because there is no market.
One of them is even a heavyweight - Facebook. Did you not realise that Facebook hosted videos? Maybe you're unaware that Instagram has Instagram TV section...
> Would an independent YouTube be less susceptible to these requests?
You would almost certainly need something like the Paramount Consent Decrees to structure the marketplace correctly and to foster the kind of competition that would prevent a single player from being in such a vulnerable position.
>>The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.>>
Sure they could. They had the East India Tea Company.
I'm not a legal expert but it seems like the fundamentals are pretty simple and timeless. If they have a monopoly, then their private get-out-jail-free card no longer applies.
Messages had to be transmitted by hand until the telegraph era.
The British (or Dutch) India Companies had a stranglehold over shipping -- and thus over communication -- to colonial holdings for much of their existence.
I wasn't aware of this, but I still don't think this is a compelling analogy. I doubt that these companies were able to efficiently parse the content of these messages in order to manipulate the distributions of certain messages, for example. Further, there's simply no way that post had nearly the same share of communication as do digital systems today (most communication was certainly by word of mouth and print).
The majority of communication was still local - and importantly, B/D India Company wasn't opening and reading and censoring all the letters they were transporting.
Benjamin Franklin controlled major fractions of the post offices in the colonies, the other rival post offices and Ben Franklin would often censor mail and remove messages. So, it also applies in the way you originally read it back then as well.
I recommend the biography of Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson
The East India Tea Company wasn't a fully antonymous entity though by the time of the American Revolution; it was more equivalent to a state-owned enterprise found in the likes of modern day China. Because of this any "powerful" moves the company made was assumed to be an extension of British political will moreso than that of some profit-seeking NGO.
That would be why the US Justice department is looking at an antitrust suit, Anti-trust is the remedy that came about in 1890 when the Standard Oil trust seemed unstoppable.
That said, I see this sort of thing a bit differently.
If Google is all powerful and a monopoly and never in danger of being killed, why comply with an authoritarian foreign nation to remove comments that are amplifying an anti-government sentiment? Why should Google care if the government of China is feeling a bit insecure about their own population's loyalty?
I worked at Google during "China Debacle #1", where Google went to China as an uncensored search engine, left in the middle of China Debacle #2, when China infiltrated Google's infrastructure to use it to track dissidents, and watched from the outside (as many here did) for China Debacle #3, when Google tried to create a censored search engine for China.
Why does Google need China so badly, that they are willing to compromise their values (debacle #3 and this comment censoring behavior)?
I don't think you need the antitrust legislation. I think Google is slowly dying and as they die their ideals wash away. Clean user experience, gone, Useful free services with return only positive feelings for the brand, gone. Employee perks, fading away. Lofty slogans of not being evil, gone.
This compliance, sometimes forced by edict in the EU's antitrust case, sometimes forced by coercion, tells me that Google isn't powerful, it is weak. It has lost its way and may not survive if it is unable to find its way back to something good.
Google certainly doesn't need China, but it wants it. It's a heckuva lot easier to do business and make money in a country, when you're chummy with the people in charge. Even if it goes against your ideals, free speech, or public interest.
Even if Google dies, its replacement will still be equally tempted to censor dissenting voices, in order to please the people in charge.
I understand where you are coming from here, I see it a bit differently. But I recognize that I see it differently because I have a weirdly particular definition of the word 'need.'
I have come to define the magnitude of need to represent how far out of your internal value system and the law are you willing to ago to satisfy a "need." I'm not sure what the units are, desperation perhaps.
For example, I "need" to eat to live but at the present time my need is modest because I have enough money to buy food to eat. At my current level I wouldn't steal food (go outside the law), or misrepresent my state of poverty to a food bank (go outside my internal values) in order to acquire food. So the magnitude of that need is "small."
However, if I was unemployed, out of savings, and behind on my bills, the calculus changes. I really need to eat, and in that situation might do things I would not normally do (like rummage around in trash cans for discarded food).
It is clear to me that Google, like every company, needs revenue in order to survive. The stronger the need for that revenue, the more willing they become to compromise the user experience, the law, and/or their internal values.
To me, their actions of the last few years appear to directly contradict what at one time were core internal values. Whether its the level of monetization of their own properties, or their willingness to cooperate with an authoritarian state to keep information away from their population. I see their taking of these steps as an outcome of their great need for revenue.
China is the second largest economy on the planet, and Google does not appear to be willing to hold true to their values and forego the revenue that economy could potentially produce for them. That is the reasoning by which I come to the conclusion that Google needs China.
Before 1988 in the U.S. we had "equal time" laws that required that broadcast media present both sides of political debates with "equal time" for each side. That's because for decades there were three sources of content: ABC, CBS, and NBC. Then cable and alternative radio ended that oligopoly for a while and those laws were removed.
Now we have just a few mass media content producers and a few mass social media outlets. The situation is beginning to resemble that which existed for decades, from the 20s to the 80s, in broadcast media.
Those "equal time" laws, more collectively the Fairness Doctrine, was struck down as unconstitutional because it forced broadcasters to host speech they did not agree with.
Why would we expect to be able to force Google to host speech they disagree with?
The Fairness Doctrine was not struck down as unconstitutional by the courts, the supreme court upheld it several times. It was Reagan's FCC that unilaterally struck it down. And that led directly to the rise in prominence of right-wing talk starting with Rush Limbaugh which became the template for other right-wing broadcasts including Fox News.
My mistake, it was indeed undone by the FCC rather than the courts. I could have sworn it was undone by SCOTUS, but I guess a refresher is needed every once in a while.
Regardless, I think the main point from the proceedings is: it was only found constitutional because of limited airwaves available (i.e. physical constraint of the medium, or exclusive government licensing). The same rule would not be constitutional if it applied broadly to "the press."[0]
In that sense, my point remains: there's nothing intrinsically exclusive about the medium of Google's websites that would prevent another from competing for the same "airwaves" (other than their perceived popularity), so a requirement that Google shares its "airtime" with others would not be supported by the precedent.
I think the fairness doctrine is a great litmus test for intellectual honestly on this topic. Anyone who is in favor of regulating Google and Facebook's speech should also be in favor of regulating Fox News and other platforms that are dominated by conservative politics.
I'll classify Fox News with other media, like Vox and Slate and Buzzfeed. (for the articles and shows at least, not necessarily the paid advertisements)
I'll classify Google and Facebook with other communication platforms, like T-Mobile and FedEx. Paid advertisements probably go in this category too, even if appearing within the other category.
Individuals use them to communicate. Personal messages ("Happy birthday to Root Axis!") are passed around by ordinary people. FedEx, T-Mobile, Google, and Facebook are all similar in this way.
Individuals who decide to run news segment on Fox News get denied, just the same as they would if they decide to run an article in Slate or Salon or The Atlantic. To communicate on a platform in that category, one must get hired or convince an employee that an interview (which would be tightly controlled) is beneficial to the employee.
Well there is no such distinction with regard to current law, so I'll assume you're discussing what you believe ought to be.
So from that perspective, why should Google be treated differently from Fox News simply because Fox News has a higher standard for publication than Google?
In current law, the distinction is called common carrier status. Enforcement is lax and irregular, and it mostly isn't being properly applied to the tech giants.
We don't let the phone company disconnect phone calls in which people complain about the phone company, or about China, or about the governor. We don't let FedEx decide that you can't ship an unauthorized biography of the FedEx CEO.
Common carrier status has never applied to news media. The closest we ever had was the fairness doctrine, which is gone and wasn't the same thing anyway. Fox News is clearly news media. Most of what we call "Google" is clearly not news media.
We invent a new technology by which to transfer things, and suddenly the existing law doesn't apply? New technology is inherently lawless? Being "with computers" makes it different?
I don't think so. It's the same old stuff, merely with a technology upgrade. Be thankful, so the first amendment doesn't only protect quill pens and lead movable type.
The comments on foxnews.com are at the borderline, so it wouldn't be bad to flip a coin. A reasonable approach would be that deletion is restricted to crude insults and off-topic rants. It doesn't really matter though, because the foxnews.com comments sit on the border between being a publication and being a generic public communications medium. There is no point splitting hairs.
You're the one splitting hairs; a platform that is privately owned and financed by the owner belongs to the owner, if you believe the prerogatives of private ownership should be a function of popularity then there is no reason to carve out exceptions for media companies on different mediums. It is not a reasonable outcome that google would be prohibited from moderating their platform with respect to their values yet Fox News would be permitted to curate their platform with respect to their own. The litmus test seems effective.
Verizon's phone network is a platform that is privately owned and financed by the owner.
I think you're failing a litmus test here, unless you really believe that Verizon should have the right to drop phone calls that are politically offensive to Verizon executives.
The same goes for FedEx's logistics/transportation network. It too is privately owned and financed by the owner. Imagine that it were run by an executive who decided that the terms of service would include disposal of democrat campaign materials. Send a box of Biden yard signs, and they go into a dumpster. The tracking number just disappears from the system.
It's probably hard to see that Google is very much like Verizon when you happen to like Google's bias.
> "Why would we expect to be able to force Google to host speech they disagree with?"
So what Google is doing with this particular epithet is fine is what you're saying? Sure hope there's no other cause that you champion that Google decides they disagree with someday.
The Founding Fathers totally predicted this. The USPS existed in some form before the founding of the nation. The postal service was vital for allowing communication and dispersal of news through the nation. Without this neutral party a private mail carrier could opt to not deliver for any reason, like after they've opened your mail and read the contents they find politically disagreeable.
Historically the monopoly of the mail was abused for censorship (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws). If there've been comparable consequences from competing private mail services, I haven't heard of them.
Mail is to Data as Video is to Data. Youtube is a private data service. We are in a discussion of the comparable consequences of competeing private mail services.
The very first multi-national companies were neck deep in looting India and smuggling opium to China. The American founding fathers were very aware of this.
I don't see what this has to do with this conversation. Those companies were not censoring coffee shop or bar conversations of citizens WITHIN the United States.
We aren't talking about economic monopoly exploitation - we're talking about monopoly control over domestic communications.
Sure, a more fundamental problem. But many people don't have enough imagination and foresight and for them concrete examples are more convincing. Same with the country I'm currently in - democracy has been rotting for the last several years as the ruling party has been busy disabling protection mechanisms and pulling out screws. It's only now that the government is blatant in its abuse of law and police fine people with no chance of appeal and straight up beat them, nurses get pay CUTS... that citizens realize what suckers they've been. That laws and procedures exist for a reason.
Maybe they're not just stupid, but have a different way of thinking. Bottom-up versus top-down.
google search is a utility class service at this point, a tier below tap water and electricity. the world would be an objectively worse place without it for billions of people. with great power comes great responsibility is how the saying goes, but i can see them fighting tooth and nail to not be labeled as such. same for facebook and others like them.
You're putting the cart before the horse. Google and Facebook are utilities but the Internet service you need to access them isn't. Seems a bit ridiculous, no?
It is your bad for assuming. Telecoms will fight to the death to prevent Internet service from becoming a utility and you're acting like it's all but guaranteed. We're not even close to this reality.
There is nothing sadder to think of than a desperate man, crawling through the desert, body burned, lips parched, just begging to know what year Ted Nugent was born in.
The suggestion that google search is comparable to water and electricity is absurd IMO. Google search is not needed to survive. There are also alternatives to google. Nothing about google's popularity precludes someone from using bing.com instead.
Not everyone needs it to survive, but many do. It is needed to survive if you live in a climate that gets very cold or very hot. It's needed to survive if you rely on medical equipment powered by electricity. It's needed to survive if you rely on a refrigerator to store food. Of course needs are on a spectrum, but its frustratingly disingenuous to suggest that google.com is comparable to electricity in terms of need, it's obviously not.
> a single private company having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels
> The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.
Financial, political, religious entities controlling newspapers and book publishers is a problem known (and well documented) across thousands of years.
Same for near-monopolies of means of transportation, materials, water, and other.
None of those combined instantaneous planet-wide distribution of spoken word, produced by anyone, shoveled to everyone, individually based on what they would be most likely to want to hear.
If founding fathers had netflix this wouldn’t even make to a black mirror episode of their time.
>The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.
The Founding Fathers used this to their advantage.
They colluded with the handful of major publishers of the time to orchestrate a rolling, synchronized release of the Federalist Papers, saturating the already-monopolized (due to the massive expense of presses and paper) media market with their ideas.
The authors of the Anti-Federalist Papers had no such deal. They had to print out their responses on their own and distribute them by hand.
The country probably would not have even gotten to the point of needing a debate about a constitution, one-sided as it was, if it hadn't been for publishers telling non-conforming opinions to fuck off.
And please, nobody chime in with "publisher v. platform": it is irrelevant, you're wrong.
thanks for the hard work here dang, I really appreciate your moderation. I hope you can appreciate our inquisitions from time to time. I think this kind of model works well in general to keep both sides accountable.
I don't remember exactly, but originally my comment wasn't top-level. Did the mods do that, or is that automatic with high karma comments or something?
>> The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.
HA! The founding fathers were all lawyers and newspaper owners. They were very aware that private interests, through control of available media, could exert influence all manner of public debates.
Right-wingers are afraid of power of governments, while left-wingers of power of multinational corporations. Both are right: we should be afraid of any organization that gets that big. Sadly, there's no political ideology that has a coherent plan to keep both in check.
You forgot socialists and anarchists (also known in the US as libertarian socialists for historical reasons) which advocate for a classless democratic society. The former advocate for a transition state and the latter demands a direct immediate transition as far as I understand it.
I agree with you and the commenter who replied with the market share stats that the numbers are worrisome, but literally no one laid a gun to the commenters’ heads and asked them to leave a YouTube comment. They could embed the video (or link to it) and offer a comment on their blogs.
There was an article about RSS on HN recently — in the end, people voted with their feet away from a decentralised web to the YouTubes and Twitters and Facebooks of today.
Maybe we need more actions like these to remind ourselves of the perils of lease-holding.
It's not "We're a private company" as much as "Google cannot practically force you".
Google also doesn't have anywhere near a monopoly position in consumer markets. YouTube isn't an absolute majority of online video and strong alternatives are right in front of you - Twitter and Facebook offer free video hosting. You could even build a private one, or rent space from Vimeo or Dailymotion.
The Founding Fathers can go &&*k themselves. Invoking their name is literally appeal to authority.
This is a problem with monopolies, not censorship. When private companies are forced to publish content, you have fundamentally lost the notion of a free press.
I don't entirely agree that companies operating public discussion forums is equivalent to "forced speech", but I do agree that the problem can be fixed by eliminating the monopoly/oligopoly.
Forbidding companies from moderating the content on their own public forums is forced speech. An easy test is when government officials participate in those forums: if you must publish what the government tells you to, that's literally forced speech.
Similarly, the Fairness Doctrine was overruled because requiring companies to air opinions they disagreed with was found to infringe free speech.
That is a bigger issue for our society, yes. But it's also understandable that people might be very interested in alleged problems that strike closer to home for them. In this case, if there is an issue worth considering at HN, exploring it could give insight into the larger issue as well.
Total content agnosticism is not going to fly once illegal stuff starts getting hosted, and then you go down that sliding scale of what content is allowed vs what isn't. If you ban some highly illegal content, you'll probably need to ban some other illegal content, and then start picking what countries laws count to enforce (recognizing that you'll be banned in some countries if you dont comply), and you'll end up back where you started. If you decide you dont care and will let literally anything be hosted, you might find yourself in jail, and very few people will feel comfortable hosting their content on the same service that hosts some of the most despicable content in the world.
True, but to me the difference is the focus on the user rather than the platform. If somebody mails a package of child pornography to someone else the news doesn't attack the Post Office. Since it'd be government-run I wouldn't have a problem with each account being tied to a specific social security number. A true federal public utility that doesn't have to worry about crossing borders.
If the post office didn't comply with/lead an investigation into who mailed it (or something like a mail bomb - there are ways to do direct damage with the platform as well, imagine the site being used to host viruses) and instead said that they didn't moderate what went through the mail, they will protect free speech, mailing is a form of speech, and that they won't enforce anything for the spirit of the platform, the platform would be eviscerated and the we must protect the children backlash would be enough to get a law passed saying that every single bit of mail must be opened or read. For the internet platform, they'd have to start having questions about what they enforce and what they don't, and when they do or don't work with law enforcement. Just look at how Apple is going up against the justice department and multiply that conflict by 100x
Yes, but there's a difference between complying with the law and having a constantly-shifting rulebook whose enforcement is predicated only on creating the largest value for shareholders. I want rules that apply to all users equally regardless of whether they have ten viewers or ten million, which today's online hosts like Youtube and Twitch blatantly don't do.
good luck with that, congress has been trying to slowly kill the real post office for years and now the head of the executive branch is been trying to kill it as a way of punishing a perceived rival/critic. despite the consitution specficly calling out that we need to run it. getting them to build a modernized digital equivalent.
The founding fathers gave the USPS a monopoly on the major communication channel of the time. Maybe it's time to update those laws to give them a monopoly over online communication, too?
Email: Protonmail, Tutanota, etc.
Storage: AWS, Box, pCloud, etc.
Search: DuckDuckGo, a few open source projects, etc.
Video: Not sure if there is one.
My point is just if you pay for something, you are less likely to be gamed for advertising cash.
For search you should be paying for the indexes in some way, or for the algorithms in your company.
I am just presenting this as a philosophy. Not trying to solve the world's problems on a forum.
Other than waiting for a superior product to emerge, nothing can be done to stop their monopoly besides seizing the google.com and youtube.com domains and permanently shutting them down.
Last time I checked Facebook, Whatsapp and fake news outlets were being used by bad actors to manipulate elections in various countries. If Google holds monopoly in public communication channels, this shouldn't have even happened?
That was a bad joke, but truth be told there are not that many outlets. The word "monopoly" is thrown around very lightly, although if you have just a few big players on the market then there is always a real possibility of cartel-like operations. Small platforms are eliminated or bought out very quickly. The way in which all the classical media reacted to Gab getting bigger was a bit suspicious, because it was not their direct competitor. From their point of view it should be an enemy of an enemy. It's much more likely, that existing internet molochs do not like competition that much. Maybe Gab was a special case, but ask yourself this - how many video platforms created from 2008 onwards can you name and how much of them are still around, not owned by big G and having a reasonable market share? There is only YT, nothing else comes close. This format - medium to long, usualy rich in content, videos are something that cannot be easily replaced in public discourse. Maybe facebook groups or reddit fill some of the gaps, but definetely not tictok or instagram. Communication does not equal communication. A well made video can have a lot more impact than all conversations that you can possibly start on WhatsApp in your life. Twitter is too shallow to fill this gap in my opinion.
This is a feature of Capitalism. The big fish will always end up eating the small ones unless the small fish so radically different that the big fish dies before it was able to eat it, there's no escape.
Sure, I agree, but so far unregulated capitalism served only those companies and nations that already had market advantage. Forcing "liberal" economic changes in South and Latin America caused their markets to crumble under global competition. You always have to regulate markets somehow. The anti-monopoly laws are an example of just that. Now let's ask ourselves how is a monopoly in a certain area of information brokerage any different? I think classical media gave a very good example of what should be avoided and we have to remember that those actually split the domain between themselves. In the case of internet giants it is often a division based on functionality, so each player owns almost a monopoly of one form of expression. YT Twitter and Reddit are the prime examples. Those three altogether cover almost all of meanigful ways of communication. Most of what's left is just too short, shallow and spreads not that well. Ok, there is still Facebook et al, but you will probably share content created on those 3 big platforms anyway. This is not a game. This is a breach of trust on an unprecedented level and is a direct threat to the future of humankind.
OK, but why is there so much Constitution/Founding Father worship in America?
It's a flawed document that has lead to a flawed nation. It does not have Messiah-like abilities to deal with current problems so why be surprised it doesn't have modern solutions to modern problems.
But they did have the foresight to make it a document that could be edited. That part did take forethought and was revolutionary by men who were very much ahead of their time. I understand that judgement of figures of the past by modern ethics is the newest trend, but history has to be given a bit of context and what is a given now was blasphemous at the time. Some of the things, like a constitution that could evolve, was not the norm.
Every country that has a constitution has a mechanism to modify it, but the US Constitution is set up in a way that its most severe flaws can't be fixed (small rural states are over-represented but have a veto over any attempt to change this because 3/4 of the states must agree to any amendment).
That's not a flaw, it's a very intentional choice that enables the US to be the federation of states that it is. Changing that would be to fundamentally change the form of government that the US has.
> Every country that has a constitution has a mechanism to modify it
Sure, NOW that's standard. At the time, it was not.
> the US Constitution is set up in a way that its most severe flaws can't be fixed
This isn't a flaw at all. It is meant to ensure the broad geographic consensus is required to make fundamental changes.
Reducing the political power of rural communities might be popular today among urban communities, but it is a recipe for escalating division and ultimately rebellion.
There is great value in giving out-sized political power to remote colonies and communities. Further centralizing power in the capitals is a path to fascism.
This last summer I read through the two Chernow bios for Washington and Hamilton. I came away from them with a renewed respect for their leadership through a difficult war and the daunting challenge of errecting a new government built on a system of checks and balances that protects individual rights. I'd say they were pretty darn successful.
We are lucky that they were able to pull it off. It really could have fallen apart. But it didn't. And for that they deserve an enormous amount of veneration.
It's an outstanding document all things considered. Aside from some things like implicitly allowing slavery at the time, the constitution + bill of rights are nearly perfect as a foundation for the role a federal government should play in my opinion, especially with some additions like the 14th. Nothing else that I've seen captures the essence of good governance quite the same.
Because people (on different sides of political divides, at different times) are happy to have any, arbitrary, damping coefficient on the pace of social change.
The ceremony of interpreting the document is all a bit silly, but it's better than letting they majority party write a new one.
It's not only Google, some argue we have been slowly moving from an Internet to a Trinet where GOOG-FB-AMZN control the majority of the web traffic while staying out of each others way [0]
Google can do whatever they like. They're a company, not the government. And as such, they will always bend to the mercurial whims of both rich investors and the government (who is also owned by the rich).
The only way to fix that is a nearly-uncensored#, non-profit& communications and streaming platform that is globally-distributed and doesn't have a SPoF. Trying to get a content creators' union is all-well-and-good, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem of reliance on corporate greed that will never assure access to speech.
# There are only a few topics that shouldn't be enabled like child porn and actually planning mass murder.
& Nonprofit itself while it supports monetization for creators with only minimal fees to cover costs.
> having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels
> Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply
You're upset that they have a monopoly on their own website/business? What the hell are you even talking about?
Do you even remember the internet before Google? I do. You know how I found new websites? By typing random domain names into the URL bar and trying different combinations of TLDs.
Then I used Yahoo. Excite. AltaVista. Lycos. Ask Jeeves. Dmoz. Alltheweb. They all kinda sucked in their own unique ways. And then Google came around, and I could actually find what the hell I was looking for in one go.
Your outrage is pure entitlement. You don't like the way the world works, so you think you deserve to change everything to function exactly the way you want. As if that's in any way rational, fair, or ethical. Presumably you think of yourself as a good person. How is it good to demand unreasonable things from people who do not owe you anything? Do you really think this is the best way to effect societal change?
Not that long ago, capability (yes, some dictionarys
show also; skill, appearance, behaivior and other
around orchestrated topics ^^) btt: capability
wons importance, cos growing globalisation and
toughening competition - in terms of the commerce,
with shorter product life cycles, higher
complexity and much more influences.
In such a environment, a premise for life is a
permanent monitoring on all levels of performance,
to have the option to bring on steering and
governance, if a discrepancy in goal-reaching
or goal-setting occurs.
no, that was'nt english enough, let me try better:
"'Sharks' are speaking of 'satisfied'
when a half of the profits result
by dividends and from Performance."
Exploiting the central-bank-agitation
so big on a global scale, more in detailed,... now you...
Do you want to continue to support art, like 'google will eat itself'? (-;
- if they don't take down speech some consider hateful
- if they take down speech some do not consider hateful
共匪 is seen as an insult by a group, but others do not. If Youtube bans nothing, then hate speech thrives and they get bad PR. If Youtube bans anything anyone flags as hate speech, then they become de facto as censorship agents for foreign powers. Anything critical can be seen as offensive and taken down by CCP or Russia.
Youtube is more and more siding towards removing content. I wonder, can US regulators do something about it?
The solution is to realize "hate speech" is mostly subjective and revert back to the clear rules that we had last decade before the current political climate of gratuitous outrage.
I think part of the issue is the power of comments like yours that pretends there's a simple solution.
In some conversations bad actors can gain more power in a debate using misleading information than a good actor can by using the truth.
Most conversations, such as this one about free speech, are so complex that it's tough for a 'good actor' to offer solutions. They may discuss the pros / cons of each side, talk about where further research is needed, talk about experts that are more informed, etc. They can still offer solutions but they shouldn't be pretending an unconfident solution is complete if they really are a good actor.
Bad actors, on the other hand, can simplify the complexities. They can provide confident solutions to complex problems and do so without worrying about the information they don't know or about misleading others.
Fortunately bad actors are often weeded out in discussions, but in conversations that abuse humans fear we become more demanding of answers. Explaining to fearful people "it's complex" isn't satisfying so we become more susceptible to lies / misinformation spread by bad actors. Conversations abusing this fear / anger is where there is an argument about whether misinformation should be limited.
Why is the simple solution just "pretending"? What evidence is there that a complex solution exists or works? What is the basis of the assumption that good actors are not as effective as bad actors? Why has society not devolved into chaos if that's the case? How did this work before social media and online anonymity?
I would say it's pretending because it's not 100% certain to be the solution. As mentioned, the situation is incredibly complex and can't be properly argued in a one-liner. There is no evidence that a complex solution exists, but I would say it's better if you know you don't have the solution to imply uncertainty.
Good actors are almost certainly more effective than bad actors. That's likely why the world hasn't devolved into chaos.
But societies DO devolve into chaos, such as revolutions and wars. These also obviously take place at times when society is most fearful / angry. But it's possible that many societal wars and revolutions would be unnecessary if good actors used rational discourse to reach solutions.
> "Good actors are almost certainly more effective than bad actors."
By your own exposition, this is the simple and effective solution that's inline with what I stated. Let freedom reign because the good already solves for the bad, and has done so for the entirety of civilization. Do we really need more?
Fair point.
I guess part of this conversation also depends on what each of us believes society's goal should be (minimize suffering, maximize individualistic freedom, etc).
My thinking is more so from a position of minimizing suffering, and that finding a way to reduce the power of bad actors may help minimize wars and other conflicts and reduce suffering. There's obviously the big counterpoint that attempts to reduce power of bad actors may lead to increased corruption that in turn worsens society that if it hadn't been attempted.
But that's why this is just another example of a complex problem.
People should never be allowed to claim suffering from political speech. It is that simple in my opinion. Yes, this legally allows Nazis to hold rallies outside of a synagogue. However, in practice this rarely happens, and is arguably a benefit to society since these people (Nazis) are now outing themselves as insane.
On the other hand, human history has shown that political parties will attempt to censor anything they can. We can see this with the alternative realities constructed by Fox News/MSNBC and we can see it in totalitarian dictatorships like North Korea. I am not aware of any counterexamples of a country where the government does not attempt to influence the narrative.
The problem is that the concept of free speech cannot be independent of the concept of power. Rules and Laws are only as good as the people in power choose; we've been lucky in many ways that most of the time, the people in power choose to behave in a way that upholds the laws that we consider important. However, that "good will" is specifically what malicious actors exploit in order to achieve that power and then violate the same rules that allowed them to spread their message and come to power.
And unfortunately, once they have power, there is very little that normal people can do to ensure that they will obey by the rules that got them there (i.e. free speech). I would argue that there was no way to prevent the Nazis from squashing free speech except by preventing them from coming to power - and this is true with many malicious actors. Unfortunately, that means we have to balance the need for free speech with the need to prevent malicious groups from coming to power.
> And unfortunately, once they have power, there is very little that normal people can do to ensure that they will obey by the rules that got them there (i.e. free speech).
This is where the second amendment shines isn't it?
I know what utilitarianism is, as someone who leans more to the side of deontological ethics.
The problem with fairness not being an end means you can't have justice.
Your moral ethics culminates on the never ending struggle we have right now of shifting the blame for what happens and what doesn't, and you're fine with it because you're blinded by the hope that it'll work. If you're willing to tell me why, as well as why you're proud of your relativism, why the means justify the end, I'm all eyes. If you're not, I'll understand.
> In some conversations bad actors can gain more power in a debate using misleading information than a good actor can by using the truth.
Can "actors" be neatly divided into "good" and "bad"? Who decides who is a "good actor" and who is a "bad actor"? Your judgement of who is "good" and "bad" may well differ from mine.
There is a simple solution. If you read something, and you’re offended by it, that’s your problem. The worlds full of stuff, you’re free to take offence to absolutely anything at all. Nobody has any obligation to protect you from that.
The one and only place this falls over is with the concept of “obscenity”. But if that’s the only place you have to make exceptions, they are much, much easier to define.
I think the issue is that YouTube wants to be seen as the "creator" for the content they distribute, and therefore, all content must not contradict the brand image of Google.
Alternatively, YouTube needs to put more emphasis and responsibility on the reputation of content creators and make it such that their reputation gains them visibility over time. A creator with 20 years of community determined honest reporting, should be featured more prominently than a channel that is new or has a controversial history.
Sadly, can't agree. The rules we had in the last decade weren't actually working; they only appeared to work. They looked like they were creating conflict-free environments, but they were really creating environments where, in general, minority populations hate speech was targeted against weren't using the tools or participating in the forums that had a laissez-faire attitude on such things.
What do you mean by not "actually working"? What is a "conflict-free environment"? What does hate speech have to do with minority populations? Do people within those populations never say hateful things, even to each other? How do you know they never participated in any forums?
>What does hate speech have to do with minority populations?
Come on. There's a debate to be had about hate speech and free speech, but it can't even get started on a reasonable footing if some of the participants don't know enough history to be able to answer this question.
There are no laws in the United States against hate speech. It is a made up term that changes with the wind. It used to describe speech that was encouraging violence towards a person or group but then it just became "speech that expresses hate." Nowadays it is mostly used to describe speech from a majority group that a minority group found offensive.
What is hate? What is offensive? It's whatever you want it to be!
When in doubt, err on the side of freedom and liberty.
> There are no laws in the United States against hate speech
An interesting part of this discussion is that Youtube is operating globally. There are a number of countries with the concept of “hate speech” in the law. Saying it doesn’t exist in US law is only a partial answer.
That’s true. But as a consequence, content can be blocked/deleted per country, it doesn’t have to be global.
Otherwise countries with most restrictive laws basically dictate what is allowed or not to the rest of the world (though in practice that’s already in part the case).
Every term is a made up term. Hate speech is generally understood as sexist/racist/homophobic speech (in general, discrimination against a minority group with no justification based in reality). It doesn't need to be encouraging violence in the immediate against such a group, that's a subset of hate speech.
You may disagree with the definition, but that's what people are talking about. If you want to elevate the discussion, you should avoid pointless semantic arguments IMO.
>Hate speech is generally understood as sexist/racist/homophobic speech
That may be your definition but it is not the definition and certainly is not close to being the "generally understood" definition.
All words are made up but definitions should not change with the wind. What is happening with hate speech is that it has morphed into "speech that a minority group found offensive." This is not a workable definition because what you find offensive is not what I find offensive. The most broadly accepted definition based on the laws I see on wikipedia is "speech that encourages imminent violence."
The only reason we are even discussing this is because people have begged online platforms to police speech. The inevitable conclusion when you police speech is this problem we are discussing right now. You ultimately just devolve into tyranny of the majority where dissenting thoughts are silenced.
>You may disagree with the definition, but that's what people are talking about.
Just because you don't want there to be nuance doesn't make the nuance go away.
Wikipedia's definition is actually broader than what you quoted.
> Hate speech is defined by Cambridge Dictionary as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". Hate speech is "usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation".
If I may clarify, the key part of the definition is "based on something such as [a core characteristic of a person that has no relationship to the hate] such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". So hating someone for doing something is not hate speech. Hating someone for what they "are" (at their "core", if there's such a thing) is hate speech.
This isn't about finding things offensive (although clearly hate speech is found offensive by most people).
I disagree strongly about whether policing speech inevitably devolves into censorship. We already police speech, for example calls to violence in the US, with no visible devolution. We also police where you can physically be, without limiting your ability to go about your life with no undue policing. The slippery slope argument without supporting evidence is lazy.
I don't think that article can be classified as hate speech using any reasonable definition. What I get from it is a disdain toward men for their behavior, particularly as it pertains to power and violence in a particular social/political context. I don't read it as, "I hate you because you have a penis," although there are certainly people who think that way (a very small minority as far as I can tell). As a person with a penis, I certainly don't get a feeling of personal animus from the article nor am I threatened by it.
> Hate speech is generally understood as sexist/racist/homophobic speech
No it's not. Here you have Google removing anti-communist speech which is not sexist, not racist and not homophobic. And communists aren't even a minority in China (though thankfully a minority in most of other countries). But "I hate Nazis" is also hate speech, obviously - should Google ban anybody who hates Nazis? Maybe not, you say? So there's some hate that is allowed, but some is verboten. And who decides which is which? Ah, now we are getting to the point of "hate speech" term - "hate speech" is hate I disapprove of. If I approve of it, it's a vigorous and righteous indignation against the evils of this world and should be lauded, but if I disapprove - it's "hate speech" and should be banned. Now we need only do figure out who holds the power to decide these questions... but wait, we already did, Google decides that. All hail Google, the bastion of free speech and protector from the hate speech! I, for one, welcome our new speech overlords.
Anti-communist (against the ideology) speech is not hate speech. Dehumanizing speech against communists (people who identify or are identified as communist) may be. Quoting Wikipedia quoting Cambridge dictionary:
> Hate speech is defined by Cambridge Dictionary as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". Hate speech is "usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation".
This is a workable definition and it doesn't lead to a slippery slope argument.
> Anti-communist (against the ideology) speech is not hate speech
Why not? Because you said so? If somebody hates communists and publicly proclaims that I don't see how it's not hate speech. Unless, of course, you massage the definition to match exactly the cases you like. Religion and ideology are the same thing - or, more precisely, religion is subset of ideology with some specific properties. Why would anti-certain ideology be different from anti-another ideology because some of these ideologies call themselves "religion"? How does it make any sense?
> something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation
Ok, so hating buddhists is hate speech, but hating communists isn't. And hating atheists is ... who knows. Now sure about Wiccans either. How about Objectivists? That looks like exactly the definition to match one narrow case of US contemporary politics (I'd even say very narrow sliver of a contemporary US politics), where racial and sexual discrimination issues is all the rage. But outside that context it makes zero sense, the categories it chooses are just arbitrary.
Is hating scientologists "hate speech"? Well, depends on whether it's a religion or not, right? Because if it's not then no hate speech for you. Is hating furries "hate speech"? If it's about sex fetish then yes, "sexual orientation", but if it's just about cosplay then no, because it doesn't fit the official categories. And so on. Completely nonsensical definition, unless you use it exactly as declared - to privilege certain categories of speech and suppress others, because you want so. There's no logical basis under it, just an arbitrary list.
> This is a workable definition and it doesn't lead to a slippery slope argument.
It's not workable because it selects arbitrary categories based on certain political agenda. If you expand it using "such as" and argue, for example, that regardless of whether Scientology is a religion or not, hating for the group characteristic of belonging to it is under "such as" - good, then how anti-communism is not "such as"? If I make a church that declares Vladimir Lenin a top saint and otherwise the views would completely match communist views with the exception that I also would celebrate Lenin's birthday once a year and call it a religion, now anti-communism is a hate speech? Or only if it's directed against me, but if it's against Chinese communist who has the same ideology but officially not in my church then it's not? Again, nonsensical.
> In a nutshell: hate speech causes people to commit suicide.
Can you elaborate on how we establish a causal relationship between hate speech and suicide? Let alone specifically hateful comments on YouTube? This doesn't seem corroborated by the suicide rates in the US over time. Rates were just as high (and in fact, higher in some years) in pre-internet days [1].
This claim is made even more questionable when taken in conjunction the previous comments' emphasis on its impact on minorities. Minorities in the US actually have substantially lower suicide rates than Whites [2].
Minorities are most often the targets of hate speech. Which is why LGTBQ youth are often bullied both IRL and online and they commit suicide. And yes, it is a crime. But this thread is talking about deleting comments; not about law enforcement.
This thread is about hate speech and the ambiguous subjective definitions that have lead to this unending censorship problem.
If the core agreement is that it's about hate against a group, then saying "minority" is nothing more than just a shortcut for a certain group and doesn't really add anything to the discussion of what is hate speech.
There are studies dating back to the 70s that suggest publishing headlines about suicide causes people to commit suicide. Headlines about murder-suicides similarly caused an uptick in murder suicides.
> Abstract: Fatal crashes of private, business, and corporate-executive airplanes have increased after publicized murder-suicides. The more publicity given to muder-suicide, the more crashes occurred. The increase in plane crashes occurred primarily in states where murder-suicides were publicized. These findings suggest that murder-suicide stories trigger subsequent murder-suicides, some of which are disguised as airplane accidents.
There have been some studies which found similar correlations with fatal car 'accidents.'
It's easy to speculate that comments discussing suicide, such as yours or mine, might also plausibly cause suicides. Perhaps that's something for you to consider.
I've seen a few cases where people have committed suicide after suffering online hate, and to be honest, I don't think that this hate made a radical difference – rather, it was something that triggered an individual who already was in a very dark place.
Sacrificing free speech for their sake of like doing a nation-wide ban on peanuts to help people with allergies: it will prevent quit a lot of accidental deaths, too. Except that peanuts are not essential for a functioning democracy.
There are a number of well-known historical cases where hate speech targeted at certain minority groups has precipitated genocide (in the worst case) or other forms of violence.
The problem is that there is not a single, universal correct answer. Answering this question requires that we uncover built-in assumptions, and make them explicit.
> it can't even get started on a reasonable footing if some of the participants don't know enough history to be able to answer this question.
Perhaps you're conflating hate speech with hateful (and harmful) actions. History is full of examples of the latter, but it's also full of examples of the former where no one was actually hurt, minority groups included.
Speech can be a precursor to action, but that doesn't make it a crime in itself (unless you're living in "1984"). What's that old rhyme about "sticks and stones..."?
I'm not arguing we make hate speech illegal, or have thought crime. In fact if it were up to me racists would be even more up front about their deplorable worldview. But I think it's very important that the employees of companies are allowed to exercise their own value systems by denying users of hate speech a platform.
This isn't a defense of banning anti-PRC posters though. Calling xi jinping Winnie the Pooh isn't hate speech. Discussing what constitutes hate speech could be another valuable discussion perhaps held elsewhere - I don't agree that a definition is impossible, if that's where you're thinking of going. I don't agree that there's a slippery slope.
> But I think it's very important that the employees of companies are allowed to exercise their own value systems by denying users of hate speech a platform.
I completely agree. That doesn't mean I have to agree with their value systems or stay silent about my discontent (and I'm not implying that you claimed that either).
I'm just tired of hearing the phrase "hate speech" used whenever these discussions happen, as if there were some fundamental human law that we have to protect people from ideas that might offend them - either via regulation or private company policy. Illegal or not, I don't think it helps to talk about "hate speech" in the context of censorship and free speech. It's like having a debate about which curse words are the worst, when really that's missing the point.
There's more at stake than being offended. If the reality was that the reason companies like Google kick out people for, say, ambiguously dogwhistling with sexist blog posts is because sexist blog posts hurt people's feelings, I wouldn't feel quite as strongly about how ethically good it is for Google to have taken said action.
However, it's not "just speech." As I linked elsewhere, studies show that after every dogwhistle-ridden Trump speech, violence against minorities increase. We've strayed into Sticks and Stones territory. Apparently, it's important to not let hate speech spread unfettered. Standing aside, allowing racists to post racist things on your platform, makes you directly culpable in actual violence being committed against minorities.
If I was the CEO of Google, I would not accept that violence is being committed that I could take direct action in preventing. If I was an employee, I'd put extreme pressure on my management to prevent that violence.
The issue is the harmful actions and the people who commit them. That's why there's an exception for speech that incites violence.
Outside of that, rhetoric that you consider hateful is not a direct cause of any harm. That is a dangerous road to go down and it's far better to counter with your own speech instead.
> However, it's not "just speech." As I linked elsewhere, studies show that after every dogwhistle-ridden Trump speech, violence against minorities increase. We've strayed into Sticks and Stones territory.
Studies would show that a thousand other things are also followed by an increase in violence. In literature, movies, telephone calls – anywhere people communicate with other people, you will find that some people communicate offensive (to someone) ideas, and as a result, other people who are prone to violence will be pushed over the edge and do something harmful. Those who seek violent ideas will find them regardless of censorship. And those who seek positivity and love will find them.
It is absolutely "just speech". We haven't crossed any magical boundary today that we hadn't crossed 229 years ago when the bill of rights was ratified. If you want to fully prevent violence from ever occurring by censoring speech, you're welcome to live in a communist country. But of course, you won't find what you're looking for there either.
> We haven't crossed any magical boundary today that we hadn't crossed 229 years ago when the bill of rights was ratified.
You mean, when black people were still considered non-human? I don't think the bill of rights, nor the people that wrote it, gets to stand on its own laurels. There's plenty of room to debate the problems with the Constitution as it stands today.
> If you want to fully prevent violence from ever occurring by censoring speech, you're welcome to live in a communist country.
I'm not sure what to do with an HN poster that conflates the economic theory of Communism with the authoritarian plutocracies of China and north Korea.
Oh hoh if you wanna live in a capitalist country like Russia, where the secret police can disappear you for speaking out against the democratically elected president, maybe you should just move there!
> I don't think the bill of rights, nor the people that wrote it, gets to stand on its own laurels.
Agreed, but I'm talking specifically about free speech, not any other parts of the constitution or the people who wrote it. I'm not debating the need for a "living constitution".
"Perhaps most important is that Sanders’ wording implies that the 226% jump stems from comparing hate crimes before and after a Trump rally within the same county, when in fact it’s a comparison from Trump rally counties to similar counties that did not host a Trump rally."
You made a claim here.[1] Then to virtually every response, you ask lots and lots of questions like "What does this mean?" "Why.." "What..."
While your questions are fair, it is noteworthy that you haven't clarified or backed up your original claim. As someone reading this thread, I'm a bit surprised people are engaging with you. Personally, I would not engage with someone who makes an unsubstantiated claim, and instead of backing it up keeps trying to poke holes in others' responses.
The fact that hate speech is subjective is evidenced by my questions which examine just how loose and vague the definitions are. There still is no clear answer on what hate speech is, beyond the 1st Amendment which I think is good enough.
If you mean something else, then please state what it is that's unsubstantiated.
The part where you say "The solution is..." and then don't substantiate it, but instead focus on knocking down other solutions. That other solutions have problems does not make your one any better.
(At least in this comment you are providing a qualifier ("I think..."))
My solution is a lack of implementing any of the solutions, therefore that's the only focus there is. Freedom (by the 1A) instead of vague, complicated and heavy-handed policies that are currently causing an American company to side with an authoritarian regime.
I don't claim that the 1A has no problems, but it does have less problems and that's still an improvement, and it has worked for more than a century for this great nation.
What do you mean by "other" evidence? You didn't provide any.
> but it does have less problems
Unsubstantiated claim.
> and it has worked for more than a century for this great nation
Unsubstantiated claim.
To respond in a manner similar to your other comments:
What does "worked" mean? How is it an improvement? How does it have fewer problems? Where exactly did it work in whatever great nation you're thinking of. Have you considered where it didn't work? What is the metric for "worked"?
American companies didn't side with authoritarian regimes before and wouldn't if they just followed 1A rule. People wouldn't be censored on platforms if they just followed the 1A rule.
The metric is personal freedom and how much you can do without the government or someone else preventing you from doing so. Anyone can say what they want and people can ignore and block, leading to more freedom for all.
This is an improvement. It was also what we had before. It worked everywhere in America. I don't know of any place where it didn't work and do note that many countries without freedom envy the American way.
> American companies didn't side with authoritarian regimes before
Please do a simple search before making incredibly wrong claims. There was one very famous case in the decade you refer to. And when you look at the history of American companies in general, you'll find more.
> The metric is personal freedom and how much you can do without the government or someone else preventing you from doing so.
> This is an improvement. It was also what we had before. It worked everywhere in America. I don't know of any place where it didn't work and do note that many countries without freedom envy the American way.
As others have pointed out to you, by that metric, the US failed considerably. It's not what we had before in practice. People have pointed out places where it didn't work.
> do note that many countries without freedom envy the American way.
And many Americans envy other countries for traits they have that the US lacks. What's the relevance?
> How do you know they never participated in any forums?
Large amounts of anecdata of people reporting (e.g. with the first post on a new blog) that they have finally found places where they can freely engage in Internet discourse; and explaining that they hadn’t been engaging in Internet discourse up until then, because any attempt previously was met with people reacting to the cultural “outgroup” signifiers in their message, rather than to the content of the message itself.
> What does hate speech have to do with minority populations?
Pretty much every country other than the US has an official legal definition of hate speech—but even the US has a definition of hate crime. Both terms are defined in terms of prejudice toward a group. Wikipedia’s definition of “hate crime”, for example:
“A hate crime (also known as a bias-motivated crime or bias crime) is a prejudice-motivated crime which occurs when a perpetrator targets a victim because of their membership (or perceived membership) of a certain social group or race.”
> Do people within those populations never say hateful things, even to each other?
“Hate speech” doesn’t literally mean “hateful speech.” If just say something with hatred, you’re not engaging in hate speech. If you say something with prejudice, intending injury to the victim because of that prejudice, you’re engaging in hate speech.
Keeping that in mind, you can certainly commit an act of hate speech (or a hate crime generally) against someone in the same intersection of groups as you. It probably implies that you hate yourself (or don’t consider yourself a part of such group/groups), though.
The discussion is about speech, and speech is not action. Harmful action is already a crime, and any crime can be upgraded to "hate crime" based on the motivation.
Group membership doesn't have anything to do with minorities though. You can define groups however you want, so a "minority" is entirely dependent on the context of the situation and just as subjective as the hate speech. So who are you considering minorities and what is this anecdotal data that claims they did not participate in forums? Must every forum be welcoming to everyone? Did no other forum exist? Could they not have created their own forum? If they talked to each other, does that mean a forum exists? And if so, doesn't that mean they are free to engage in their own discourse after all?
I don't see how membership of a minority group is all that subjective in most cases. E.g., LGBTQ individuals are pretty clearly a minority, Jews were pretty clearly a minority in Europe in the 20th century, etc. Minorities tend to be more vulnerable to hate speech for obvious reasons.
How you scope the entirety of the universe and how you group the people within determines the minority.
Either way, the point that if hate speech is targeting against a "group", then that group can be anything and anyone. There is no specific connection to "minorities", whatever that means to you. It just dilutes the discussion about defining hate speech.
>How you scope the entirety of the universe and how you group the people within determines the minority.
That is entirely specious, pedantic and irrelevant. In the context relevant to hate speech, there is no doubt that, say, LGBTQ individuals or Jews are minority groups. I don't think you can really be serious about denying this (given that the numbers are what they are). I am not sure what point you are trying to make here.
>There is no specific connection to "minorities", whatever that means to you.
There is no essential connection between hate speech and minorities, but there's a very obvious connection. Historically, many victims of hate speech and other hate crimes have been members of minority groups. And it's not difficult to see why. It's a lot easier for a majority group to persecute a minority group than vice versa.
Hate speech is subjective. Minority is subjective. Even if there are commonly considered minority groups, it doesn't solve for the definition of hate speech other than just being a shortcut to defining a group membership that is the basis for the "hate".
Therefore there is really no connection (essential or otherwise) that is useful to the discussion of what is hate speech.
It is not subjective in any interesting sense whether a given group is a minority within a particular society. It's simply a question of counting.
The connection, as various people have explained to you, is that minorities within a society tend to be more vulnerable to hate speech and its associated effects.
You can't count until you know the (subjectively chosen) boundary of the whole. For example, a minority in your city may not be the minority in another country.
Either way, so what if it affects minorities more often? The question is What is hate speech? and saying "it affects minorities more" does not solve for that definition at all. Hence why the connection does not matter/exist.
Obviously you choose the ‘boundary of the whole’ according to the location of the instance of hate speech. E.g., Jews were a minority in 1930s Germany; LGBTQ individuals are a minority more or less everywhere; Muslims are a minority in London, etc. etc. There’s nothing about this that’s difficult to understand, and you really just seem to be trolling at this point.
As to your ‘so what’, you now seem to accept that there is a connection between minorities and hate speech, which was the point at issue.
There's no connection. It's an observation at best, based on what you define as a minority. For example, billionaires are also a minority group and frequent recipients of hate speech. Do you disagree?
I don't disagree that they are a minority group. I haven't seen examples of hate speech directed at billionaires per se. In this context, people are usually thinking of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities - but of course you know that, right?
To pick a concrete (if inflammatory) example of the subjectivity of "minority", perhaps it is worth considering the example of "Trump voters". Within the context of the US, they are less than 50% of the population, so would it be hate speech to insult his supporters?
To pick a smaller minority, what about "Baby Boomers". Should the "OK, boomer" meme be banned as hate speech? At 22% of the US population, they constitute a smaller minority than the proportion of non-white Americans (28%, excluding White Hispanics).
No-one thinks that anything insulting said to any minority automatically qualifies as hate speech. This is a straw man. The point is that e.g. ethnic, religious and sexual minorities have historically been some of the primary victims of hate speech.
Thanks for clearing that up. Maybe the problem then is the misleading nature of the phrase "hate speech". The speech that is being banned isn't distinguished by being "hateful", but because it is targeted at certain subjectively chosen minorities.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we shouldn't give extra protections to groups of people who have historically faced disproportionate amounts of violence (and other harms), just that we should maybe call it "selected minority endangering speech" instead of "hate speech", and be clear about the specific cost-benefit trade-off we are making by how we choose and delineate those categories of people and how much speech is covered.
It's pretty easy to find out what people mean by hate speech. What you're doing seems a bit like people who derail discussions about homophobia by pointing out that homophobes aren't literally afraid of homosexuals. In both cases, the terminology is well established. Fussing over it just serves as an excuse to avoid addressing the problem.
I'm not trying to derail the discussion by pointless complaints about etymology, I'm saying that part of the problem with the concept of hate speech is that the name given to it obscures (accidentally) the nuances of how it is applied in practice.
A better analogy would be if the critics of homophobes genuinely thought that homophobia was literally a fear of homosexuals, causing the homophobes to complain that this framing of their position made it hard for them to explain their objection to homosexuality.
By hiding the subjectivity of "hate speech", people then get surprised or angry when it does or doesn't get applied to terms like "communist bandits" or "OK, boomer", or "eat the rich". The real debate isn't about whether the terms are hateful (as the name suggests), but whether the specific groups that are targeted need the specific protections being implemented.
So you were genuinely and not merely rhetorically confused when you asked whether insulting Trump supporters would qualify as hate speech?
Sorry, it just seems like you are deliberately trying to introduce confusion about what hate speech is into this discussion.
There's nothing particularly 'subjective' about the definition of hate speech. At least, it's no more subjective than the definition of 'free speech' or 'censorship' or any of the other relevant concepts in this domain. There's a perfectly objective history of persecution targeting certain minority groups.
I was genuinely looking for a logically consistent framework for excluding "insulting Trump supporters" from being an example of hate speech. I'm sorry if it seemed like I was labouring the point too much by asking where the lines around hate speech should be drawn.
I accept that there are objective historical examples of majority groups persecuting minority groups, and I'll ignore the difficulties of constructing well-defined subsets of a population (e.g. "working class") or whether a given group is numerically a minority (e.g. "females" in many countries). What I still think is subjective, though, is how much (and what sort of) persecution is necessary before a group becomes entitled to claim that hateful language used against them is "hate speech".
Imagine a hypothetical African country that had, say, France as its colonial occupier, under an apartheid system, but then allowed free elections, leading to the native population gaining political power. If the native population had talked about "getting rid of" their French occupiers, while the apartheid system was in place, presumably your definition of "hate speech" wouldn't have applied to that speech. But would your definition also not apply to similar speech (targeted at the same French people) after the occupying minority population lost their power? Would some amount of time (and violence) have to pass before the minority was entitled to point out that the hateful speech directed towards them was this special kind of "hate speech"?
Again, I apologise if this seems like a contrived example (and it's very hard to come up with an example that people don't have instinctive pre-conceptions and biases around), but I'm trying to explore if your definition really is as neutral as you think it is. You're right, though, that terms like "free speech" can be very nebulous, while still being useful concepts.
If your point is that you can contrive edge cases then, well, duh. There are also edge cases involving free speech and just about every other legal/moral/political concept.
The US has a pretty well defined notion of "protected class" since at least 1964. Like all of law, there are ambiguities and edge cases that have not been fully enumerated or explored in case law. You're acting like this is a huge nebulous concept, and displaying confusion about minorities.
People often say "minorities" when they mean "protected class." Women are not a minority, but they're a protected class. Billionaires are a minority, but they are not a protected class. Who decides what constitutes a protected class? Case law. When a suitable number of cases demonstrate harm on the basis of membership in a class, then that class may be considered for inclusion in the definition.
The definition of hate speech in Canada is quite narrow, and hinges on the definition of protected class. Progress is slow and methodical, and not the slippery slope thay you drscribe.
Conflict isn't necessarily a bad thing. Conflict can resolve tension and raise long-hidden concerns to the forefront. Conflict is a natural part of human interaction.
But the conflict was and still is directed at minority groups for their being a minority. There is nothing to resolve there, a Trans person will not stop being trans, a gay person stop being gay or a woman stop being a woman. These people genuinely need protection and safe spaces.
(I'm also aware that these are not easy issues to tackle but they haven't been met with a lot of care in the last few years)
>* They looked like they were creating conflict-free environments*
No, they did not. They looked they were creating environments in which inevitable conflict was common, and in which the discussion of that conflict sometimes lead to helpful resolutions and improvements, and sometimes did not.
No. The great opening of the Internet brought points of view onto the internet at scales that hitherto were unknown. There are so many asshats on the Internet that old tactics of manual moderation do not work anymore. Doing nothing is a pathetic excuse for a solution.
Self service moderation which serves as training for machine learning algorithms. Perhaps a system where messages aren’t whitelisted for the entire platform by default but instead must pass scrutiny as a canary. At first you could seed this with employees for users with no audience. During this time the sentiments of those who view the message are used to determine if wider distribution is desired.
>>> The solution is to realize "hate speech" is mostly subjective and revert back to the clear rules that we had last decade before the current political climate of gratuitous outrage.
>> What were those clear rules we apparently abandoned for no reason?
> The First Amendment of the US Constitution.
Ah yes, the good old days when every newspaper was obligated to publish every letter to the editor and every citizen was required to reproduce and distribute pamphlets put out by every nut job they ran into on the street.
> First Amendment maintains freedom. It does not state there's an obligation. You are free to ignore people as much as you want. You should not stop them from uttering those words in the first place though.
So you're fine if YouTube/Google chooses not to reproduce and distribute certain messages?
I think the point is that it depends on their reasons. The U.S. government imposes restrictions on broadcast content, but these restrictions are on extremely shaky ground, and they rely heavily on not venturing into viewpoint discrimination and focusing entirely on content discrimination (i.e. sexual nudity on ordinary daytime television).
1) There's an argument that deleting the comment disallows the expression in the first place.
2) Sure, private companies can do what they want. My point is that they just use the first amendment, because the current nebulous definitions aren't really working.
> 1) There's an argument that deleting the comment disallows the expression in the first place.
That argument doesn't hold water. If someone pins a message to my corkboard, I'm disallowing the expression if I express my disapproval by removing it?
> 2) Sure, private companies can do what they want. My point is that they just use the first amendment, because the current nebulous definitions aren't really working.
The First Amendment only works because non-governmental actors in society are allowed to decide what to publish, what to pass on, and what to throw away according to their own standards. It's not some blanket "everyone allow all" rule.
Most pamphlets are judged to be garbage and go into the trash, much to the consternation of their authors.
1) This is the platform vs publisher discussion. I'm just stating it as a potential case.
2) You agree with me. Again, my point is not that they shouldn't do that, but that the filter they use to do so is so highly subjective and opaque that it's no longer useful.
>> The First Amendment only works because non-governmental actors in society are allowed to decide what to publish, what to pass on, and what to throw away according to their own standards. It's not some blanket "everyone allow all" rule.
> 2) You agree with me. Again, my point is not that they shouldn't do that, but that the filter they use to do so is so highly subjective and opaque that it's no longer useful.
No, I don't. I think it's fine to have opaque, highly subjective standards; and such standards are can be very useful. My standards about what I publish, what I pass on, and what I throw away are like that. The costs of transparency can be extremely high, and subjectivity just can't be avoided. In some cases, my judgement may differ from theirs, and I may even say so, but ultimately subjective judgement can't be avoided.
1) That argument is false because the comment could be expressed on another platform or their own platform (e.g. a personal website).
2) That doesn't make sense in the context of a privately owned company, the 1st amendment doesn't define a standard for speech, it outlines explicit limitations of the government.
I see there’s a lot of court cases listed in that Wikipedia entry so it seems like it'll have to be decided by a judge on what is considered free speech or not, because language by nature is vague and can interpreted in many different ways.
So there is no such thing completely “free” speech if there are constraints.
Have you read any of the cases? They get pretty detailed about what is and isn’t allowed. This is not the first time we’ve been having this debate - far front it. Though, some seem unaware that there’s a substantial body of court history on the subject, both American and otherwise.
Newspaper has editorial control, while Google and YouTube pretend to be platforms. Phone company doesn't censor your conversation, but also doesn't take responsibility for their content. YouTube has much more in common with it than with a newspaper.
> You really don't see the difference between an editor selecting one person to speak, versus a forum where almost everyone gets to speak?
There is no difference. If I invite people to come to my place to talk in some kind of forum, I have no obligation to let people who I think are disruptive or offensive stay, nor do I have an obligation to preserve any record of their words.
> There's also an important difference between "your house" and a common open forum with tens of millions of people.
No, not really. The only difference that's important is between forums run by the government and forums that are not. In the case of the latter, the people who run it have an extremely free hand.
"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."
What law did Congress pass that violates the first amendment to the Constitution? You of course acknowledge that that limitation of the first amendment is explicit - Google, not being an aspect of the government, can do whatever it pleases regarding speech.
I think you are misunderstand GP. It’s not that YouTube violates the law. It’s that the law makes a clear rule for the government.
What’s good is the clarity of the rule. Other attempts at rules become too subjective, perhaps.
So maybe it would be better if these companies actually followed the same rule as the government is required to, even if they aren’t currently legally obligated to.
Perhaps if they had to play by those rules, they would come up with a better solution than subjective moderation by a small group of employees.
> So maybe it would be better if these companies actually followed the same rule as the government is required to, even if they aren’t currently legally obligated to.
I disagree. The difference between private organizations enforcing a moral code, and the government, is strong.
Ostensibly, if racists wanted their own youtube, they could make one. I see nothing of value in the further existence of the racists' mindset, but I do think it's important that there aren't thought police, for many of the same reasons that your average alt-right racist would yell about "freeze peach."
Of course, perhaps it isn't such a bad thing to have thought police, if there were open stretches of ungoverned land where racists could go live and start their own government. Beyond Antarctica though, that isn't the case. So for now, I think it's important to allow that separation between private and public rule.
In many people’s view, adhering to the first amendment principles is the strong moral code.
So even if it shouldn’t be mandated that a private company do that, it’s reasonable to hold the position that this would be a preferable stance for the company to take.
I'm mostly on your side of this debate, but I don't think this quite works because of spammers (though perhaps that's the only reason). Are spammers protected by the first amendment? I bet Gab has anti-spam measures too.
Those rules applied today would result in indecipherable cesspools of memes at best or a community of authoritarian sympathizers at worst, who would be oh-so-happy to start conditioning their like-minded members to force undesirables away, either explicitly through bans or implicitly through non-stop hatred and coordinated harassment.
Neither one is the type of community I have any interest in participating in, and if some sort of mandate came down enforcing it on any of the large social networks I would no longer participate in them.
Your first paragraph describes subs like r/esist, r/againsthatesubreddits, r/fragilewhiteredditor, etc. They just don't do what many people would consider hate speech so they don't get banned. I think this highlights that while your goal many occur in parallel with banning hate speech in some cases, on its own it will not accomplish much because the same thing will just happen on whatever side nobody thinks is "spewing hate"
And fwiw, blocking these subs (and subs like r/trumpforpresident! You can block both sides this way) made me completely forget about them until this comment, which I think also shows that self moderation is a perfectly acceptable answer. Why can't everyone make their own bubble? Why do we have to let other people decide how our bubble looks?
I've not seen any evidence of authoritarian trends in fragilewhiteredditor. I have seen many "but both sides" types try to fruitlessly argue that pointing out white racists are fragile is somehow in and of itself racist, but that is of course absurd.
what a topsy turvy world to live in where calling out bigotry is equated with hate subs. maybe on the fronts of brigading or the like, but content wise I don't see how they're morally equivalent
I'd agree the world is topsy-turvy when the New York Times thinks "are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins" is cool but a white guy wearing a sombrero is beyond the pale.
I just found it strange that _all_ of the examples were anti-trump, especially when various conservative pro-trump subreddits were guilty of the exact same thing.
And frankly, I'm A-OK with communities having heavy-handed moderation no matter what side of the aisle you're on. That's great! At least when you join those communities, you know what you're signing up for.
But the trouble comes when you have lightly-moderated spaces that are targeted by authoritarian extremists with the explicit goal of trying to shift people's opinions. That's subterfuge, and lightly-moderated spaces are defenseless against it, since at point you either introduce moderation or throw up your hands and let the extremists win.
Three of the four examples I gave were anti trump because they happened to be at the top of my blocked list, probably because they were the first posts I was annoyed by. I also mentioned r/trumpforpresident.
And in my opinion, your third paragrah applies even stronger to heavily moderated subreddits (/r/the_donald anyone?) because dissenting opinions are just removed. Unless this is super public and regularly discussed, oftentimes I find that it's easy to forget about and fall into the trap of thinking that everyone feels a certain way. Sure at first it is right in the front of your mind but eventually it fades away (at least, in my experience).
Of all the problems that the_donald had, their exclusion of dissenting voices was not one of them. They made it abundantly clear what kind of sub it was, and I think even codified it in the rules.
And I don't quite follow your second concern. Most of the time when I'm socializing I'm not in the mood for pseudo-anonymous debate club, I just want to talk to like-minded people about our shared hobbies. If I want dissenting opinions, I know where to find them.
>Those rules applied today would result in indecipherable cesspools of memes at best or a community of authoritarian sympathizers at worst, who would be oh-so-happy to start conditioning their like-minded members to force undesirables away, either explicitly through bans or implicitly through non-stop hatred and coordinated harassment.
It seems like the only point of disagreement between you and "them" is who should be targeted.
I don't like political authoritarianism apologia no matter where it's coming from. I've seen both neo-nazis and stalinist tankies overrun and completely ruin communities and I don't care for either.
An internet community having a solid framework of rules that is strictly enforced that keeps discussions friendly and on-topic is a completely separate axis entirely.
> I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
Hasn't stopped the government from moderating other things that can't be defined crisply.
That's belittling a very serious issue. A lot of these recent anti-lockdown protests have been fueled out of social media by actors peddling extremely questionable narratives.
Holocaust denial has seen a massive revival in Germany, to such a degree that sentiments like that are intermixing with conspiracy theories about the "NWO" supposedly using COVID-19 to finalize their "2000 years old rule", with the help of Bill Gates who apparently wants to microchip everybody on the planet to "depopulate" it.
Trump is supposedly the last and only defense against this take-over by the "deep state", and will soon end it all when he reveals "Obamagate", he apparently also federalized the FED. Tho none of these people could even tell me when that supposedly happened.
While individually these ideas and movements have been floating around the web for quite a while, it's absolutely scary how they are now merging together [0] and being chanted by people in the streets after they got their "Information on the Internet" which regularly means: Facebook groups, YouTube channels and now even Twitch streams, places they usually arrive at after using search engines in the most misleading way possible.
It's like peak Eternal September where people will just believe the most obscure sources when they confirm their already established beliefs, over well-established data, and factual reality, which apparently is all controlled and manipulated by "dark powers behind the scenes". It's depressing and scary because so far I thought rationality will pull trough, people will learn to properly parse information for its validity and sources for their credibility.
That did not happen, the bad actors are now taking over to a point where they stage events in the meat world, openly threatening democratic institutions. I do not know how to stop this, but this can't keep on going like this, it will take us no place good.
> 共匪 is seen as an insult by a group, but others do not
This is where the legal concept of protected classes may be helpful. They're sets of attributes society has deemed one cannot discriminate against. That tends to line up well with said society's line between insulting and hateful.
As a legal definition, these class definitions tend to be precise. That makes them convenient for exporting.
Notably, political affiliation is not a protected class under U.S. law.
I disagree that protected classes line up with the dinstinction between insulting and hateful at all, and it scares me that this US-centric line of thinking will probably conquer Europe as well.
You can absolutely mock people (even groups of people) in a hateful way for their looks, body weight, or success in the sexual marketplace. The obvious solution is to add more protected classes! And I'm afraid that is what will happen, simply because it creates administrative work and a nice distraction from everything else (just like adding new emoji every year). And then people will find new ways to hate someone.
I much prefer HN's moderation stance. Either a comment adds value to the discussion, or it tries to derail it. And even though I hate the CCP, I don't think 共匪 is useful, except maybe in a self-ironic kind of way.
Yes but that is a difficult thing even in our society in the US. Then to project that to the world is harder. In the USA we have values that tend to see political censorship as evil, but in some other countries they see political criticism as insulting and a hindrance to government. I too thought for a long time that any place that censored or punished political dissidents probably was a place that had people yearning to be free. It is not necessarily true as we see in China. I don't agree with it from my values but then again I don't know what is good for the entire Earth.
> that is a difficult thing even in our society in the US
Difficult. Yet commonly done. (With respect to protected classes, I mean.)
> Then to project that to the world is harder
This is not a requirement. My beef is with Google exporting China's censorship regime to New Yorkers like me. I'm not thrilled with China censoring what its people see. But that's a different category of problem.
> political affiliation is a protected class in other countries where YouTube operates
At which point Google should decide on what countries they operate in. If they operate in a country where political affiliation is a protected class, go ahead and hide those comments to users in that country. But don't export that country's values to mine.
Unfortunately, the Internet allows a user to connect to to a server in any country on the planet, so your solution is really a non-solution because it's trivially bypassed.
> your solution is really a non-solution because it's trivially bypassed
One, governments who don't like this have ways of fixing it. Two, this true for other media--I can ship my friend a book banned in their country. And three, tough. Nobody has global jurisdiction.
> --I can ship my friend a book banned in their country.
And depending on the country your friend might end up in jail, not very friendly but you never know how undemocratic countries/institutions will overreact.
I like this idea, but it is hard to apply such a criteria across borders. In California, for instance, political affiliation is considered a protected class. The omission of political affiliation from the nationally protected classes in the US is a direct consequence of the persecution of communists during the Cold War. This is actually not a great idea when you consider that it essentially legalizes political persecution of the sort that you find in various dictatorships (a little ironic in this context).
> it is hard to apply such a criteria across borders. In California, for instance, political affiliation is considered a protected class.
This is hard. But it's a different category of hard from the problem Google has chosen for itself.
Let's assume California has a protected class that New York doesn't. China has protected classes the U.K. doesn't. That could mean a comment visible in New York isn't in California. Or it could mean something else.
This isn't an easy problem. One needs to map comments to various protected classes and then measure "hatefulness" according to local constructs. One needs to decide what to do with content so flagged. But that's objectively easier than doing all of that plus coming up with the definitions for protected classes.
Viewed through this framework, deleting a comment, as Google is doing here, is almost always wrong.
> it essentially legalizes political persecution
The First Amendment is supposed to protect against this. Protected classes govern private actors.
> Youtube is more and more siding towards removing content. I wonder, can US regulators do something about it?
A few weeks ago the discussion here was about how YouTube is not removing enough content (mostly in relation to Covid-19). The consensus was pretty much that they do it on purpose because it makes them money.
I don’t think YouTube (or any large public content platform) has a winning move in this discussion. Any move will be perceived as nefarious.
This isn't even remotely difficult, and I can't believe people are so obsessed with forcing their opinions on each-other that a live-and-let-live solution does not even occur to them.
- What happens if I opt out but you reply with an "offensive" word in the thread I'm in?
- If two people are discussing and one uses "offensive" words what do I see? Nothing or one person screaming at the void?
The other problem I see having more confirmation bias. We would have a split in the community between politically correct and incorrect.
You'll get deeper in the rabbit hole if you only talk to people that have the same views as you. Regardless of which side of the wall you're at.
If someone wants to hammer in screws, let them. YouTube is a tool. Obviously things will be a bit broken, that's what happens when you want a hammer for screws.
Can't we hate, and express that hate? Why can't I say "I hate Scientology, I hate Scientologists. Brainwashed bandits, they are! Hate them so much!". It seems a lot of things we want to express include hating. Isn't speech a lot about getting things off your chest? Can the frustration build up and explode and be worse that just expressing what you hate?
Yep, being able to voice one's feelings, even if they are negative or erroneous, is crucial to mental health.
It wasn't until Dr. King began exposing/revealing the violent hatred of southern white supremacists to the public consciousness through mass media that things began to change.
"Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."
Fundamentally, this is the issue with international corporations in the speech realm. People will believe and argue they shouldn't be subject to a given country's laws or have to apply that law globally, but in a real world sense, they must follow all of the laws of any country they want to operate in, no matter how ridiculous or unfair they might feel. Because if you aren't obeying a country's laws, they'll shut you out.
Yep. In some cases, Google has addressed this by Balkanizing their rulesets. Sometimes semi-literally; the territorial boundaries Google Maps shows are contingent upon the request's point of origin in some disputed regions [https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/12/302337754...]
Using such an approach on the global channels like YT comments isn't an option (unless they choose to Balkanize them, and let only Chinese commenters talk to Chinese people).
Google isn't the only firm that does this; Twitter will selectively filter some tweets based on whether it's legal to show that content in countries that have outlawed fascist agitation (which makes for an interesting side-effect; doing a request for a tweet stream against a US proxy server and a German proxy server and delta-ing the results can give you a clear signal on "Twitter thinks this person is a Nazi propagandist." I'm wondering when someone will put an API in front of that and make it a service... "DoesTwitterThinkThatGuyIsANazi.com" anyone? ;) ).
Sure, but that only works if countries' laws find that acceptable. If China says that you have to delete something from US users if you want to do business in China, they have every legal right to do so: As the sovereign ruler of the land, they decide who does business there, and they can set any requirement they see fit.
So Balkanized rulesets might work for some countries but not others. China is well known for exercising their market size to make companies jump for them, the US is as well.
Of course. But nobody is going to war over censored YouTube comments or delisted search results, and the Chinese government is happy to push that boundary.
> Using such an approach on the global channels like YT comments isn't an option (unless they choose to Balkanize them, and let only Chinese commenters talk to Chinese people).
That doesn't seem unreasonable. They could hide filtered comments from chinese users. This would allow the rest of the world to be unaffected by chinese regulation and "allowed" speech between chinese and foreigners.
But this is a case of Chinese speech in the Chinese language. If I used the English phrase “communist bandits”, YT presumably wouldn’t care. YT is applying Chinese regulations to Chinese comments written in Chinese.
People outside china might be writing in chinese. Should the CCP be able to regulate speech of all chinese-speaking people globally? Should the UK be able to regulate all english speech globally?
Right and exactly. My guess is that this phrase has actually been trained into the ML algorithm as a "no-go" by the community (not by direct action from Google) because it's primarily used in contexts where Chinese nationals or national-sympathetics flag it. If the phrase isn't generally used in contexts that don't get flagged, the algorithm would learn quickly that "nobody" wants to see it.
No, there isn't, which is why the ML system can be fooled (especially by phrases that only have meaning for a subset of users; most comments on YT aren't in Chinese, so any isolated Chinese phrase sticks out like a sore thumb in terms of Bayesian priors and first-impression effects on the ML algorithm will be strong. The system will interpret "Most users never see this phrase but it gets flagged often when users do see it" as "This is objectionable content and should be downed automatically").
Strongly disagree, there are some blurred lines around hate speech, but this isn’t one of them at all. This is a critique of a political party, that’s clear cut not hate speech.
Your comment proves the guy's point. Hate speech is subjective. There is no "blurred lines" around hate speech. All hate speech is protected speech. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled on that.
I am opposed to censorship, and I disagree with your claim. This qualifies as "hate speech". It's derogatory, its directed at a specific group of people, and it can foster animosity. That the group is a political party is not material.
Every hate speech law I’ve seen has a reasonably rigorous definition of what qualifies, including what kind of groups are protected. I’ve never seen a hate speech law that protects criticism of political parties, if you have please link to it.
So is "Nazi scum", or "Braindead Republican", or "corporate sellout", or "slum lord" or, "liberal elite", or "wellfare queen", hell even "Boomer" or "hippie" or "neoliberal".
That's an extremely low bar, so low as to be utterly useless.
As an aside, I'm of the opinion that selective censorship marginalizes groups that don't readily have representation at companies like Google. I'm talking about with terms like "redneck" or even "dumb American" that we (me included) mention that go with the flow of current mainstream discourse that some groups likely find offensive. Perhaps that is why there can be a divide and we end up with such insular communities like infowars or thedonald.
Third solution: take those people who consider some speech harmful off your platform
Twitter has a choice to be a platform for as many people as possible, or a platform for as much speech as possible. They have made that choice, but aren't too consistent in communicating it.
It seems the problem is often scale. When you can't automate something at the same mistake level a human could, scaling it either requires compromises or extreme resource expenditure via something like tens of thousands of human moderators.
Now is the word "ridiculous" towards Google or Youtube considered as hate speech?
I mean if you look around YouTube, there are lots of name calling, idiots, rude words that starts with F and S. None of the them were considered as hate speech, but all of a sudden every single negative word used to describe Communist "共" ( Which is in no specific to Chinese Communist, after all there are still a few Communist regime around the world ), and that includes "licking" ( "舔" ) communist, which the word licking in itself isn't in anyway "hateful", is now also considered as inappropriate or hate speech and be removed?
Using the Chinese Communist standards, anything that used to support the Hong Kong movement or demand will be considered as an act of attack on China and also as hate speech. Because you are in support of Hong Kong independence. For those who are not aware none of the five demands in Hong Kong specifically mentioned independence or separation, but that label has been used as any disobedience against CCP to be considered as one. So at what point will words used to support Hong Kong, or even US Government in sanction of China considered as hate speech? Especially when Youtube is already removing lots of content that is in support of the movement.
This is not a real thing. It is not based on a standard we can agree to easily or for a long time. The law (in the US) already handled this situation and made certain things illegal. Those laws are good enough.
YouTube only gets bad PR, if it doesn't police "hate speech", among the vocal minority of leftist progressive nitwits that have nothing better to do than complain about nothing. The normal, "everyday person", does not care about such things.
"hate speech" is easily abused because the premise is based on crappy ideas.
Youtube, and Google as a whole, are in for a world of pain in politics. Google pushes "quality and relevance" when they promote news articles, but this leads to them heavily emphasizing established outlets like BBC / NYT / etc. There is an increasing number of calls from official government representatives for promoting "alternative" news. What will Google do when they get a DOJ request to promote or dissuade a specific political viewpoint that isn't endorsed by their chosen "reputable" media outlets? Is the current anti-trust action against Google happening because of their perceived bias against Trump-friendly news?
"Facebook, Google accused of anti-conservative bias at U.S. Senate hearing"
The volume of low quality biased news is set to explode in the coming years, and Google/Youtube will be attacked by various governments (Turkey, Hungary, USA, Brazil, China, Russia) when they avoid promoting this flood of content, and when Google promotes news and speech that various countries dislike.
Youtube will be forced to remove viral videos like "Plandemic" constantly. Imagine when they start getting calls from the Senate for scrubbing some powerful government official's [conspiracy of the month] youtube video. Or when US House members escalate from personally suing Twitter to creating the House Committee on Online Censorship and use official government subpoenas to harass companies that host content that harm their political allies under the guise of "online fairness".
Enough mainstream and fringe politics has now migrated onto the internet that there are no longer neutral platforms, only platforms that have not yet taken a political and editorial stance on speech.
I don't think it would be that tough. They need to make sure their engineers are as objective and neutral as possible, and technically only allow Americans to say anything they want, but they would still have authority to remove foreigner content, especially since many countries will reach out to YT to do so because those countries censor their populace on a daily basis and have an industry around it.
>> I wonder, can US regulators do something about it?
No. 1st Amendment protects hate speech ("Effectively, the Supreme Court unanimously reaffirmed that there is no 'hate speech' exception to the First Amendment."), but this applies only to government, private companies or people can do whatever they want. Not great, but better than the obvious alternatives.
They should honestly consider outsourcing the legal work on their platforms to various law firms around the world. There's clearly no will within the company to do legal heavy lifting and trying to develop tech solutions for this is a band aid at best
I don't know the context behind "communist bandit", but the idea that a term can't be hate speech simply because it doesn't contain any words that are obviously bad when stripped of cultural or historical context is wrong. The recipient of these slurs likely does have that context and will take that into account when interpreting it.
Calling an African American in the South a "cotton picker" is profoundly hateful even though the term itself seems innocuous.
This is why I cannot separate hate speech from free speech. I don't like hate speech. I don't condone it. But I cannot conceive of a safe way to separate the two. The first step must be to define what hate speech is, but we can't even all agree on that.
All speech is free speech, even the parts I don't like - hate, lies, slander, and everything in between. That said, it's okay to regulate speech in some circumstances. You are legally obligated to tell the truth in court. It is rightfully illegal to lie about who you are in many scenarios.
YouTube is private property and Google has the legal right to censor whatever speech they want on it. I don't think we should regulate that. However, who and what they censor shows us who they consider to be most valuable on their platform.
Anyone who depends on YouTube should keep a close eye on Google's censorship patterns and constantly weigh their options. If you want to have any serious discussions about existing communist regimes, you'd be foolish to stay dependent on YouTube.
EDIT: If you can come up with a way to distinguish between hate speech and free speech that can't be easily abused, I'm all ears.
TLDR; the problem is that the tech companies have been flooded with people of a particular political kind after their political factions lost. They went to Facebook and google bringing strong convictions with them.
They try to deal with things like hate without having thought deeply about it. What’s the next human emotion you’ll try to eradicate? Lustfulness? Gluttony? Envy? A war on pride?
Once you’ve decided you’ll take on the self appointed task of eradicating hate you’ll also take out some things that are true. Who is worthy of this kind of power? Who can do it well?
Western civilization has struggled with how to deal with human emotional excesses over hundreds of years, spilling lots of blood and tears, and we’ve learned that we have to reconcile within ourselves that there is something ineradicable about them.
We can expose human excesses, but as long as there is no incitement we just have to live with the fact that at some level people will say things we may not like or find wrong.
It’s a claim from Douglas Murray. Recommend the video. The opinion on it being a bad idea to try to eradicate hate is in the question of who is worthy of such power?
When you try to eradicate what you think is hate in the way google is you risk also erasing truths. In my opinion only an unwise person would think themselves worthy of eradicating hate because they must think themselves worthy of this self appointed task.
Do you think google is worthy of determining what hate is and eradicating it?
Do not conflate this with hatespeech, it leads the discussion away from the issue. Communist bandit
refers to the government, not a protected class. It's not in any way similar to posting a racist/sexist/homophobic comment.
To be clear: hatespeech by definition relates to race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. Communist bandit is unrelated to any of those categories.
Compounding this is the veritable explosion of what words which are considered “harmful”, not to mention how vogue it is to be offended (“harmed”) on behalf of another group.
If google is hoping to appease these groups, they’re in for a futile challenge.
I can't fathom how private companies still think that they can make the CCP happy AND their western customers.
The CCP holds values that are completely untenable to western values. As time goes on, companies who don't know this will lose massive brand value in the western world.
The NBA has managed to tight rope this so far, but I doubt they can hold it together for very much longer. The CCP is still calling for the Houston Rockets GM to be fired 10 months after he tweeted vague support for the Hong Kong Democracy movement. They still refuse to show NBA games domestically because of it.
Actually it's super-easy; barely an inconvenience.
Most Western customers really do not care. Like, really-really. The default attitude is "Well, China has its rules and the Western nations have theirs. They can get along." Leaks between rulesets are relatively rare in the sea of regular day-to-day operations.
And honestly, I don't think the CCP's goals are as far different from the goals of, say, the US government's as some believe. The countries are trading buddies. They're both empires with a number of citizens that is too-big-a-number-to-visualize-in-one's-head. If they ever came into direct conflict, these differences would start to put Western-headquartered countries in difficult positions, but that's not the current state of things.
> Most Western customers really do not care. Like, really-really.
I think this is starting to change and it gives me a lot of hope. The fallout from the NBA and Blizzard incidents was pretty significant and the HK protests received far more attention than any others in recent years.
I think if the set of people who play Hearthstone/Overwatch and the set people who watch the NBA can both get riled up about the same issue it's spread well beyond the tech community. Eventually YouTube will have to start caring.
I think those are different to this though because those had an effect on the content being produced ie(e)sports competitions. YouTube censoring comments I doubt will gain much attention. I do think the mob outrage of places like twitter and reddit will hopefully start pushing companies morally because it let's people kick up much more of a fuss than normal
I think that attitude of customers is changing as we speak. Before, sure, it was easy to ignore the ramblings of how the CCP was upset at something and a western company just gives into them.
Now, anti-CCP sentiment is growing. I think western people are starting to realize how different we actually are. The CCP will be blamed for the pandemic (which is mostly correct), and you will see a massive decoupling here in the next couple of years.
This is the first real anti-globalization movement in about 80 years. Who knows where it will end.
Actually even longer than 15 years, the US has all-too-generously allowed the CCP to continue to exist ever since we benevolently allowed their army to fight ours to a standstill on the Korean peninsula in 1953.
I don't see that happening anytime soon, for a simple reason. Right now the three major world powers, CCP, Russia, USA, all are benefiting from the status quo. Everyone is prospering, when a real threat, such as ISIS arises you'll notice everyone worked together quickly to stop something that threatened the global order. The posturing over Iran, NK, and the like is just mostly for show.
What we need to be worried about is if any of these powers start to sliding towards a major decline, right now things are good people have a lot to lose if there is a war; however if the balance of power is too lopsided and one of the sides is at real risk of losing, that's when nations get desperate and start to do things that are dangerous.
World War 1 would've never happened if the the Russian Empire wasn't on the brink of collapse, but Russia felt it had to act because it would slip out of the ranks of influential nations. That is when the tinderbox exploded.
What I fear is that in the next World War, the US is currently looking like Germany, with their fancy tech, their super "intellectual" military doctrine, and their entrenched bureaucracy.
Russia is keeping their armies battle ready and tested in the Ukraine and Crimea, the CCP isn't as battle ready but as Vietnam and Korea proved they still can beat the US. Things are going to be interesting over the next 20 years...
> Now, anti-CCP sentiment is growing. I think western people are starting to realize how different we actually are.
I don’t think one logically follows at all. The more I study it, the more I think the US and China are vastly more similar than anyone likes to think about.
They're both empires of more people than most human beings can hold in their heads as anything but an abstract concept, and the needs of an empire that oversees the welfare and fate of so many people actually tend to converge: they need energy. They need things for people to do. They need relative internal peace to preserve their territorial and legal cohesion.
And both China and the US go to great lengths to achieve their respective paxes, in different directions; China clamps down hard on information flow, the US launches aggressive extraterritorial military campaigns to "fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here." China's surveillance state and incarceration polices may be more overt, but the Snowden leaks revealed the massive extent of passive surveillance of its own citizens the US engages in. China has its problems with "undesired" minorities; the US has a citizen-condoned police state of immense scope and violence... it imprisons more people per-capita than any other country, and has had several high-profile instances of police and "citizens watch" murdering innocent citizens who looked like they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
> Most Western customers really do not care. Like, really-really. The default attitude is "Well, China has its rules and the Western nations have theirs. They can get along."
I disagree, the sentiment in the OP is South Park-tier when it comes to reach.
Scale. China has over a billion people and a significant chunk of the globe as territory. Regardless of what they declare themselves on paper, that much size and that much population brings challenges to leadership that culturally-homogeneous nations with less territory do not face.
There are lots of human subcultures that don't enjoy having insults hurled at them, however. Should we really have a corporation drawing these lines in the sand? And should it be doing so with a basic word filter, rather than the "report" function? All context is lost in situations like this, and it is anathema to the design of the internet.
Is it an untrue story told by Trump that the Taiwanese are kept out of the World Health Organization—to the point that their data was ignored in the early days of the pandemic? Is it untrue that they are kept out to appease the CCP?
> “I can't fathom how private companies still think that they can make the CCP happy AND their western customers”
It’s easy. The amount of profits that can be made from China’s 800M and growing middle class is worth the hit of westerners forming a negative opinion. Westerners will forget over time just like everything else.
Unfortunately, for most of the Western would values like democracy, freedom of speech, human rights, etc. are more of a vague ideal than something to live by. They surely support it, in words, but if it costs them more than $100 to uphold these values, if there's any substantial risk in it, if you have to risk losing money for standing up to CCP - forget about it. As a society, we'd rather spend weeks debating whether wearing sombrero, growing cauliflowers and drinking craft beer is racist (yes, that's real debates that people have) or whether it's OK to have a particular picture as a logo of a company, than address people being put in concentration camps and disassembled for spare parts by CCP. Maybe if CCP actions cause a pandemic that kills hundreds of thousands we vaguely consider doing something... but nah, arresting single surfers for "not social distancing" sounds more fun.
So don't put too much hope in "western customers". They'd allow likes of Google to get away with a lot, unfortunately.
Similar happens with the name "Eric Ciaramella", which YouTube instantly deletes. This is a name of a CIA whistle blower. It would be interesting to know what other words are in the YouTube censor list.
No Wikipedia articles on him either, and reports of people getting permanently banned from Wikipedia for trying to create that article, or even mentioning him in another.
If you want to edit wikipedia, you need to know and play their game.
Politically charged topics on wikipedia need multiple reliable sources.
I can’t find any sources, that would pass as reputable on wikipedia, on this guy.
Maybe if there was a script from Senate from Rand Paul, who spoke his name publicly, that could be used. New York Post is the only kind-of-reputable source I can find, I don’t think that’s enough for now
edit: people link Conservapedia etc, but you can quickly see the stuff is full of misinformation. The like to point out, as Rand did, that Schiff daughter was in some relationship with the CIA guy. This is provably false.
Maybe the Wikipedia rule on sources is actually good.
People who authored pages about him get banned, a couple got life bans. This is almost certainly censorship, not some extensive source verification. There also seems to be a media blackout on the topic.
I actively didn't want to know the identity of this whistle-blower. I wish parent had put the name at the end of the comment so I could skip it entirely.
I will not take part in some chilling-effect and/or stochastic terrorism effort (see Ping Pong Pizza incident); I understand why Google, wikipedia and Facebook wouldn't want to be party to that either.
Maybe you shouldn’t venture outside of the curated Internet then. If you don’t want to read something, you’ll just have to stick to places like Facebook that delete it to protect your eyes from such dangerous words and ideas.
Do you avoid spoilers? I do, and that doesn't mean I'm "afraid of ideas". Actively avoiding certain information doesn't require a curated internet - it helps when other people respect that (spoiler tags/warnings and such).
I expect most people who hang out on HN would understand that there are no good outcomes when PII is in the wrong hands - that's not even a controversial idea.
Interesting point, but I’m not sure the analogy holds up under scrutiny. You don’t want spoilers because they contain information that you do ultimately want to know.
A better analogy might be NSFL videos (people dying, mutilation etc.) I would be upset to find such a video auto playing in my feed. But I also think it’s a whole different level of offense compared to words on a page. And I know not to visit certain pages on 4chan, for example, if I want to avoid seeing such content. So do I benefit from using moderated platforms like Reddit instead? I would say yes. But then I would also suggest you need to apply the same logic to words on a page; if you don’t want to see them, stick to platforms that censor them for you.
Regarding PII, I’m not sure how you can argue that the name of a public figure is PII. The person in question is a “whistleblower” in some sense, but it’s very debatable whether he actually has any legal protections regarding others publicizing his name. As far as I know, he is not protected by WITSEC or any official, legal whistleblower statute or act. All censorship or omission of his name has been voluntary on the part of media organizations and social media platforms.
It wasn't an analogy, it was a single point that disproved the prior (my motivation is fear of ideas) as well as the solution (curated internet).
I vehemently disagree with the assumption that the act of whistleblowing transforms one into public figure.
edit: A better analogy would be a recipe for crack cocaine. I have 0 use for that knowledge, and I definitely won't spread it because at best, my audience will have no use for it either, or at worst, they'll act on it and I'll likely find their actions disagreeable. If I find a link that says "How to make crack in 10 steps", I won't click it. I won't appreciate it if someone randomly injects crack-cooking instructions in a discussion about baking soda or sodium perchlorate or whatever might be one of the ingredients.
It doesn't matter that you didn't want to know -- all the people whose knowing of this matters... know, they all know. If you wanted the whistleblower to avoid reprisals by having his identity kept secret, it's too late.
I clearly stated my 2 concerns. The chilling-effect (by sending a message to would-be whistleblowers that they'd be tarred and feathered) as well as a "Lone-wolf" taking matters into their own hands, as it were.
I have no control what you (or others) propagate, as is your right - but I will not be part of it. I understand why Facebook, Wikipedia and others won't either (they too, have 1A rights).
Nonsense. Being a whistleblower requires running some risks. It's a necessity. You can't really blow the whistle on crimes etc. without ever going public -- at some point there might be a trial and you'd have to testify, else it's not a proper trial.
And again, horse, barn, door. It's gone. It ain't coming back.
Anyone who wanted to harm Eric Ciaramella could find that his name is Eric Ciaramella with a minute of research. The notion that scrubbing the name Eric Ciaramella from the internet will protect Eric Ciaramella is laughable. The only thing censoring information about Eric Ciaramella does is inhibit debate.
1. State actors also have a long and established history of abuses of power. We should not defer to what they have to say on issues related to their possible abuses.
2. Propensity for creating such a page is a strong indication of extremely poor judgement.
>You don't get special agent treatment for being in WP.
Yes. You do. WISTEC covers their bases, but they can't force large organizations to play ball at a whim. Those organizations need to be willing to help. And it's heart warming to see that they are.
What's more troubling is there's a list going around being used for censorship that citizens can't FOIA or see.
Citizenship has no bearing on the internal policies of private corporations. If you don't like the large corporate offerings, do without and use other services. Being a consumer of their services doesn't grant legal standing because you haven't suffered any definable injury.
World Socialist Web Site as mainstream press needs very-very big quotes.
And this Eric C character turned out to be a nobody (maybe a CIA analyst). So why censor this name? Could be a NSL? (But can that somehow compel the recipient to censor a name anywhere?)
This would be an incredible public service. While I believe Google is within its right to censor information on their platforms, the opacity with-which they do it is imo unacceptable, given the scale of their influence on the public dialogue. Similarly, I think any media conglomerate should be required to publish any formal lists of in-house gag-orders.
Ironically, it was google that first innovated along these lines with their “chilling effects” project. Any time a URL was removed via a copyright complaint, they would log it. If a search result was censored, you could see the copyright complaint. I’m not sure if they still do this.
Are we playing "what censorship is OK censorship" now? Who determines that "pretty clear difference?" Isn't the point of being against censorship is that nothing is above the interests of public scrutiny? Partial censorship seems fundamentally contradictory in terms of the underlying moral justification.
>Are we playing "what censorship is OK censorship" now?
Yes, obviously. Nobody is forced to have an absolutist position on censorship just like it's mostly silly to have an absolutist position on anything else.
>Who determines that "pretty clear difference?"
In this case Google, which is a private business. In other cases the government, or the courts. Depends on the issue at hand.
There's nothing contradictory about partial censorship in the same way there's nothing contradictory about having a speed limit.
And it even varies by culture. US media reporting on crimes in Germany tend to get confused (to the point that at least once they suspected some public cover up attempt) that they won't get the names of arrested suspects - that's part of our approach to privacy here, while apparently having the names out is considered a mechanism against misconduct by the police in the US (at least that's how it was explained to me when I asked why the names are always public).
I can follow both arguments but there's only room for implementing one in any given society. Societies overlapping like they do now (thanks to globalization and, to no small part, the internet) doesn't make that easier.
I mean going by a lot of American's perception, only the US way is the correct way, so it must mean that Germany is doing some form of cover up! To make things even better, Germany should ditch its civil law for common law! /s
Deleting spam is universally agreed upon as OK censorship. I think it's viewed as OK because everyone can see that many conversation forums can't even work if they're flooded with spam.
And to head off the "no, deleting spam is clearly distinct from censorship," imagine you write a book, so we're dealing purely with ideas.
Obviously, for anyone to read it, you have to promote it. If you post it in too many places or are too "hypey", you'll quickly get banned as spamming. You got censored, there's no way around it.
So we've always been in the "what censorship is OK" realm.
If you interpret freedom of speech as freedom of opinion, the sentence fragment "communist bandit" is a statement of opinion that should unequivocally be protected, whereas that isn't quite as clear cut for the name as such of a specific person. (Note that I think that the prohibition on the name is at this point completely moot anyway)
It certainly does not seem to be in the interest of the current US government.
To answer your question:
Protecting a whistleblower's identity is in the interest of US society as a whole. It protects the individual somewhat from persecution which in turn encourages people to blow the whistle on illegal activities, thus benefiting society.
If the last four years have proven anything, it's that the US gvt. is not a monolith. The three branches of the government are further subdivided into bureaus, agencies, committees, and regional subdivisions, all with their own distinct interests and concerns. The president may be the chief subject of public scrutiny at present, but that doesn't mean other interests within the state should be immune to scrutiny.
I can't claim to know anything about ciarmella's background, save what hyper-partisan, conservative outlets have spewed. But absent more even-handed coverage, or rebuttals from liberal and left-leaning outlets, the details of his personal history, and affiliations do seem to merit some level of public scrutiny. Anyone interested can look him up on Breitbart, conservapedia /wikispooks, or through any other connservativr outlet (oddly enough, not fox last time I checked). But I'd rather not link to those rags if I'm not confident of the veracity of the information within.
Still, it's redacted due to some interesting parties pressing charges. Protecting a whistleblower's identity is the right thing for sure, but I don't believe Google add his name on the list for the righteous reason.
That's a strange equivalence, and a malevolent comment.
Outing whistle-blowers (or supposed whistle-blowers) is bad for democracy. The government is supposed to be transparent to the people. This does not mean that the people should be transparent to the government, or that dissidents should be outed.
The "whistle-blower" was a federal employee making allegations of hearsay and intent identifying other federal employees (not just the President). What is the line that decides that one is immune to scrutiny while others receive the full brunt? Is it partisan lines, or perhaps seniority cut-offs? Carter Page received no such protection from being targeted and publicly unmasked, despite being a long-time investigation informant.
Do you find it implausible that an agent of the CIA could pose as a whistleblower to advance antidemocratic intelligence efforts against US citizens?
Look, I'm not saying that's what happened, I don't know anything about it, but the idea that we should be shutting down inquiry into CIA agents interfering in other parts of our government, given the known history of the CIA, is absolutely crazy to me. And it's not like they've changed! We're talking about an organization that just recently illegally spied on the Congressional illegal CIA torture investigation and then lied about it to Congress (also a crime) - and got away with it!
Even in other branches of the government, we know that "whistleblowers" are not always acting in good faith - the NY Times just did a story about a "whistleblower" lying to the press about what was happening and using that as an excuse to leak people's personal information to the press, all in order to advance his own political agenda. If that can happen at the IRS, surely it can happen at the CIA? And surely we should at least be able to look into whether that's a possibility>
Gotta love this site. Snowden is revered around here yet a whistleblower goes through the proper channels to report wrongdoing by the US government and they still get outed, named, and trampled. Do you want government oversight or not? Do you want whistleblowers or not?
>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.
It's more complex than that. Imagine that you are a US company operating in Germany that provides German citizens with an incredible amount of information that wouldn't otherwise be available. You have thousands of people working in Germany. Occasionally, the Nazis ask you to censor things, If you don't, your entire team is at risk and will all loose their employment and citizens of Germany will loose access to an incredible amount of information and services. It's not cut and dry.
A more fitting parabole would be, a US company banned from operating in Germany that could provide German citizens with an incredible amount of information if only the German government didn't block any access to its service.
Because in case you hadn't noticed, Google is entirely blocked in communist China.
How do you feel about the German proscription on Nazi symbolism/speech? It's not absolute; for example, Mein Kampf is still published in Germany, but in academic critical editions which provide extensive historical information to place it in context.
The restrictions on Nazi symbolism are clearly infringing on freedom of speech, and should be recognized as such.
On the other hand, they are somewhat limited in scope (though not enough to my taste, see video games) and more importantly, understandable in their very specific context. They were arguably needed in the aftermath of WW2 when denazification didn't go as smoothly and naturally as could have been hoped, if only to remove the social proof that Nazism might not have been entirely defeated.
There s no “we” in the IT community, theres the “well funded groupthink” and “the sea of the unknowns”. When did the IT band together to achieve something?
Plenty of times, see the entire open source movement or the cypherpunks, or the browser wars in which Firefox was a major competitor, there must be tons of examples.
I'm not quite sure the "we" encompasses a majority in all of these examples... especially the "browser wars" where firefox users are a definite minority (compared to IE users). But maybe you mean "we" as in "we the resistance" or something. After all the engineers Microsoft hired to build up IE were also part of the IT world.
I simply said they were not the same. You and another commenter have incorrectly inferred that I was talking about their victims. Says a lot more about you than it does about me.
Counterpoint: this is (weirdly effective) reverse psychology. We know China runs slave camps near the NK border and slavery is typically demonized here in America. However, no one talks about it because China deplatforms relatively benign topics instead. Do we really think they wouldn't prefer a Winnie the Pooh image of their leader over slave camps? Even Tiananmen Square is preferable to forced human organ harvesting.
> We know China runs slave camps near the NK border
We don't, actually.
> slavery is typically demonized here in America
No it's not, it's just hidden so liberals (including republicans) don't have to think about it. It's the prison industrial complex.
> Do we really think they wouldn't prefer a Winnie the Pooh image of their leader over slave camps? Even Tiananmen Square is preferable to forced human organ harvesting.
Anything you read in the western media about China or North Korea should be second-guessed and double-checked against eastern media, usually chinese language, for facts. The so-called "free press" is really a coordinated operation run by a few media companies in the interests of the capitalist class. People supposedly iced by Kim Jong Un have been magically resurrected many times. Western media tries to put all the blame of the coronavirus deaths in the US on China "not coming forward" when they had months and months to prepare. The US has entire media structures like "Radio Free Asia" to spread anti-China propaganda.
so you think it's smart to look for "facts" in Chinese media with all their censorship? What a ridiculous idea, there are no facts there, only things their government wants people to see.
Can one take out an ad with "共匪" in the text? Adwords against it? Is this censored on Orkut? Would Google consider censoring Gmail? Or Google Voice? Would they consider bleeping Google Meets?
Google will need to be very public about who signed off on this and under what framework.
Very interesting. I wonder what would happen if you put in some special noise from adversarial AI methods today. Would be a real arms race of detection vs evasion.
Just tried it on a video about WHO and Bruce Alyward. It's still up after 6 minutes. Either we're inundating their censor bot, it's been shadowbanned, or Google has stopped under the flak. I'll keep checking later.
Try looking at your comment in an Incognito window and sort by new. You'll still see your own comment if you're logged in, but you won't see it otherwise. I just tried this.
Google Translate to/from Chinese is often terrible, especially with short phrases. Try 剿匪 which means busting gangs/bandits (剿 = bust, so this phrase is an action against bandits). However, Google translates it to “bandit”.
You must have excellent karma. Mine was deleted after ten seconds. I simply wrote: "Just testing if comments containing 共匪 will be deleted" to a Rick and Morty video.
As a software engineer I understand these sort of bugs.
A product manager in China asks: can we find a way to prevent people commenting on these videos with comments that contain the word 共匪. Engineer goes away and comes up with a plan to train an AI model to detect these comments. He present's this solution to his manager who informs him that the solution needs to be in place next week, there is no time to gather the required training data and annotate it. There is also no budget for this project.
So the engineer goes off to find a new plan and finds that Google already has a basic spam comment detector which uses simple heuristics to delete comments. He adds a new rule to the detector. Mark as spam if it contains the "共匪" sub-string.
His boss is now happy, it gets sent to a test team in China who confirm that commenting with the word 共匪 on one of the videos results in the comment being deleted. Test passed job done, ticket closed. At no point does this get escalated or reviewed by anyone properly.
If you’re right, Google will stop removing these comments now that it has gotten publicity (although personally I heard about it ~a week ago) and apologise.
I won’t be holding my breath.
Edit: I’ve just noticed the Google support claim here was posted in late 2019. It’s somewhat hard to believe that this has just flown under Google’s radar.
One fascinating thing about being Very Online in the past 10-20 years is watching the messages of astroturfing campaigns slowly leak into public sentiment. I'm sure the same thing happens with other forms of media, primarily cable television. But as an example, with the whole 50 Cent Army, a few people have heard convincing arguments from them and turned into unwitting (or otherwise) propagators of the same rhetoric.
> But as an example, with the whole 50 Cent Army, a few people have heard convincing arguments from them and turned into unwitting (or otherwise) propagators of the same rhetoric.
The 50 Cent Army posts pro-Chinese propaganda on Chinese websites. Do we have any evidence that the 50 Cent Army posts on English websites? I can't imagine it being that difficult to produce given that we traced Russian propaganda. Forgive my snark, but it sounds like you are unwitting propagating rhetoric that designed to dismiss anything that defends China.
If you're interested in what the 50 cent army actually does, Harvard published a paper about it. It turns out that China rarely actually engages in argument, but rather tries to distract people, so they think about other things.
To be fair, Google is in a no-win situation. Post-2016 election, there has been enormous pressure put on Google (and Facebook and Twitter) to ramp up their censorship from the anti-Trump center/center-left/left. The mainstream media is on it too and relishes taking shots at social media every chance they get (the YouTube 'adpocalypse' was spurned by a hit piece by Washington Post against some minor doofus thing that PewdiePie did, and explicitly targetted advertisers of YouTube).
Even tech commentators are in on it. Kara Swisher, for example, has been railing at social media companies every chance she gets to get them to ramp up censorship against things she deems offensive.
So... basically everyone who isn't a Trump supporter, then? Is that really how you see the world? The president of the united states vs. literally everyone else? And you've chosen the political side instead of the social consensus?
>So... basically everyone who isn't a Trump supporter, then?
No. There are plenty of non-Trump supporters[1] who don't care for YouTube censorship. However, the calls for censorship and pressure on social media companies came as a result of the panic-induced from Trump's election and Russian election interference, which does correlate with anti-Trump voices, more specifically Democratic party establishment and their supporters.
Those aren't the only voices to call for censorship. There is also a parallel cultural war that pressures social media companies to censor hate-speech (as defined by supporters). This tends to generate a lot of noise from both sides, but I think it's probably minor in the grand scheme of things. That Democrats in Congress are cracking down on social media is by far a much bigger deal - because they can actually punish these companies through laws and regulation - and they have been threatening to do so.
[1] I supported Hillary in 2016 because, for all her faults and unlikability, she would have been a reasonable and competent leader. So no, I'm not a huge fan of Trump, but I also don't pearl-clutch every time he says something dumb on Twitter or in a press conference. In a similar vein, though I think he should be a one-term president, I don't think it's an existential threat if he gets elected again.
> Democrats in Congress are cracking down on social media is by far a much bigger deal
What legislation are you talking about? I mean... they only have one house of congress. I'm sure there's some rhetoric somewhere, but it's just rhetoric.
I mean, the POTUS himself routinely calls for censorship of the news media, but it's likewise "just rhetoric" because he can't unilaterally pass laws (though he can come closer than the house can). Does that not trigger your same logic? If not, why not?
>What legislation are you talking about? I mean... they only have one house of congress.
They can investigate and haul social media CEOs in front of the House - which they have done routinely, blaming them for things like Russian interference and Hillary losing the election. And any bull the Democrats throw out there against tech companies is magnified by mainstream outlets - who really do act like the arm of the establishment Democratic party when echoing Democratic talking points.
And elections are cyclical, today Democrats have the House, in 2021 they could have all three branches.
Maybe none of that would matter if it wasn't the case that these tech companies are ACTUALLY listening to these calls for censorship, even if Democrats have no power today.
>he POTUS himself routinely calls for censorship of the news media
POTUS is a doofus that mouths of all the time on twitter and press conferences and nobody (not social media companies, not the public) takes him seriously, with the exception of mainstream media outlets. It's been 3 years, and still, every tweet is the end of the world. He does have a lot of power to do a lot of things but he doesn't all those things, but the pearl-clutching that happens by the mainstream outlets anytime Trump tweets is now a joke on the media. And the media is stronger than ever under Trump, even after years of fawning over the Obama administration.
Good luck with that. Their services are essential to my life and I don't think they're doing this dramatic draconian version of censorship everyone thinks. Never seen this kind of hate from the HN crowd towards amazon or apple's manufacturers and warehouse workers working in deplorable conditions, which is far and away the worst thing a company could be doing. Not whatever this is.
they are all despicable to me. I boycott amazon and apple for those reasons. Google is so entrenched in everyone's life that is much harder to let go. And that's why I keep trying to get rid of it... nothing left holds me except the huge amount of google docs that I share with many others
YouTube filtering slurs and hateful memes is not surprising.
They would target anything that gets spammed and reduces the quality of discourse (such as it is on YouTube).
I see no evidence that China is getting any special treatment here. It was the subject of hateful spam, so now it gets a filter. Same would apply to any other country or topic.
From my perspective, the absolutist "freedom of speech"/anti-censorship belief is naive. There would be no havens for intelligent communication online without censorship.
When an intelligent, well-reasoned critique is deliberately suppressed, protest is warranted.
Until then, it's shrill and spammy and divisive and ascribes nefarious intent to people simply trying to keep the room clean and is, ironically, best moderated away to preserve the quality of discourse elsewhere.
There are two parties that decide what constitutes an intelligent, well-reasoned critique.
The first party is the owner(s) of a platform. For any owner, there is incentive to preserve power, but there is also incentive to not act as an oppressive villain.
The owner sometimes has ideals beyond power, such as cultivating free communication to build ideas for a better world.
But even the most callous, iron-fisted dictator can sniff the danger in being overly oppressive. They also sometimes recognize that unstifled communication serves as a competitive advantage.
The second party that decides what constitutes an intelligent, well-reasoned critique are the viewers of and contributors to a platform.
We have pitchforks, and pitchforks have sharp ends, but they can be dulled by overuse. Furthermore, the citizen's militia grows weary when called upon too often.
And thus, when the rallying cry is sounded for the non-event of a crude slur being censored, we're eroding our own power. We're jumping the gun, which should fire only when we think an intelligent, well-reasoned critique has been suppressed.
Making a slippery slope argument is betraying a lack of understanding about the above complex dynamic.
I disagree, since I think all speech* is equally protected speech, including a crude slur. The reason for that is because it is far too easy for the powers that be to use claims of "only cleaning out the trash" to censor legitimate thoughts and expressions. Throughout history humans have proven incapable of making the right call on where to draw that line, so the only option is to draw it at all.
To refute your points: the owner of the platform has all the power in this relationship, since there are essentially zero repercussions for them over-censoring discussions. Most of the users of a platform won't know, won't care, or will accept the "just censoring the evil speech" argument. The audience itself is also not infallible, since there is a such thing as the tyranny of the majority.
*: of course, there is the point where speech itself requires harming another to create, such as child pornography or snuff films. But that is not what is at issue here or anywhere in modern discourse.
* Allow all speech, including unintelligent and hateful speech.
This is evidently false, given:
1) Intelligent, well-reasoned dissent against a platform is permitted on virtually all large platforms on the internet, and this has been the case for decades.
2) Virtually all large platforms censor unintelligent, hateful speech.
Your nightmare scenario of intelligent speech disappearing due to censorship of small-minded vulgarity simply hasn't happened.
Quite the opposite, intelligent speech does disappear when small-minded vulgarity isn't censored. See voat or 4chan or the thousands of other poorly censored, poorly moderated places on the internet. Productive, intelligent communication does not happen in public forums without censorship.
Concerning what-ifs and slippery slopes, call me when someone with a well-reasoned argument is being suppressed by a large platform. All I've ever seen is hate and misinformation being pushed down the drain, and good riddance.
Censoring kids spamming "communist bandit" isn't a problem, not in this universe.
Censoring a professor critiquing communism as a viable form of government would be a problem, but that's neither here nor there.
Meanwhile, legitimate problems in the free speech domain are draconian copyright laws, suppressing science and creativity, and espionage laws, suppressing whistleblowers such as Snowden.
If we've decided that free speech shall be our crusade, and we're in the US, our limited time and resources should be focused on these real, ongoing, and broad-reaching problems.
Moderation can create a productive discussion, but no automated word filter is going to fix that community if people are motivated to be hateful, troll or spam.
Besides, the subject in question is not "hateful spam" or a "hateful" meme. It's charged, opinionated political speech but you'd really have to be stretching the meaning of "hateful" to apply it here.
Of course, expanding that definition is the political strategy of some interest groups right now. But this is a great illustration of how fuzzy and easily abused that advocacy really is.
It's an insult to every anti-racist, anti-bigotry campaign in history to say that any political party should get to hide behind this kind of crybaby b.s. -- much less a party that operates concentration camps. Or are they, too, "people simply trying to keep the room clean" in your book?
First, you need to re-read what I wrote. I didn't call it a slur. I called it a hateful meme.
It's precisely that, because it is driven by hate -- you will understand this if you talk to people who deeply hate communism, such as in my experience Czech people who suffered under it -- and it's a meme, something repeated for social reasons, not to cultivate understanding.
If you can understand what's driving the kids to spam "communist bandits", you will see its ugliness. If you can't, then it's like a curse word in a foreign language: of course you don't mind. It remains, however, a foul little turd to all the people who do understand the context and the language, and who have adequate taste and intellect to prefer higher minded discourse.
To directly address your mischaracterization, this is not crybaby-ism; it's taste and the desire for substance. Nobody is crying about kids posting the hateful meme "communist bandits." I have no affinity for communism myself. I would take equal disgust in kids spamming "capitalist pigs". It's just dumb and ugly.
Give me a thesis with supporting evidence and citations. Meanwhile, delete (indeed, censor!) all the childish and simpleminded spam, so I don't have to be immersed in stupidity and hate when endeavoring to broaden my understanding.
You seem to not mind wading through filth, but most highly verbal adults share my preferences. We leave forums when the filth piles up, and the "discourse" that remains after we're gone reflects this reality.
And now we get to you. Some of us try to be bigger than calling each other crybabies, and calling their positions bullshit. What you wrote violates Hacker News rules. I'm not going to report you, because despite your unflattering model of me, I can pluck out a fly that lands in my whiskey glass without crying about it. This thread should be dead enough that you should be safe, but I'll regret my decision if you go on to attack other people.
I instead hope whatever is broken inside you gets healed, so that you can more effectively tackle what I agree is a problem: a government that forces citizens to literally watch their backs after they voice their mind is influencing countries and companies abroad. Right now, with your hostility, you're just poisoning the well.
"And thus, when the rallying cry is sounded for the non-event of a crude slur being censored..."
Are you calling it a slur or not?
Also, good catch -- above I mistyped "crybaby" when I meant "crybully". I can't stand watching an totalitarian party like the CCP hide its crimes behind this language of anti-bigotry, all this "slurs and hateful memes" business to silence criticism. The oppressor gets to play a victim role, and it all feels topsy-turvy.
Of course, if this ploy backfires and forces the CCP's critics to hone their arguments to the level of discourse you and I both love on HN (and which you seem to think is within reach for YouTube), that's great, everyone wins.
And you're right, "b.s." was a too harsh and probably violates the guidelines. Retracted.
"what I agree is a problem: a government that forces citizens to literally watch their backs after they voice their mind is influencing countries and companies abroad"
It's hard for me not to be hateful and angry about it, as you've recognized. It's hard to know what people can do when no employee at any multinational company, in any jurisdiction, is free to speak out publicly without fear of retaliation. I sympathize with people going around posting this phrase, even if it's low effort and stinks a little of regional prejudice and of less democratic times in Taiwan's history.
I'm curious, what do you think are the best tactics counteract the CCP clout? What could those YouTube posters be doing instead?
It's not a slur. Some slurs are also filtered, and I'm suggesting we ignore this petty and generally positive censorship.
A more effective approach for anti-CCP activists would be to spam a short, compelling sentence regarding one of CCP's questionable activities, followed by, "Read more here: <multilingual article with citations>".
If that lucid and informative spam got taken down, I'd also be up in arms. I myself invested time in online activism regarding Hong Kong. "Communist bandits", however, is worse than useless. Censor/filter away the low effort and unproductive stupidity, not the substantiative information.
its really sad to see Google kowtow to China. i guess money trump everything.
a free, open and democratic China is Taiwan. you can see it by Taiwan's handling of covid 19. they are open about their cases, allowed press to ask unlimited questions and show everything to Taiwanese and not conceal any info.
its sad that Western companies love money more than the Western values that they always talk about. "Don't be evil"
Wait, but China is also doing the same. Have you watched any of the press conferences in China? They were frank and forthcoming with information, there were many reddit threads applauding it until everything got politicized around March.
Western companies don’t talk about values, Western governments do. The past few decades have seen an aggressive destruction in the power of Western governments to subdue them to Corporate power. The US is a prime example where the Republican party’s only policy platform (not even exaggerating) is “tax cuts are the solution to every problem”.
The US government specifically has been declawed and dismembered by the current administration to the point of uselessness. The only time it’s willing to assert power is to enable the corrupt dealings of political appointees and lobbyists.
>Western companies don’t talk about values, Western governments do.
This is completely wrong.
Every other ad on TV in the US is preaching about how much Walmart/Amazon/Pepsi/etc. care about the environment/LGBT rights/safe working conditions/etc.
Western companies talk about their supposed values _all the time_, they're just mostly full of shit when they do.
I’m talking specifically about values in an international context. Google won’t try to enforce free speech values it loves when operating in China. They will abide with warantless searches there if need be.
The US government though has more power to resist such demands acting as a sovereign equal to the Chinese State.
Nice rebuttal, giving a single example to disprove a hypothesis about a complex system with a spectrum of participants. Try to be better at debating hypotheses.
You naively think that western governments are immune from being influenced by China.
You're wrong. Governmental institutions like the WHO have been influenced by China. The German government has been influenced: they have been reluctant to criticize China.
There is no magical governmental institution that is immune from this. If the president was a Democrat we'd be in this same situation.
I never said Western Governments are immune to influence from China. They are not. They do have the power to resist that influence with competent leadership, which in the past two decades has only been provided by Democratic administrations.
From the actual Google Support question, this was posted on 11/10/19. Why are we only now just noticing? Was it previously confined to China and has now just rolled out globally?
Viral noticing is fed by widespread predispositions, which change over time like fashion.
There is a critical mass of people paying attention to censorship in general, and recently a critical mass of people attentive to the evils of the CCP.
You're misrepresenting that link. It's not a list of things that Google censors, but a list of things that Google wanted people to know are blocked by the Great Firewall (i.e. Google calling attention to censorship, not censoring themselves).
We never had free speech online. Only the illusion of it.
I've noticed, especially recently, that most websites that allow commenting will shadow ban comments they disagree with, even if it's not trolling or abusive.
The scary part is that most people don't even see this and just assume that all of the comments they see are the only ones on the site. This can create the false sense that a larger number of people have a particular viewpoint.
This sort of censorship and controlling behavior absolutely effects the outcome of our elections and is much worse than anything Russia can even dream of.
The Chinese government knows this well and in addition to online troll campaigns, they fund our media companies directly and will pull funding if these companies don't toe the line.
With Covid ripping through the profits of many of these media companies, now is the time they will buy them up in mass.
We all should be prepared for an online future of CCP controlled media and influence.
In the end, we just have to stop using this stuff. We’re all addicted, complain that google shouldn’t have all this power, yet we can take that power away by choosing not to use these platforms. I’m guilty of this myself.
Section 230 of the CDA either needs to be re-interpreted by the judiciary or Congress needs to get its act in order and pass a new law that is more reflective of society in 2020 and beyond. It's not 1996 anymore...
This is the first time I am seriously considering leaving Gmail. Seems like a royal pain in the ass to switch though, since you don't "own" your email handle like you would a domain.
It's not so bad if you have a domain tied to the gmail account. I use myname@mydomain.com but point my MX records to use gmail for it. So switching for me basically means re-pointing to another mail service.
The only reason I use them is their spam filters are excellent. Otherwise I wouldn't.
Switching would be laborious if you're using @gmail, probably a case of looking at each unique domain name you've received an email from, logging in and switching addresses. Could be relatively methodical about it by taking a backup and then working down your inbox and deleting the emails from those recipients until you have nothing left. Could be a day job.
There is an option in gmail to forward your emails to another address if you wanted to do it over time.
With a bit of planning you can have a near seamless switch. The biggest pain point would be places where you have to reregister/change your email address, and you can avoid even that if you're fine with Google still getting to read all email that comes to that address.
It is a huge pain in the ass to switch, but the sooner you start transitioning to an email solution you control the sooner you'll be out of the tenuous position of depending on a free service that can be revoked at any time.
YouTube is a platform designed around showing video ads to targeted audiences. In order to show those ads they need to allow people to upload user generated content. This content needs to be 'brand safe', i.e. it cannot be content that advertisers don't want to be associated with.
'Content' is more than just the video itself, comments are part of this.
If an Easily Offended Entity, in this instance 'China', sees an ad from AdvertiserX appearing on content they deem offensive they can kick up a stink about this, this is especially true in China where nationalism is extremely strong. Western brands have a long history of apologising to China over minor things, they really cannot risk fervent nationalism from damaging their balance sheet either through boycotts or having authorities turning a blind eye to counterfeiting.
So YouTube will remove this content, not because they're under the thumb of China, but because advertisers call the shots.
The netizens of China have come up with very clever code talk to get around censors. For instance, Hu Jintao's surname can be broken up into the Chinese radicals for "Old Moon." So instead of Hu, they refer to him as Old Moon, etc. I wonder if non-Chinese Google users will be doing the same thing soon.
Because the Chinese market is huge. Because freedom of speech in the Western world is an individual liberty which platforms such as YouTube do not need to guarantee, whereas censorship in China is an absolute requirement they must abide by. The payoffs are asymmetric. If we had legislation in the EU or in the US that demanded that YouTube not tamper with users’ comments, then they’d have to choose between one side and the other. As it is, they’re not legislated as a utility, so they have editorial oversight.
As another user posted, there’s a long list of terms dating back to 2012, so this isn’t recent. Even the post referred to dates from the end of 2019, so it isn’t exactly novel.
Google might well accept being excluded from China, but I’m assuming that the prospect of being allowed to re-enter that market is periodically dangled in front of them by the ruling party in China, and that consequentially Google has an ongoing motive to somewhat abide by the PRC’s rules.
Also, Google may be excluded from China, but Google also has a lot to lose if relations with China deteriorate, for example, if China somehow interferes with the primacy of Android there and therefore causes a massive dent in platform numbers.
Point is, the longer Google can postpone any such occupancies, the longer they can delay a drop in their stock market price (because surely such an event would have a negative effect on their stock, both for rational reasons [such as less telemetry data] and irrational [day traders] reasons).
And yes, of course this is pure conjecture. I’m not Larry Page in disguise spilling the beans of Alphabet’s Boardroom musings.
The most charitable explanation would be, that this phrase is considered derogatory and offensive towards some, akin to say the N-word, and they have banned it on those grounds. Seems unlikely though.
If you think the idea of trusting giant social media corporations with the levers to control our speech is outrageous, so does everyone working on LBRY.
We are working hard to design systems that have the same user experience as the traditional web, but fundamentally redesigned so that this kind of behavior is outright impossible. LBRY allows for local control of the publishing experience, and layers identity, discovery, and payments on top of a distributed data network.
I write some comments on Youtube that explains my understanding of the situation happening in China, in a objective as much as possible. And it turns out it could be viewed as Pro-china. Then these comments gets deleted by Youtube. Whether its reported or deleted by the system I don't know.
Look at all the flagged comments in this thread and all over the site. HN is the most influential technology forum on the internet, the government should really get involved in preventing the kind of mass censorship that goes on this forum. I am being entirely sarcastic.
>In 1996, Microsoft halted sales of its Windows 95 operating system in mainland China due to discoveries that it contained the term in Chinese-language input method software bundled with the operating system following police raids on computer stores.
There's something I've been thinking about lately and its the fact that I learned about the Black feelings of the Hasidic (Jewish) community moving to Bergen-Lafayette neighborhood of Jersey City only after the mass shooting that occurred their earlier this year. I saw a news report from the neighborhood and a resident mentioned how they have seen a big shift in their neighborhood and longtime residents were getting harassed to sell their homes for the incoming Hasidic residents as they were looking to leave Brooklyn for cheaper real estate.
I bring this up in relation to free speech because it seems to me like there was no outlet for the residents to speak up on what was happening. It looks like there was a chilling effect and some discussions may just not have been had. I think its important to provide that forum to air grievances so that a chilling effect does not occur and people feel like they are a frog slowly being boiled alive.
I don't think Democracy is the model for all nations today, but I do think that as countries develop and have a certain educated populace that they will trend in that direction. Its better to be enfranchised, then completely trust the decisions made on your behalf elected by a group of technocrats but it requires a populace voting in good faith and of a certain education attainment overall.
We must keep an open dialog and forum for people to speak freely. I like to think of confronting prejudice as a first responder running towards danger. I don't cower from having those conversations, I'd much prefer to deconstruct them. I have to say though that the internet makes that hard since it is easy to find echo chambers.
I really want to see communities like r/politics on Reddit better try to foster rich, insightful discourse because I really don't see it that way now and if someone feels differently, I would love to hear from you.
I personally think Reddit should create a new "Featured Comments" feature like they have in comments on NYT and appoint mods of different biases to choose Featured Comments on highly upvoted content. In the US House of Representatives they give members of the house equal time to address the floor and should we try to virtually recreate that type of forum as well?
To be honest, I think that many, if not most, of israeli and diaspors Jews (and quite a lot of religious, too) would be banned from YouTube for antisemitism if they voiced their opinions on Hasidim there.
To my knowledge YouTube does not ban content that is antisemitic. There is some evidence that antisemitism when couple to anything Nazi will be banned (video wise), but there is no blanket prohibition against antisemitism.
I don’t understand the shock here, Google doesn’t even allow for Taiwan to be considered a country on its search page. When you search for Taiwan it shows the map picture and says ‘Taiwan’, but Germany for instance shows the map picture and says ‘Germany Country in Europe’. This is the very top of the page on the mobile layout. Doing things to avoid disgruntling the CCP is standard operating procedure for Google at this point.
I'm not sure how reliable the following site is, but it looks like this has been banned at least since 2012, along with a long list of words that I find shockingly restrictive.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess the phrase was added to their hate speech filter. I would guess that if I wrote racist or anti-semitic phrases those would be automatically deleted as well. Sometimes it gets a bit silly. I remember that in the game Words With Friends you’re not allowed to play “jew”. Which is one of the easiest ways to use a ‘j’.
All these platforms have always been censorship platforms. It is the nature of the beast. They can explicitly or implicitly censor. They can censor by making sure the algorithm downvotes or content is not discoverable. Many governments, ranging from the US government to other countries have had these platforms like YouTube enforce censorship of content:
You won't ever see a youtube competitor. Youtube is running with google's proprietary search engine and has a decade and a half of content a competitor simply wont have. It will always be better than its competitors and some nonsense ban on a word won't stop anyone except 10 or 11 people on hackernews.
Google is becoming another wechat, one or two words a time. The stages are:
- ban one or more words
- lock your account
- control the visibility of your speech
- report your actions to Chinese government
- ...
I am kind of surprised (and worried) that anyone is surprised by this. YouTube has always been known for very heavy moderation. This is only about comments but they also delete tons of videos without any explanation. If the creator is big enough they can cause some outrage in Twitter and get YouTube's "offical" attention and then maybe they will fix it. Otherwise you are out of luck. I wish there was some alternative platform creators could switch to.
In my best guess, if large enough people report a repetitive keyword in a comment, the NLP will mark it as backlist corpus and auto-deletes posts next.
Can any native Chinese speaker offer some additional context, like whether this is likely just a request from the CCP to mute criticism in general, or whether the phrase in Chinese has some specific meaning/implications beyond the separate meaning of the two characters?
The only way this makes sense is if the intention isn't to ban in order to stop the term being used, but the opposite; to appear to ban in order to cause a sensation.
Is any anti-CCP content banned/blocked? epochtimes? falungong? ... it's all still there.
It is either the case that the parent likes to add random facts into conversations such as "the word communist contains 9 letters" which has nothing to do with the conversation, or the parent clearly felt that the phrase being perjorative was tied to it being censored.
Let us assume the parent was being on topic and relevant. Therefore they seem to indicate the censoring was due to it being perjorative. As most other perjoratives are not typically censored (per my comment), that would imply that the "Communist Bandit" perjorative is somehow special.
Is it special because it's somehow especially worse than other perjoratives, or is it special because it offends a foreign state's political party?
I guess we're on a tangent now but maybe it's an interesting exercise.
>the parent clearly felt that the phrase being perjorative was tied to it being censored.
How do you come to this conclusion? In my view the comment is not implying anything at all, it is merely translating (not only using a direct translation but also conveying the implications of the phrase "communist bandit"). The word "pejorative" adds to the translation. There is nothing in the original comment that says anything about censorship at all.
A banded together band of bandits bandying about their propaganda. Communists are not US citizens, and even if they were, the US does not have laws to protect softies from "pejorative speech." Clearly, someone claimed it was "hate speech" -- which it is not -- and now it's banned globally on YouTube because US laws stipulate they must not entertain Hate Speech, but until a US judge says "Communist Bandito" is hate speech, zero relevance.
Sure, vote me down but it's true - extranational powers do not have citizens' rights in the US, and even if they did, pejorative language is not something citizens are insulated from as a right.
Google is siding with a fascist prison-state over Americans' right to free speech, it is deplorable.
And furthermore, the only real justification for a global ban for a US-based company could be "hate speech," which clearly enough communist operatives claimed it was, but just because somebody's feelings are hurt doesn't make something hate speech, it doesn't come down to cancellation politics.
In other words, Google is siding with the Party Room of Control because Google is not an American company. If they were, they would not let this stand.
The corner cases is why reddit cmostly using armies of humans for censorship aka moderation - there are auto-report and auto-censor bots only for the most egregious cases.
There's a gazillion videos all over youtube criticizing, mocking, and calling out the Chinese government for all sorts of repressive activities.
I'm confused as to why people would think youtube is bothering to sensor those two characters in oparticular as opposed to something much more likely like spam/bot filtering or channel word filtering. I'd think the Chinese Gov would be much more animated about videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9AvUuEPgvA
Communist bandit (Chinese: 共匪; pinyin: gòngfěi) is an anti-communist insult directed to the Chinese Communist Party. The term originated from the Nationalist Government in 1927.
This is direct censorship on behalf of the Chinese Government.
It's an insult but also a historical fact. KMT was listed a observer party in COMINTERN and Chiang Kai Shek himself was nominated as president of COMINTERN China branch. So in a sense KMT was the real Communist deal and CCP was a copycat version.
COMINTERN even ordered CCP to join force with KMT to form "united front", Mao himself was forced to join KMT. And it turned out to be a bloodshed purge by the KMT. Afterwards The CCP failed to hold its insurgent territories, CCP vows to kickout the Soviet consultants and cut links with COMINTERN and became independent, thus began the famous "Long March". THe term "bandit" was invented at that time.
Wasn't it was an enemy-of-my-enemy alliance that occurred in the context of the Japanese invasion, and both sides were planning on picking up their civil war where they left off, after the Japanese had been removed?
No, the First United Front was formed in 1924, the purge of Communists by the Nationalists started with the Shanghai massacre 1927 and the Long March began in 1934, before the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937.
Personally I’m not really offended by rare appearance of “共匪”. Politically this word implies the failure to recognize the legal government of mainland China, which goes against international consensus. I’m not surprised this word is blocked at scale
I was skeptical, so tried it out myself and tried making a comment there with 'communist bandits' / 共匪. My Youtube comment was indeed removed completely and silently, including from my comment history. I am very disappointed with Youtube.
Just read on Wikipedia[1] that the Chinese Communist Party raided computer stores back in 1996 that sold Windows 95 because the OS contained text input software with the “communist bandit” word in its dictionary. Microsoft had to temporarily halt sales because of the incident.
Google & YouTube employees on HN: how do you justify still working at this company? Enough of the cognitive dissonance. Face your choices and tell me how you square yourself with them. For shame.
Drew, ever since sourcehut got a little positive attention you seem to have adopted this mindset of "I started my own company and don't have to work for the man anymore, why doesn't everyone else just do the same?" You need to realize that this is an extremely narrow minded view to have. Not everyone can start their own business. What would you have done if sourcehut hadn't gained enough popularity to be successful? You would probably be working for [CORP ABC] who surely would be doing something you disliked, too. That would not make you a "bootlicker".
In fact, I'd like to ask this question of you: your website is undoubtedly being used by people to build software that you disagree with, perhaps even censorship. How do you justify still hosting your site instead of shutting it down? Enough of the cognitive dissonance. Face your choices and tell me how you square yourself with them.
Is it because you need the money from your site? So do Google employees (probably).
Is it because you still enjoy the work of building your site? So do Google employees (probably)?
Is it because on the aggregate you think that your site still provides benefit to society, despite it possibly being used for things you disagree with? So do Google employees (probably).
There are plenty of reasons why people still work for Google, and you probably would relate to them too if you stopped being so combative towards anyone who works for [big corp].
I am not relating the reader to my experience with SourceHut - I haven't told anyone to quit and start their own company rather than work for Google - but remininding them that the market for their talents is strong and that we have the luxury of choosing who we work for. I have held and spoken of these convictions since long before SourceHut. Read my blog archives or my old HN comments since pre-SourceHut and you'll find much of the same.
Who is using SourceHut to build software I disagree with on ethical terms? I am not aware of such a project.
> I haven't told anyone to quit and start their own company rather than work for Google
Your past comments and submissions to HN say otherwise. You have been very outspoken and proud about the fact that you haven't taken money from "the man" (my words, not yours), and that others should do the same [0][1]. Whether it be a VC or Google, your messaging is clear.
>Who is using SourceHut to build software I disagree with on ethical terms? I am not aware of such a project.
You're dodging the question. Have you done an audit on every single project hosted on SourceHut to see if you disagree with them? Would such an action even be something you agree with? What if someone was hosting such a repository (I'll go create one right now), would you remove it? But that is censorship, is it not? Do you even have the technical capability to do such an audit? If not, that means people could easily use your site for nefarious things, so how do you justify keeping it running?
>Your past comments and submissions to HN say otherwise. You have been very outspoken and proud about the fact that you haven't taken money from "the man" (my words, not yours), and that others should do the same [0]
Your link omits context. A couple of comments up is this:
In the quoted link I am speaking from the perspective of a startup founder offering advice to potential startup founders. In today's discussion I am speaking from the perspective of a tech worker speaking to other tech workers. I have been in both roles, and I have different advice for different kinds of people with different kinds of goals. Do me the courtesey of not assuming that I expect every person in all circumstances to be exactly like me.
>You're dodging the question. Have you done an audit on every single project hosted on SourceHut to see if you disagree with them?
This is a disingenous line of questioning. Google employees are aware of their employer's misbehaviors. In order to even have seen my comments in the first place, they would have had to visit a discussion about those bad behaviors. Google employees cannot claim ignorance in the way you're assuming I am.
I am familiar with most public projects on sourcehut, of course. I do not conduct an audit on private projects, but if something was brought to my attention, I would conduct an investigation which may result in the termination of the account. For example, if some knucklehead on HN went to create a bunch of abusive repositories to prove their point in an internet argument, I would definitely terminate their account.
>Your link omits context. A couple of comments up is this:
So your context arguing against my assertion that you are telling people to quit and start their own company is a link to a comment telling people they should quit and start their own company?
How about this [0] comment? I'll quote it here for you:
>But, I may suggest an additional option: do something about it. Build a business that eschews VC culture, or become a VC who doesn't fit in among their blood-sucking peers.
>This is a disingenous line of questioning. Google employees are aware of their employer's misbehaviors.
You're still dodging the question, and your reasoning is "I've stuck my head in the sand and I'm going to pretend nobody is using my site for things I disagree with"?
I'll ask it again and maybe you won't dodge it this time: You just admitted that you do not conduct audits on private projects. Without a doubt, someone is now or will be in the future using your site to build software that you disagree with. Knowing this, how do you justify still hosting your site instead of shutting it down?
I told (past-tense) a person (singular) to consider founding a company in the context of their individual circumstances, while reassuring them that if they chose not to that I would support that decision; in a discussion entirely unrelated to the one we're having now.
You are arguing in bad faith and I have no interest in entertaining it any further.
>You are arguing in bad faith and I have no interest in entertaining it any further.
Ironic, because this entire comment chain was started by you with a loaded question that was asked in bad faith. I guess it's fine when you do it, but not others, eh? Is this the same mentality you're holding in regards to sourcehut? "It's fine that I'm building something that may be used nefariously, but when Google employees do that, they're bootlickers"?
The fact that you still dodged the question is duly noted, btw.
I'll remind you that this "line of questioning" wasn't intended to bash SourceHut or you in any way, but rather to try to get you to empathize with the fact that "quit your job and stop working on things you enjoy just because someone on the internet disagrees with your company" is hardly a winning stance to take.
You are obviously arguing in bad faith. You pose the rhetorical:
> Is this the same mentality you're holding in regards to sourcehut? "It's fine that I'm building something that may be used nefariously, but when Google employees do that, they're bootlickers"?
And yet it was previously asked:
> Who is using SourceHut to build software I disagree with on ethical terms? I am not aware of such a project.
It is clear to me that Drew has declared an absence of knowledge of such malfeasence with his products.
TL;DR take a huge life risk; just don't forget to be both exceptional and successful!
99% of startups fail (a turn of phrase, not a real statistic AFAIK), and that is usually said in reference to those that do take VC money. Tell me: what happens when my bootstrapped startup fails?
Google employees are more than capable of getting jobs at thousands of other smaller companies with narrower customer bases and clearer ethical stances. Nobody "needs" Google SWE money. You can still easily clear 6 figures while taking a moral stance so this "think of the starving" argument doesn't work.
Tom Lehrer was my math professor in College. He was delightfully amusing and I learned a lot (in particular, the birthday paradox, years before I understand why they matter in hash tables and other probability problems).
I’m not a Google employee, but really all companies of large enough size care only about the bottom line. Large companies don’t have morals, they just try to make money at all costs, full stop. Google is a bit more hypocritical in that they pretend to be about more than this, but lots of companies are similarly hypocritical, especially tech companies. It’s really only small businesses that have any sort of humanity (sometimes).
Google pay better than most, and if you’re on the right team I assume you get to work on very interesting/challenging projects. They’re just as heartless/selfish as any other bigco, but I don’t know that they’re worse.
The fundamental problem is that there is collective action on both sides of the issue. There are plenty of people organizing for the removal of "hate speech", and there are plenty of people organizing for free speech. It's not exactly clear which side is economical since you're not going to make both sides happy.
Tech giants have picked the winners and I'm pretty convinced they've picked sides based on their personal convictions. They're removing hate speech because they think they're on the right side of history, not because they think it will make them the most money.
If all the ethical employees leave Google as you suggest, then who do you think will fill their place? Let's not assume they will suffer to find people willing to work for them. Will that make things better or worse?
Other than the hn-liberitarian anything that resembles censorship in any form is bad circlejerk, I don't actually see what the fuss is about here.
Assume I believe that moderation is a reasonable action. Why is this unreasonable moderation, who is harmed?
Put another way, assume that I have some line on the sand drawn on when I would leave. Assume also that I believe that what I'm doing at Google has net-positive impact. Why should I move my line in the sand back to <whatever this is>?
How do you justify being a citizen of your country? (not sure what country that is, but most of them have done bad things in the past). It's possible to be a part of a large organization and not agree with its every action.
This analogy holds water about as well as a sieve. You can't shop around citizenship in most other countries. You can't just willy-nilly decide to renounce citizenship in one and go become a citizen in another. I'm sure people will jump in here with counter examples but I'm also sure they'll be the exception and not the norm. You're also born into citizenship. Comparing citizenship to the job market just seems so silly.
Nice mental gymnastics. There's always a choice to not support the country by not participating in its economy and becoming a hermit. Ah, but that's inconvenient!
To begin with, citizenship is forced upon you. You don't have a choice about it. Yes, you can (in some cases) renounce it, though that's quite a momentous task - it involved pretty much cancelling your existing life, and takes many years. And as you say - most other countries may be worse - and the ones that aren't may not accept you either way.
Not working for Google, in particular, is extremely easy. Something that roughly 99.999% of the world's population succeeds at without even trying :-) And most people who are working for Google are also likely to be able to find another job quite easily.
The two are not comparable. At all. In any way or form.
This is, by the way, why I support much more open borders than we have now. There is a humanitarian case to be made, but I also have a strong desire to be able to pack up and leave when I disagree with my country's government.
I would have a stronger civic spirit if I were a willing member of my country rather than a prisoner.
I have much less mobility as a US citizen to move to another country than I have as a software engineer. Almost any Google employee could have an offer somewhere else within 3 weeks of starting their search.
It's not as easy as you might expect, through normal channels. There's a points system to gain access and a whole lot of hoops to jump through if you aren't able to pay for the economic class.
Now, if you were to walk across the border at certain locations and claim refugee status you could probably remain so long as your application is being processed; regardless of the merits of your claim, that process time has become _rather long_.
It's suprisingly hard to move there if you're from the USA. I looked into moving there after I got out of the military, and had no chance because I don't have a degree. The fact that I have over a decade of work experience in cybersecurity and have been through intense courses acredited at the graduate level doesn't factor in. Their immigration process reminds me of the shitty HR at big corporations that aren't willing to budge from their checklist of "requirements".
I don't have a degree; they won't take me. I have looked into it many times, but the difficulty of moving to another country (at least to ones which I find it easier to be proud of living in) is very high, especially compared to that of moving to another employer.
Compared to most other western countries, sure, Canada is on the easier side.
However, even with that in mind, it is still a very difficult and complicated process, with tons of hard limitations that can put a complete stop to the whole thing due to something trivial, like not having a degree. And even with that barrier of hard requirements cleared, it is still a pretty draconian experience.
Having gone through a similar thing myself (not with Canada, but I ended up coincidentally reading a lot about Canadian immigration laws), I can assure you, it is way more difficult than getting any job, even if you are a successful Google engineer, and by a far margin.
I am pretty sure that any person who went through an immigration process to another country can attest to that. And I am talking purely about the legal-paper-stuff aspect of immigration to another country, not things like getting adapted to your new country or anything like that.
> Compared to most other western countries, sure, Canada is on the easier side.
Our process isn't that easy; we have an immigration system that the GOP would _like to have_.
There are points awarded based on your education and training, variated against the demand for those skills in Canada. If you are being imported by an employer they must go to considerable lengths to prove that they attempted to find an existing Canadian to fill that role. And so on.
And it can be all avoided by paying approximately $800,000 to what is effectively an escrow: you get it back after a few years, less inflation.
That was the whole point of my comment. Out of all western countries, Canada is definitely one of the easiest. But even with that in mind, it is still extremely difficult.
As a US citizen you are entitled to so many things that most people out there could only dream of.
That's not the point though. Google is so large that it's just weird to talk about the morality of its employees in the context of the company's decisions.
This is a very poor comparison since nobody chooses their original country of citizenship and it usually takes lots of money or familial connection to obtain citizenship elsewhere.
I wish that people who use the "a few bad apples" quote as a defense (especially when it comes to the police) would realize the full quote is "a few bad apples spoil the barrel."
I don't work there anymore, but this is a confused argument born of zealotry. Taking Google's money to work on open source is totally fine. More money spent on good things might even mean less spent on bad things.
For example, nothing good would come from the Go team quitting over unrelated political stuff.
Other than for commercial tool vendors like JetBrains, development tool improvements are rarely business critical in that way.
Go in particular is known for stability. In the short term, descoping or delaying Go releases is unlikely to matter to any business goal. Language and SDK improvements are for improving the ecosystem in the long term.
FWIW, open source is not an absolute good. It is undercutting the ability of your peers to make a living. It is making software a commodity, such that capital rich hardware owners can make a killing. See AWS.
It may not be common, but it is possible to make money on open-source software. Redhat would be the largest example. Automattic's WordPress is another.
If software can be profitable whether it's open or closed-source, then isn't open-source inherently better?
They continue to operate fairly independently, and there business is still fully open source. IBM executives have also paid lip service to their model, suggesting they might move towards it. (Of course, lip service is lip service, and action is action. Two different things.)
Money. Being part of a massive company with lots of compartmentalization. A majority left-leaning political affiliation which tends to be softer on China and against nationalism/borders.
> Google & YouTube employees on HN: how do you justify still working at this company?
Not a Google Employee , but in 99% of the case it's money + experience/situation.
This is similar to what others tech company are doing ( Reddit , Adobe etc.. ) in terms of arbitrage when they decide to enter Chinese Market , Partner with Chinese VC or with ideas that challenge their values.
Regardless of where you'll go in tech you'll end up in Amoral corporations like Google/Amazon/Microsoft which are driven solely by Money and Growth , regardless of the consequences. ( Remember Gillette and Child Labour ? Nestlé ? )
Also , the last people who tried to Unionize at Google , which could have enable them to do something about it , got laid off instantly[0] , same pattern happened in all others tech companies...
Not a Google or YouTube employee, but, practically, what would change? In the most likely case, a bunch of Googlers who believe it's important to be apolitical at work would take over the product and implement much stronger censorship to get promo. In the unlikely event all of them (and every applicant drooling for a FAANG job) had a change of heart too, Tencent would gladly step into the vacuum.
A strike causes change when management can't hire enough workers to replace the strikers. My entire point is that they can. You can probably successfully strike against paying Andy Rubin hundreds of millions of dollars for creeping on employees - while there are a handful of folks who want that same life for themselves, there aren't that many. I'm claiming you can't strike over censoring some words on YouTube because there's no shortage of qualified-enough people who don't currently work for Google who would be glad to take your job.
(And you still haven't addressed my point about, suppose they strike successfully and Google decides it won't help the CCP at all and the CCP bans Google and has Tencent step in - what then? Did you save the world?)
>A strike causes change when management can't hire enough workers to replace the strikers. My entire point is that they can.
[citation needed]
I don't believe that if a majority of Google's software engineers went on strike that Google would be able to hire and train new employees without any of the striker's domain-specific or institutional knowledge without enormous expense.
Laughing all the way to the bank... It justifies the behavior to people who think for themselves and not for some intangible global internet community. i'm not trolling.
Imagine thinking anything Google does comes close to resembling having blood on its hands. It really seems to me that the first world doesn't have enough real problems on its hands.
"To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
"The world's" doesn't mean "The part of the world we like most." "Universally" doesn't mean "Nobody in China gets to use our system until the Chinese government adopts Western notions of information control."
Google would operate in North Korea if it could, because as a point of philosophy, it's believed that access to more informtion, even curtailed by the government, is better than access to only information controlled by the government.
Are you speaking as a Google employee or just from personal opinion?
Also, this viewpoint is naive. Simply more information isn't better. What if all that information was about the flat earth theory and nothing else? Wouldn't more "mutually consistent" information be a better goal? Flat earth stuff is fun but you must limit yourself to a very small plausible universe in order to really buy into it.
> Are you speaking as a Google employee or just from personal opinion?
The distinction is irrelevant; were I speaking as a Google employee I would still be speaking from personal opinion, not on behalf of my employer.
> Also, this viewpoint is naive. Simply more information isn't better. What if all that information was about the flat earth theory and nothing else?
It's not though; it's "all" the world's information (within constraints; Google also isn't vending a search index to make pedophilic imagery easy to find). But the flat-Earth hypothetical doesn't apply because that's only a subset.
In fact, it doesn't apply in a way that's demonstrative, I think, of the game Google plays with authoritarian states. Google banks on the notion nature cannot be fooled. Sure, individual phrases or sets of facts (like Tienman Square history) can be knocked out of returned datasets. But the missing data leaves holes; it becomes apparent where the cuts are in the data.
This is why North Korea cuts the whole internet; they know it can't be contained. China's ruling party is more subtle; they'll block unpopular signal it if a sense of "decency," as it were, but they know their people aren't stupid. In any sense of "stupid."
> The distinction is irrelevant; were I speaking as a Google employee I would still be speaking from personal opinion, not in behalf of my employer.
Seems like word splitting and I disagree. If you're working at Google, then your opinion is an answer to OP's question. If you're not, then your opinion doesn't count as a Google employee's justification for continuing to work at Google.
My opinion is my own and OP can take that as they will (because the opinion they'd get from a Google employee will be of the same weight relative to the "company's opinion" unless their thoughts have been cleared by legal).
> It’s almost impossible to lead en ethical life in this day and age if you do anything related to tech.
That doesn't change that an engineer in the bay area can choose to work for Google or choose to find an alternative place of employment. People can choose more ethical choices without living in a pure ethical panacea.
Sure, but then we're back to "What mental gymnastics do techies do to justify buying hardware they know is made in sweatshop conditions in China?"
Take that template and apply it to Googlers. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism; everyone has compromised a rigid belief structure somewhere.
I don't think it has to be mental gymnastics, but you are right that it is a real challenge.
I think people (especially those in privileged positions like engs in the bay area) should feel empowered to think and decide their line as to what they want to support and contribute to the world.
Hey alter-me, it's a nice thought. But, realistically, many people are faced with living a subpar life in the bay area (rent small apartments for the rest of your life) or working for a big corp and living a better life (own a home - can afford many things). It's not like these people are going to find a company that is perfectly ethical on every side while also still paying $400k+/yr for senior software engineers.
A lot of engineers are wage slaves as much as anyone else. It's not like everyone wants to do this stuff.
EDIT: On a more personal note - I hope your name is actually "Bradly" and you're not "Bradley". And that you actually go by that in real life instead of "Brad". As I know there's some "Brad"s out there that like to buy up Bradly variations without actually going by it. It's killing me.
I agree with you, I just think some big corps are worse than others, so I choose one that is on the better end of big-evil-corp. Is the pay that much worse at Stripe, Square, GitHub, Netflix than advertising companies?
--
Yes, I am a Bradly. About half my coworkers/friends/family call me Bradly and about half call me Brad. I introduce my self as both interchangeably depending on the situation.
I don't know if those companies could take on every engineer leaving a supposedly morally lesser company - which employs many more people.
My point is - not everyone has a choice. You might get the pick of the litter but there are many people who are lucky if they even get one offer from a company paying $400k+/yr. And - for reference - I am one of the people who has never received an offer from one. All my offers have been under $200k/yr (that doesn't include that I have to pay over $2,000/month to buy options that will "maybe one day if we're all lucky" pan out for something).
The world of living in silicon valley under $200k/yr vs $400k+/yr is wildly different. One feels like you're no better off than a retail worker and the other feels like you're a working class professional.
No, the lesson is take a hard look at yourself before casting stones at "others". We can sit here and say that people who work at Google are so amoral, so are those at Twitter, at Apple, at Uber, at Microsoft, at Amazon, etc.
The truth is most for-profit organization will not have a flawless ethical image that satisfied everyone, and that probably includes your employer. I'm not saying we should all look the other way, but let's keep things grounded in reality. Censorship is a delicate subject, especially as it concerns expressions involvong multiple cultures. This doesn't make Google immediately evil for electing to / not electing to act one way or another.
Maybe your accusation is that Google is choosing profit over ethics in this case? Then the "Chinese hardware" argument has to come into play. Are you, yourself choosing price and convenience when you know it means your dollars are ending up in those poorly run Chinese factories? What are you going to do about it? Should Googlers quit their jobs before or after you source all your hardware from ethically run, blame-free factories?
Not necessarily, but if you can justify one thing for yourself then it should help you understand why other people behave similarly.
Whether buying hardware or working for google is worse is another debate, but you should be able to see why people can work at google and not necessarily feel guilty about it.
I am paying my taxes to my government as well, does not mean I agree with everything my government does. When it comes to purchasing certain categories of items (like electronics) you have no choice but to buy something made in China, most of the time.
Yes, by paying taxes you are supporting the government you are paying your taxes too. And yes, this leads to paying for things you disagree with if you do not agree with some of your country's policies.
Hopefully, however, you have a voice (vote) in that government. The same obviously does not apply to you with China, nor generally does it apply to Chinese people within China.
You also generally have less choice when it comes to paying taxes, and significantly more choice when it comes to not buying things from China. If there are no non-Chinese alternative for X item, you can always choose to not buy X. However, that probably means not buying quite a few things, as you point out. But that was GC's point – it is fairly hard as a techie to not support the CCP. But just because something is hard to avoid does not mean you aren't doing it or aren't responsible for doing it.
And democracy's legitamacy is derived from monkeys voting in a system rigged against them, after listening to false promises of growth. While still supporting cheap, often exploitative labor.
I mean, from your description, I'd rather want a system that actually shows continued growth, rather than hollowed promises of growth.
Let's be honest here, democracy's real growth had been going to war with nations and extracting/exploiting resources from them. Hence why the past 50 years, there has been no real growth in democratic countries because they are not able to as easily extract from the rest of the world.
What exactly are you defining as "real growth" in order to come to the fantastic conclusion that there hasn't been any?
I'm also fairly certain that the US (and other countries) have been warring a lot in the Middle East in the past 50 years, and many people claim that this is directly related to oil, an "exploited resource".
I try to avoid buying Chinese products, but unfortunately I end up doing so more often than I'd like. But ultimately, my lifetime contribution to the Chinese regime of a few thousand dollars worth of consumer products pales in comparison to the lifetime contribution of millions of dollars of capital that each Google employee is raising for the company to spend on directly supporting the regime with censorship and surveillance tools.
A real-world example would be companies that make parts for nuclear bombs, but also make parts for thermostats.
If there were no other thermostat companies, you might have an argument. But there are plenty of other thermostat companies, and plenty of other tech companies than Google.
In our society it does. They're being incentivized (highly) to do said work.
I'm not saying I agree with the incentive structure but money is one of the core incentives in the US since it translates to other necessities and wants in life. Those working at dubious businesses are being highly incentivized to do so and at the same time, normalizing said behaviors.
Here's the kicker as well, as the clench on labor grows tighter with the middle class being squeezed more and more, people seem oblivious that even if you're getting paid relatively well (6 figures) and have options to jump ship, that may not always be the case when labor keeps caving (sometimes without option) into business incentive structures for compensation.
If there are plenty of people on the labor market capable of competing with you yet willing to do work you won't for money, you too will be displaced. Ultimately, the people dangling carrots in front of us win and we (those who rely on labor for income) lose.
- Am an employee of a large company whose practices would probably also not stand up to public scrutiny
First question is has this been verified beyond "someone said so"? Perhaps it has - but any search I do ultimately leads back to the same comment.
Second, google is hardly the only company to occasionally kowtow the the PRC. I don't think any large company wants to a face-off with them. Are there more ethical employers? Probably, but they're probably small and not everyone wants to work at a small company pace. Also, if the company got larger and push came to shove, I suspect they'd do what they needed to do to stay on China's good side. It's a better option than going under.
Really a lot of employers are ethically shaky.
- Is it better to work for the DoD? Some people say no.
- Is it better to work for a Big Bank? Some people say no.
- Is it better to work for Big Pharm? Some people say no.
- Is it better to work for a place that frankly abuses their warehouse workers? I think we've had that discussion.
I'm not sure where that leaves anyone who likes gainful employment, particularly outside the Silicon Valley startup culture.
That doesn't necessarily translate to 'throw up our hands' but it does meant a more nuanced approach to where we work, how we feel about our employer, and how we measure that against all the other places we do business with that also have their dark sides.
This is a pretty narrow view of the available jobs for software engineers. I have personally never worked for any of the industries/criteria you listed. I just pulled up the latest "who's hiring":
Of the first 12 posts, one is the FBI, one is questionable (using proxies to circumvent rate limits, anti-scraping tech, etc), and the other 10 seem anywhere from boring to laudable.
Most tech jobs do not require you to make broad ethical compromises to work there.
It has been harder and harder every year, and frankly I'm really disheartened and demoralized these days. Articles like this one don't really surprise me anymore. It's not my department, but I feel complicit none-the-less.
But when I look out at the tech industry landscape, it is clear that I can do more good from within, because I have more freedom and influence on the work, and I believe that the work is net positive for the technology ecosystem.
Businesses large and small seem to have their heads on backwards here in Silicon Valley. Their founders are all highly profit-motivated, and don't truly seek to make the world a better place. Those that wear a facade of idealism give me no reason to believe they are any better than Google. If I left Google, where would I go where I can work without shame? I even have a hard time imagining starting my own business without falling prey to the same broken mechanics that brought us to where we are today.
At least at Google, I can say with confidence that there is ongoing work by people I trust - who in turn are given a lot of autonomy by the company - to make the world a better place with technology.
It might be easy to say this, but I believe I would quit if I was asked to implement something like that. But perhaps I'd be different if I were paid $300k a year. (I sure hope not, though)
If you were being paid $300K/year, it costs your employer (as a rule of thumb) 1.5x, or about $450K/year. The only reason they could spend $450K/year on you is if they expected to make at least that much money with you, compared to what they would make without you. Even if you aren't directly working on this stuff, you are providing them with capital that is being spent on it.
Arguably they don't have to make that money off you directly.
They just need you to not be elsewhere making that money for someone else, or disrupting a market that they are entrenched in. IMHO much of the FAANG hiring / head count / acquisition process could be analyzed in this light.
It’s good that you would refuse to do the work. Sadly they can easily find someone who badly needs the money, doesn’t understand the problems the feature creates, or doesn’t care about doing the right thing. If all the workers organized it would make a bigger difference, but the company actively discourages worker organization.
by "like that" do you mean "a community moderation system" or "a system for the CCP to backdoor explicit takedown rules into the system?"
Based on what we're seeing right now, this is likely caused not by the latter, but by the former. Consider: the ML-assisted thread moderation logic can be vulnerable to brigading. If several tens of thousands of Chinese people decided to start flagging comments with that phrase, YT would also start killing the phrase (because its sample is biased towards seeing "That phrase usually results in a flag, so the community clearly doesn't want it").
No one will ever ask you to implement something "like that". It probably was an ordinary blacklist that probably started to "protect children" form porn and such, then it went on to "protect teenagers" from radicalization, and now it will protect adults from anti-communist/chinese comments. We've made the bed.
If every HN submission were spammed with "communist bandits," do you think at some point the mods would just write a script to block such comments? It doesn't seem absurd to me to think that they might. It wouldn't bother me in the least if they did. That type of comment is even less edifying than "first" or "top" or "did anyone else come here from 9gag."
I work for Google. It does some things I don't like but this does not prima facie appear to be one of them.
another fact, you know which population uses word "共匪"? people in Taiwan, this is actually very old word dated way back from early 1900s when Kuomintang was still controlling China; they call communist party "共匪", and keep using that term after they got defeated in China civil war, and fled to Taiwan island.
I'm not sure I understand your point. It makes sense that people in Taiwan would use political rhetoric that aligns with their perspective.
The issue is whether societies without political censorship should support their businesses adopting it. Who uses any specific rhetoric (that should be categorically protected) is not salient to the debate.
It goes all the way back to Chiang Kai-shek and Nationalist China. It's an old-fashioned way to insult the Maoists and promote the idea that Taiwan was (and still is) in the right.
There was a previous unrelated discussion about this just a few hours ago which was climbing to the top of the front page when I saw it. And then just vanished: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264
It's not flagged, it just went from #13 on the front page to invisible. In a single refresh. How does that work? Looking at the votes and age, it should be in the top 5 of both Ask and the front page. What's the metric or decision that made it disappear?
@dang might be worth commenting on this? Moderation is fine, opaque removal of content with no explanation, not so much. I fully believe @dang has the best interests of the community in mind, so please give us a clear explanation of what's going on here.
It was flagged by users and set off the flamewar detector. We review those, but not while asleep.
The site guidelines specifically ask you not to post like this, but to send such questions to hn@ycombinator.com instead. Would you please review them (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)? The reason we ask that is that such comments routinely spark completely speculative subthreads that range from completely off topic (at the high end!) to outrage mobs. They're extremely repetitive and they basically act like a drug and not a nice one.
We're always happy to answer questions—it just takes time to deal with the firehose. Yes, you have to wait for an email reply, but you've had to wait for a reply to this comment too, and if you'd sent an email you wouldn't have damaged HN. This digression (I'll use a nice word) was the #1 subthread on the #1 story of HN when I saw it.
You can't compute a post's rank from its timestamp and score. The software is more complicated than that, plus user flags affect things, plus moderator action. The "why is this post at rank N when given the score X and the timestamp Y my mental algorithm tells me it should be at rank Z?" question is an HN classic, but people grossly overweight moderator action, or rather sinister-moderator-misdeeds in the answers they give themselves.
I mean, think about it you guys. Do you really think we're suppressing discussion of the suppression of the phrase "communist bandits" from YouTube? I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a.
Hey, dang. I've sent a letter to hn@ycombinator.com 5 hours ago, questioning why my AskHN submission "Self-censorship on HN" has been flagged and blocked for further replies. Have you seen it by any chance? I'm really concerned about the issue.
> Do you really think we're suppressing discussion of the suppression of the phrase "communist bandits" from YouTube? I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a.
I have not seen it yet. If you saw the inbox you'd understand why. I'll get to it as soon as I can.
Edit: One not-so-obvious reason why subthreads like this are so disastrous for HN is that they suck up all the moderation resources. I haven't had a chance to even look at the rest of the HN front page yet, let alone the emails.
Definitely agree it's not sustainable to moderate these issues individually. But maybe it's a red flag that HN needs to change their approach to this issue? It feels like a "guilty until proven innocent" setup.
Thanks for the reply. If subthreads like this happen at all (let alone, as you put it, are so disastrous), then it might be a good idea to revisit the moderation mechanisms, don't you think so? Ideally, with a public discussion.
What I'd personally be happy to see being discussed:
- abandoning downvoting of comments completely
- introducing a compensation mechanism for flagging of comments (debatable)
- displaying all flagged submissions in a separate page with a link in the header (like "new", "ask", etc.)
No, because subthreads like this are eternal and no effort to prevent them can succeed. They can only be somewhat contained sometimes. If moderation mechanisms need to be changed, it needs to be for more substantial reasons.
Each generation of internet users thinks they're the first to come up with these things, and in a way they are, it's just that every previous generation was also the first to come up with them. It's an eternal cycle of internet forum life. The points you raise have been raised on HN for over a decade (HN Search is your friend!) and if they weren't those points they'd be others.
That probably sounds too dismissive. I don't mean that we're uninterested in hearing from users, getting suggestions, and answering questions. We do that all the time, and it's welcome. But making meta-posts to HN is not the best way to do it, especially in any inflammatory context, where they are almost guaranteed to blow up like the gas station in Zoolander—and then consume all our limited resources for the day, which ought to be going into making the site better.
I completely understand that it's an eternal issue. That does not automatically mean that it does not merit a yet another discussion. Downvote hell is real. Targeted censorship by (possibly coordinated) flagging is real (I presume so). I would love to read HN users' opinion on Bill Gates driving the world into a nightmarish dystopia, but can't do so, because some of the users think, that it's conspiracy bullshit (even if backed up by facts to some degree)? Might very well be so, but the fact, that we can't have such a discussion at all, has far-reaching implications, given the status of HN in the eye of the Internet crowd. It would be different, if all politics related subjects were outlawed here, but that is not the case. Rather, only some subjects are selectively and very opaquely (for the majority of users, who don't even get to see, that such a subject has been brought into their attention) dismissed as flamebait/propaganda/conspiracy/whatever. Why is that necessary?
On the question of political topics on HN, I've written about this at length in the past: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... If you take a look at those and still have a question I haven't addressed there, I'd be interested to know what it is. Just be sure you've familiarized yourself with past explanations, because if the idea is something like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already explained many times why that won't work.
I honestly visited the links and read some of your comments. I still fail to see why downvoting and flagging are necessary. Am I overlloking something?
Those links were in response to different issues you raised. The answer to this question is that downvoting and flagging are vital mechanisms for preventing HN from becoming completely overrun with much lower-quality threads. There is a ton of dreck on the internet, including here, and there needs to be countervailing mechanisms to address it. Upvotes alone can't cut it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
Basically, they are the immune system of the forum, and we need those white blood cells. There's a downside, to be sure—HN certainly gets bad downvotes and flags. But there are mechanisms to address those, like corrective upvotes (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and vouching (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), and as a last resort you can always email hn@ycombinator.com. Meanwhile the downside of having no immune system at all would be much worse.
It is an endless tussle of how people want to be moderated. I definitely see the value of flagging given many if not all forums, commenting blocks and social media sites have that. It seems highly suspect to cast doubt on the value of it. Adding a low friction way to say "why" would give a way to add priority.
Second, downvotes are community driven and very useful where the participants use it to bring up quality content. Of course it can be used unfairly as well.
Could not agree more, HN is taking the "we know best, so we ask that you blindly listen to us" highbrow approach. I lost 20% of my karma because I took a non-popular stance within a single thread lol. My stance was backed up by references/facts/data, but none of that mattered.
In a comment above, I mentioned the possible solution (to the issue discussed in above thread) that HN create a publicly available list of "marked off topic / down-weighted / removed / flagged as duplicate" actions. I feel like HN could squash 90% of these concerns with that simple feature.
The question is whether it would squash 90% of those concerns or blow them up 900x. I don't know the answer to that, but I fear the latter. Everything we do as moderators is defensible—it's our core principle not to do things that we can't defend to the community, with confidence that the majority would support it. But that doesn't mean that everything we do explains itself, and therefore that a moderation log would be a good thing. On the contrary: it's all prone to misinterpretation, accusations of sinister manipulation, secret communist or nazi sympathies—I mean, you name it, we get accused of it. The bottom of that barrel is large, and at any moment there are hundreds if not thousands of readers raring to go there. Posting explanations as I've been doing in this thread is by far the highest-energy-expending thing that we have to do. We don't have the capacity to do significantly more—that's a recipe for burnout.
Moreover, the litigious sort of users who would post most of the meta complaints are also the least likely to ever be satisfied by the explanations. Why would it be a good idea to give them more material to work with and a single place to go get it? If, on the other hand, the goal is to keep the majority of the community satisfied—well, the majority of the community is already satisfied: the clear majority, and clearly so. If that weren't the case, believe me, we'd know it, and we'd already have adjusted. That's how we keep the community satisfied in the first place.
This doesn't mean we don't want to be transparent. But we take an ad hoc approach to that by answering questions as they come up. There's no specific question you can't get an answer to.
I understand being a moderator isn't easy. Definitely agree this conversation is mentally draining...I'm doing it because I care about what the underlying topic represents.
> Why would it be a good idea to give them more material to work with and a single place to go get it?
It's one thing to not make it easier to acquire, it's another thing entirely when it isn't possible to acquire.
> There's no specific question you can't get an answer to.
Until HN decides they don't want to answer it. Or until they play the "lost in my inbox" game, like used in this thread multiple times.
It is possible to acquire in any specific case simply by asking.
> Until HN decides they don't want to answer it.
Sure, there's always a risk that the people operating the site will ruin it.
> Or until they play the "lost in my inbox" game, like used in this thread multiple times.
A swipe like that deserves no response, but in case anybody actually thinks we might do that: I have 44 emails waiting for replies right now (edit: 45, while writing this. edit: 47). I spend hours every day answering HN emails, but haven't had a chance to do much today because I've been busy providing explanations to the commenters in this thread, as well as trying to do the normal workflow of HN moderation, which itself has been set behind by several hours. If I'm lucky, I'll spend my evening working through those emails. It's a point of conscience to try to give everyone who writes to us a meaningful reply, it's not a game, and I don't lie to the community—that would be not only wrong but stupid.
It seems like my comment was also vanished from the top of the thread? I don't see what guidelines I came even close to breaking. Help me out here? No one's going to see your reply, my comment is detached from the submission. But I do want to understand what's going on here.
That's a bit disingenuous isn't it? You're saying that the actual beef (vanishing Ask thread about google censorship) is okay to mention, and the reason my comment was silently nuked is because I happened to address the HN team? That's a bit strange.
I really do believe you have the best interests of the community in mind, but this chain of events is making it difficult. Using 'off topic' as an arbitrarily broad mechanism to remove high SnR content doesn't have the best optics, especially when a lot of the child discussion was pointing out seemingly inconsistent and arbitrary enforcement of HN guidelines.
Again, help me out here. You're acting in good faith. Maybe a more clear and specific set of guidelines would help?
You're not going to tell me with a straight face that the highest upvoted comment on that submission and the origin of some healthy debate was 'off topic' when the top 3 comments of most front page submissions are far less related to TFA, are you?
I'm saying that what you posted was completely off topic, you shouldn't have posted it, and you should have emailed us instead (as indeed other users did). It's not that your comment was so bad in itself; it's the upvotes and replies that it attracted. They turned it into the worst subthread I've seen at the top of a high-ranked HN story in a long time.
If you think a subthread about "inconsistent and arbitrary enforcement of HN guidelines", or rather people's feverish imaginations about that, doesn't qualify for being downweighted as off-topic, I'm not sure what to add. A subthread like that sitting at #1 on the #1 story of HN is a three-alarm fire from a moderation point of view. Smart readers don't come to HN to read that.
We routinely downweight this sort of thing because if we didn't, most threads would consist of nothing but. Do you think that HN discussions stay on topic (to the extent they do) by themselves? That would be a self-driving-cars-level achievement.
HN users will happily comment all day about HN, moderation, and their imaginings about these things. There's no stronger force on the site, but unfortunately it's an addictive process that burns all the oxygen from actual discussion and ends up asphyxiating it. A forum becoming self-referential like that is the road to death. If a smart new user showed up here, wanting to read about interesting topics, and ran into endless reams of insider bickering, they'd close the tab and never come back.
We 100% see where you're coming from. Would it be crazy to request that HN create a publicly available list of "marked off topic / down-weighted / removed / flagged as duplicate" actions? I feel like HN could squash 90% of these concerns with that simple feature.
The troubling issue here seems to be HN asking users to "keep it quiet" by sending an email rather than commenting publicly about valid concerns. But I get your point that those concerns are technically "off-topic" from the underlying thread itself.
For what its worth, I was also shocked to see your entire comment thread, with over 110 children I believe, deleted from the thread without mention. Before this, I thought HN handled deletion with graying out, [flagged] or [dead] etc.
I only found it again by checking @dang's profile.
I've also emailed HN support strongly objecting to this complete deletion.
I didn't delete it; I downweighted it. You're running into the pagination problem (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23184485), which is that you've confused the first page of comments with the entire thread. Click More at the bottom and you'll find it perfectly intact, just lower.
We don't delete things outright on HN unless the author asks us to. The most we ever do is 'kill' a post, meaning it's still visible to anyone with 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile, and even that's rare. Beyond that, we'd never kill an entire subthread with dozens of replies. We might downweight it or we might auto-collapse it. That's all. By the way, if I had actually deleted that thread, you'd not have been able to find it via my profile. I'm not sure whether to be more hurt by your assuming I'm such an evil censor or such a bad programmer. (<-- that is an attempt at a joke)
Thank you for clarifying - you can disregard my email! I don't think I've ever seen/clicked the More on comments and was unaware of that feature. I appreciate you taking the time to explain!
You're welcome! I understand the shock of it seeming like something has completely disappeared, which is one reason I want to get rid of that pagination, as soon as our software can handle that load.
A few years ago, I reverse-engineered the HN ranking algorithm [1]. Basic ranking is based on votes vs age, but there are numerous other factors. Penalties are applied based on words in the title or the domain. Posts with too many comments got penalized as controversial. A "voting ring detector" triggers other automatic penalties.
HN ranking has probably become more complex since I looked at it. Manual moderation also impacts ranking.
I suspect the formula is changing if only because the sheer volume of spammy type stuff skyrocketing to the top seems to have subsided.
There was a short run where a lot of nearly raw spam type posts were quickly rising to the top, and sticking a long time despite almost / all the comments being about how terrible the spam is.
Good analysis, but - obviously - outdated and besides, the biggest input and wildcard is 'what are the penalties' and without knowing those the analysis is not super useful even if it is accurate to a rough approximation.
Keeping the spammers out is already quite a bit of work so I'm perfectly OK with the secret sauce staying secret.
Some users tend to flag stories about China and censorship because they generate a lot of nationalistic and hot headed comments and very little actual intelligent discussion. Just look at the comments attached to this submission.
The submission I linked is not flagged (at least as far as I can see from my account?). Either there's some non-intuitive stuff going on with the way submissions stay on the front page, or HN soft-nuked it. Either way I think we deserve an explanation and a clear understanding of the underlying rules.
It takes some amount of people flagging it before it shows up as [flagged] but flagging submissions affect rankings before it reaches that point. On top of that "Ask HN" posts also have some modifier on them that makes them drop quicker, these two effects seem to be cumulative, explaining why it dropped so quickly
Does HN always tell you when someone flags it? Or just a critical number of users or something like that?
I see the flagged indicator now and then, but I see it somewhat less frequently than I would THINK things get flagged, admittedly that's all conjecture.
If something is memory holed quickly enough after being flagged, perhaps combined with an automated algorithm that considers certain keywords, then the likelihood of people noticing flagged posts can be kept very low.
Of course this is all speculation, the truth of censorship on various platforms will likely never be known.
the best and surest way to have your account deleted from facebook is to post porn.
the best and surest way to delete an inconvenient discussion from hn is to spam it with a political flame war.
i don't have proof that this is the case here but i wouldn't be surprised that such threads are actively heated up and/or gaslighted by nation state sponsored censors.
If "I wouldn't be surprised that such threads are actively heated up and/or gaslighted by nation state sponsored censors" is possibly true, can it not also be possibly true that ideologues do the same thing (consciously or not), knowing that so-called flamewars can (and often does) lead to censorship?
Oh for sure...it's a symbiotic relationship, kind of like a non-coordinated conspiracy, something that is a lot easier to pull off than most people think. It's funny how many people seem to only be able to recognize the obvious herd-like behavior of people under certain topics of conversation, but if you change the topic then it is ~"literally impossible".
It so happens that we've entered a period where technology, morality, ideology, etc. are converging - to censor those who wish to talk about these connections would seem very antithetical to a culture of inspiring bright minds, innovation, and technological advancement for the good of mankind.
I for one have never shied away from a "hot headed" argument. Imho, I feel that as adults it is our responsibility to voice our opinions even in times when that opinion will contrast with another. In fact, sometimes it is crucial to do so as often times the most important arguments to be had are the most heated.
I believe the HN esk counter-point would be that HN is not the proper forum for those kinds of discussion. Imho, there is no "proper" forum for these kinds of discussions. They simply need to be had, more now than ever in my lifetime, on every street corner, and in every shop.
Might it be because threads like these often cause toxic, rude, unproductive, and generally tribal discourse in the comments?
Looking around the comment threads, I certainly don't see a lot of intellectual curiosity being stimulated or minds being expanded. I see a lot of dogmatic accusations, hyperbolic bemoaning-the-downfall-of-civilization, and general "how could you possibly believe that?!"-toned rudeness. Not our finest hour.
I do, and the kind of stuff that I see greyed out at the bottom is usually something I see floating around the middle of the page in other popular communities.
Hacker news and dang in particular has a very good track record of even handed and well thought of moderation. They have definitely earned benefit of the doubt from me. Let's wait a little before bringing the torches.
That's not a log, not even close. It's a link to dang's comment history, not a list of every comment/submission that has been deleted by the moderation team.
Go ahead and downvote me, doesn't make what I'm saying wrong.
The moderation is 100% transparent and you can see a log of every comment/submission that a moderator has removed. Furthermore, each subforum can control their own moderation team through a voting system. Moderators should serve their users, not rule over them as dictators.
I would think that having more transparency (eg: moderation/removal log) is much more appropriate than "he looks good to me".
I've already seen a few times where content demeaning YC companies mysteriously got disappeared... and then summarily blamed on automated removal. Who's right? No clue. But being able to see that log as it happens would be a significant good faith action.
This leads to am interesting security question: how to achieve real transparency?
I mean HN could publish a ranking algorithm and claim that that is what they use. But then we still wouldn't know
(1) if that is really what's running in the background,
(2) if that is really receiving user inputs that lead to the observed outcome.
I'm guessing for most people here the programming assignment "create a fake log including these real inputs so that this story is suddenly dropped according to the ranking algorithm" isn't that hard.
I think that in the end, you end up trusting something. (Eg. Is the log fake or real?)
IF that is so, you might as well design the system around a predetermined root of trust... here, the moderators.
I also think that "real transparency" is something one can approach. Just because complete transparency is nigh impossible doesn't mean the steps towards it is worthless. And there is always a lower layer one can point at that is opaque... right down to the silicon.
YC wound down YC China, but still committed to funding Chinese companies[0], in a blog post carefully written to avoid explaining YC's motivations. And beyond that - how much Chinese money is invested in YC startups? How many YC companies have exited by bringing Chinese money to YC's coffers?
I have absolutely no idea, but I'd bet it's extremely little because I've never heard of anything. In any case, this strikes me as weak sauce. You can make up purity tests to accuse anybody of anything, and if you choose to read that blog post as signifying "support for the Chinese regime", that is entirely your fantasy.
In any case, this has zero effect on HN moderation. It had zero effect while YC China was being set up, zero effect while YC China was being wound down, and zero effect regardless of whatever "Chinese money" you're referring to, which you seem to know more about than I do. The only effect any of this has on HN moderation is people making up dark insinuations about it and posting them to HN. I expect that kind of thing from trolls but it's pretty weird to see you stoop to it.
I respect you as a moderator and I think that on the whole, you do a good job - but ultimately, the YC logo is up there on the top left of every HN page. You have earned the presumption of goodwill in almost all of your moderation actions, but when incentives favor YC, you need to (and will always need to) go out of your way to prove that you're addressing these issues without bias.
I saw your comment earlier about this particular case - the flamewar detector went off. This would be a good thing to bubble up somewhere for transparency. I've mentioned many times that a public moderation log for HN would be a very good idea, and it would avoid scenarios like this entirely.
Again, I have a lot of respect for you as a moderator, but that is dependent on being able to push back when HN moderation fails. I've gone to bat for you before; it's only fair that I get to criticise you, too. Maybe this was a bit of a low blow, and I apologise for that, but it highlights places where HN moderation can be improved all the same. I don't think that pushing to have all of these discussions in private is going to be acceptable.
I also experienced this on numerous Chinese government-related posts in the past, where front page articles were not flagged, but quickly disappeared. Don't really have an explanation. Would be great if @dang can look into this.
I seriously doubt that there’s anything to “look into” from @dang’s perspective. A huge share of his moderation lately is focused on “nationalistic flamewar”, and from his perspective, it’s probably easier for any thread that might tend towards that to just quietly sink off the front page.
Unfortunately it's nowhere near that easy. Some of the stories that overlap with nationalistic flamewar are well on topic for HN. This is one. The recent TSMC stories come to mind. Really there are many of them.
While not all comment-wars are flame-wars I know what you mean. I've been involved in a few. Trouble is, if the chinese trolls cause enough trouble that the mods are happy to let the thread vanish[1], the trolls have won. Scratch that, china has won, because there's a strong reek of high-level organisation behind it.
[1] Assuming that's what is occurring; I don't know.
I had a similar thing happen to my post [1] a month or so ago — one minute it was #1, then after a refresh, it vanished. No flag (that I know of), no explanation.
When things happen like this, explanations are helpful to the submitter and/or the commenters, whichever was causing the problems.
I suppose this opens things up for debate, but not sure a silent removal of content is great for the community either.
Seems like a child comment has been detached from this thread and moved into a separate top-level thread, that is currently at the top (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223772), while its' former parent (comment that I'm currently responding to) has been moved to the bottom (2nd page). QED.
If we're downweighting an off-topic subthread A, but it has a subthread B which is actually on-topic, we sometimes detach B so that it doesn't get pulled down by its parent. This is a good example. In this case A and B were almost completely unrelated.
"Don't solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions. Users should vote and comment when they run across something they find interesting—not for promotion."
(I didn't downvote or flag your comment, just wanted to let you know about the guideline.)
Thanks for the reminder! I read that at some point.
The problem with this is exactly what I'm trying to address in the AskHN submission: the probability of a random person running across interesting content is much smaller, than that of a group of users with agenda, who monitor new submissions/comments on a constant basis, as they appear.
I.e. there's a non-zero probability that my controversial submission looks interesting to several random people, and maybe they even give me an upvote, but at the same time there's a 100% probability of being flagged and never making it out of "new". In my opinion, this misbalance completely breaks the moderation system.
I also don't appreciate it when comments are detached from their parents without a note from the moderators. I've had a few comments taken completely out of context because they were detached from their parent into their own top-level comment.
I've participated in several active, somewhat neutral threads here that have disappeared entirely from the site with no indication that they have. Unable to find by browsing backwards by new or backwards from front page.
The one in question was that new Michael Moore documentary. There was a lively discussion, but obviously didn't fit the established narrative here, and it was disappeared.
Isn't it more likely it was flagged off the front page by overly-enthusiastic users?
I'll also admit that this link, to a support thread, is more compelling than the Ask HN, where half the comments were questioning whether the phenomenon was actually happening.
Yes. I believe some topics get removed by sufficient community flagging alone, no intervention by mods. If true, then this feature can be abused by users with agendas.
Yes, and within how short of a time span all those flags came in!
A post that's regularly being flagged by 0.0X% of logged-in users will have different behavior than one that gets fairly few flags for many hours and then suddenly gets 30 within a five minute period.
> Isn't it more likely it was flagged off the front page by overly-enthusiastic users?
It's a wild guess either way.
Increased transparency like mandatory reason for flagging, and anonymized stats on flagging per userid including not just aggregate numbers, but also flagged post titles (so ideological patterns could be observed per topic) would improve trustworthiness that HN is an impartial platform, and there are no technical limitations in doing this, although it would require a bit of one-time work. It would be interesting to know why we have some stats here, but not others.
But unless this greater transparency is provided some day, we will have to run on faith, just as other religious people have faith as the basis of trust in their God of choice. Everyone has faith in their axioms, it just doesn't seem that way, in no small part because the mind tends to not let you think in that manner, even if you try.
Is that more likely? Should it be that easy for a user to flag an article that's trending so far upward?
If it is that easy, maybe we should discuss the flagging system because it gives the ILLUSION that it was taken down because there's a conflict of interest.
Perhaps there is an innocent explanation? Or are HN users not smart enough to decide for themselves and indeed tear apart controversial views on the burning topic of the day should the arguments presented warrant such treatment?
That one was flag-killed by users (I've turned that off now). Moderators didn't see it.
The combination of taking an extreme contrarian position and presenting it in a grandiose and inflammatory way is pretty reliably fatal. I'm of two minds about that. On the one hand, I don't like to see contrarian views get killed for being contrarian. On the other hand, if the initial conditions of a thread are that inflammatory, we're guaranteed to get a flamewar, which is bad for this site.
This is very worrisome. If we cannot as computing professionals raise the alarm about censorship and tech abuses on a primary forum for computing professionals, what options are left? Ethics is an important part of what we do for a living. We cannot back down from that now or ever.
HN is extremely corrupt in that way, but don't worry, my reply to you will be flagged and people will continue to ignore HN's extreme biases, and ideological agenda.
Same thing happens with JoeBiden.info on facebook. You can't send it in messenger, facebook will tell you it's blocked. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before google manually adds it to the "unsecure websites" list
Surprised how everyone just reads the title and no one is discussing whether "Google deletes comment globally" as reported by a single forum post by "Anti-communist hero" who posted one time in 2019 is factually true.
I find it so ironic that the reason for censoring a slur against communism is because a capitalist company stands to lose revenue from angering the government of China.
No, they're pro-people-who-call-themselves-Communist-and-also-have-a-lot-of-geopolitical-power-and-market-share. China is most certainly a capitalist state through and through, and Google is a money-grubbing company whose sole motive is profit. It really isn't hard to talk about these things in frank terms without resorting to silly culture-war-style name-calling.
China has a stock market [1] and 389 billionaires [2], second only to the US. A decidedly un-communist state of affairs... In reality they are an authoritarian capitalist surveillance state.
Not even the most anti-china, anti-communist person in the world operating on half a brain cell would call china communist. How are you buying things from china with capital if they're communist?
Google left the mainland Chinese market long ago and all of its services are blocked there.
The most likely explanation is that some mainlander inside Google has been pushing for this with the "this is racist and hurting the feelings of the Chinese people" argument.
> ...we can just use Google to find information that directly contradicts your claim.
Not really. Google hasn't returned to the mainland market. Youtube is blocked.
That little bit of developer interaction or Project Dragonfly - whatever its state may be - does not contradict that.
If you believe this sort of censorship is ordered from the top in order to get back into the mainland market, that's fine. I still prefer my explanation.
Did you read the article you linked? It's no longer prefacing the code of conduct, but it's still included in it. They moved it from the opening statement to the closing statement.
Despite four comments now incorrectly posting otherwise, it has never once been removed from the code of conduct.
"And remember… don’t be evil" the way its written at the end of the code really feels like a sarcastic wink, like "don't be evil" is a joke that they know they don't actually follow.
They've dropped it and added it back then dropped it and so on
I realized first hand they did evil in 2013 (stomping on and or blantantly stealing tech from those dreamers they inspired to dream/do/innovate) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
Actually, this is more like: “In other news, you are in China now.”
I don’t care that much about how Chinese citizens let their 共肥 party censor them, but it’s not ok when I am being censored for speech that could be considered offensive to the communist party of China.
Nope. Well, sort of, but not really. It's more like. You are on Earth now. All the big govs work together at the highest levels. The whole nationalistic shtick is for us proles down here in the bleachers, working the boilers, eating scraps. You know, like entertainment? Something to get all excited about, like.
And all govs control info. Democracies just pretend they don't (they do it covertly, through narrative control, disinfo, etc). Social media now presents them with a problem. They have to censor platforms, which makes it overt.
This is against the historical trend of democracies modus operandi for information control. Brave new world out there!
Edit (this thread now has restrictions, can't reply you, below, so here):
I mean more "nationalistic shtick" as in the trope of "US vs China" or "US vs Russia" etc. They have to be able to start a profitable war, for something, right?
All the same...expanding the argument (as you have) to the "truths we hold to be self-evident", well, they are unfortunately not implemented in as iron-clad a way as us proles would think. It should be obvious. I love the US, living there, the people, the environment, everything about it...aaaannndd....structurally, you can't really say that the debt trap, opioid epidemic, Wall St bailout, social division deliberately inflamed by the media, covert info control and surveillance, democratic "theatrics" that stymie results, really equates with "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" can you, chum?
I mean, I sort of agree with you a little bit, even, in a way. It is sad. And I do think it is an impressive argument. Yes. Very much! ツ
Edit (to your edit ツ): Yes, the Muslims in camps, that is a hard thing for Westerners to get their head around. It's funny, tho. I wonder about it, for a few reasons:
- Western tech supports the security in XJ
- China has protected Russian, and US interests along its Western (Central Asian) borders with regard to the countries there, the Tajik, Afghan and Pakistan areas. It could have caused plenty of troubles for US/Russia there, but on the face of it their security interests align. And honestly, who do you think is coming across the Afghan-Chinese border (or via Tajik) and doing some of the interrogations in the detention centers, working right alongside Chinese? You guessed it, the [C_A] ツ.
- I would have thought an American would be more supportive of counter-terrorism/deradicalization/counter-narrative. Being soft on sepratist terrorists almost seems like being an apologist for terrorism. Something I know no American would ever do...I'm sure. :P Especially considering how tough the English speaking world has been on terrorists in the Middle East. I can't imagine them standing up to support Islamic terrorism in XJ, or is that just because it's against CN and it's like "enemy of my enemy is my friend"? But truth is CN no your enemy. Really no!
- The XJ narrative is actually cooperative propaganda between US/China. 90%+ of "whistleblowers/defectors" are Chinese disinfo agents working this psyop. Preparing for the "great discrediting" that will come. The remaining ones are fakes/unaffiliated individuals trying to get attention. The real story is: There is strong CT presence in XJ, but the "camps" is fake news, as you say. People apply to go. Like college. And yes, some people wish they were not there, just like college! But they can leave. Only people who are "detained" are terrorists, exactly like in the US.
- This XJ propos is a complex info strategy but boils down to:
1) an overly critical narrative works to support China (just like the overly critical MSM actually supported President Trump into election because it fired up his base);
2) regular Chinese, seeing how crazy and fake is Western coverage of XJ, begin to distrust more and more Western media, helping the Party;
3) eventually, when the time is right, XJ will be revealed as to have been wildly-mis-assessed by Western media, in a "mea culpa" moment that boosts Chinese world image, and plays to the idea of it having been unfairly "maligned and mistrusted".
4) For the US side, anything that supports criticism of China plays well domestically for racist/nationalist reasons, and can be used to fire up a base,
5) Also for US, anything extremely emotive and triggering, can be used to make proles act irrationally and distract them, and also thereby to grease the wheels for other moves such as law passage, etc. It's also a distraction to how they're working together.
It's all just calculations designed to take the global proletariat to a destination, through the best path. Path has to be right for each country's circumstances. So each country needs their own story. That's all it is. Don't worry about it. As long as you obey the law, you'll be fine.
I hope this "red pill" doesn't taste too bitter. I'm not trying to rock your worldview. Nor offend you. Actually I hope you feel a little more a peace about everything. The world doesn't have to be perfect, nor make perfect sense...but it's all still OK. Focus on the stuff that matters to you. Ignore the noise because it's a lie, and it's gonna happen anyway. You still have a lot of power to make your own life good.
>And all govs control info. Democracies just pretend they don't (they do it covertly, through narrative control, disinfo, etc).
Wishful thinking. "Narrative control and disinfo" are categorically different than banning expressions, opinions, theories and thought. The scale and types of information control are not on comparable levels.
There are always contradictions inherent in governance. There are always both open and classified activities. There are always those peoples/departments/regimes that seek to stretch or overstep rules or norms.
But you can't group it all and say "Great Firewall is equal to think tank lobbying."
What citizens, businesses, platforms, politicians and basically every other entity is allowed to say in a free country vs. China is on different planets.
> [XJ secret master plan]
Citations needed. Testimonials of citizens and family members dealing with camps are more convincing than wide-ranging, decontextualized, strung-together internet rants about XJP's secret genius plan.
But yeah about the rest, you're probably right. I can't prove any of what I say to you, and one reason is I don't think you'd take, "just trust me, I'm right", as proof.
I hope you don't believe me. It is sort of an awful thing to believe in.
What can I say? I guess I'm a bit of a nutter. Maybe more than a bit. Definitely more than a bit. Conspiracy theorist whackjob if you will.
I like your ellipsis "XJ secret master plan". Nice quote style. Very funny. Perfect for nutty comments :)
Your reply sounds crazy, like a conspiracy. I don't want to believe it, but I have to admit this helps to explain something, you gave me a fresh and interesting view to think about the narrative.
You can't break the site guidelines like that. We've had to ask you about this many times before. Your comment would be fine without the first sentence. (No, I'm not defending the opposite side of the argument. I'm defending HN's guidelines, which please follow.)
Where does it say that hate speech is about immutable characteristics? Is that your subjective personal definition?
Advertisers really don't care that much (and I'm speaking as a 12 year adtech veteran). They play into popular culture and are being carried along with the increasingly sensitive social environment online. Also we're talking about comments, not video content, and it's futile to try and control how others react.
> "It can be easily identified using a few easy qualifiers."
Anyone can find anything offensive and hateful. That's the opposite of easily identified.
> "Most people who have trouble defining hate speech are people who, at least partially, agree with it."
Because it's subjective, according to who's defining it.
Here's the first result from Googling "hate speech":
> public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation
I might broaden the final bit to "immutable characteristics" instead of the specific list they provide. For the same reason, I probably wouldn't consider the comment under discussion hate speech, but I'm really curious what you find difficult about that definition.
Edit: see the followups for why something that is a social construct can be immutable, since multiple people have made the same flawed response.
Encouraging violence has clear rules under the 1st amendment which is covered in my original comment.
What does "expressing hate" mean? Why does it matter what characteristics are used? Is it ok to "express hate" based on the clothes you wear or job you do? If you remove the characteristics, then it just says hate speech is speech that expresses hate. It's a tautological and useless definition.
> Is it ok to "express hate" based on the clothes you wear or job you do?
Morally? No I don't think we should go around expressing hate much at all. It's not productive and, well, hateful. I think the question you mean to ask is "do you believe that expressing hate based on your clothes or job should be censored to the same extent that hate based on immutable characteristics is?"
The answer to that question is also no. This is mostly due to the relative dangers. Hate speech can (and does!) lead to dehumanization and discrimination. Nipping that in the bud is worth it. But creating the outgroup needed for discrimination is much more difficult if it's based on a job or an item of clothing (unless that item of clothing is something you're required to wear that identifies you with a specific immutable characteristic, like a star or pink triangle).
> So hate speech is speech that expresses hate?
No, you keep changing the definition. I don't. Please stop. Your definition is useless because you keep changing it to one that you feel is useless. If you refuse to use the definitions that others use, and instead you only use one that you've defined with the intent to be nearly useless, then yes, you will find the term useless. The rest of us will continue to ignore your trolling.
I never stated a definition, only questioned them. There's been several posted, changing from immutable characteristics to others like religion, and now also including clothing. Basically any characteristic can be used to group people, in which case mentioning a list of characteristics isn't useful for the definition.
So after that, you're left with "expressing hate". So please, solve for that. What does that mean exactly?
We’re going in circles. The definition you quoted says hate speech is "...speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as...".
"Towards a person or group based on something such as" => people defined by whatever characteristic (can be anything since there's no correct list to judge by).
"encourages violence" => This is a crime, already covered in the First Amendment which I said is is a good enough policy.
"expresses hate" > WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
Please explain how the primary statement of "hate speech is speech that expresses hate" is useful as a definition.
> This is a crime, already covered in the First Amendment which I said is is a good enough policy already.
No, the first amendment doesn't protect speech that incites violence. Incitement and encouragement are different things. "Punch a Nazi" encourages, but doesn't incite violence, unless one is at a Nazi rally and there are nazis standing next to you.
Similarly, "we should kill the blacks" or "we should push the Jews into the sea" encourage, but don't incite violence against a group based on immutable characteristics.
To your response, "expressing hate" is pretty much self explanatory. A dictionary would define it as "profess a dislike of". I think that definition suffices, and I don't know why you need someone to explain this to you.
Fine, so hate speech is speech that "expresses hate and encourages violence". Please explain what "expressing hate" means?
---
Replying to your edit: "To your response, "expressing hate" is pretty much self explanatory."
Great, so we're still left with "hate speech is speech that expresses hate..." which is completely tautological and useless. Do you not see the problem there?
Even if we replace it with "profess a dislike of", it remains useless. Do you consider disliking any group of people based on any characteristic to be hate speech? Do you realize how common this is? Is every single Democrat and Republican now engaged in hate speech? Is everyone on either side of a debate now engaged in hate speech? What do we do now?
No, you continue to ignore the whole immutable characteristics aspect. I get that you don't lie to recognize that part because your whole tautalogical line stops working, but it remains.
So we're back to step 1. Hate speech is only based on immutable characteristics? There's no issue if you target people based on clothes, wealth, sports team, political affiliation, etc? The definition you quoted included religion so was that incorrect?
Like I said last time you asked this: I certainly think it's wrong/rude, but I also don't think there's any news to remove such speech, as the negative impact is minimal.
Great, then Google is not removing hate speech because 共匪 is not an immutable characteristic. Instead they're censoring US citizens on a US property to appease a foreign authoritarian nation which would never let its own people have such freedom.
That's an interesting theory. But I don't think it holds up under deeper analysis. Specifically, there are lots of other phrases, including some that praise the CCP directly that are also removed.
Given this additional context, it seems much more likely that the real answer is something like "a bunch of spambots posted messages about communism in Chinese, and as a spam-prevention measure, certain strings were added to a list of auto-removed strings."
If you Google "hate speech", it shows the definition from Wikipedia, which says:
> Hate speech is defined by Cambridge Dictionary as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation".
So no, Google does not decide what hate speech is. They let Wikipedia decide, which happens to go with the Cambridge Dictionary's definition.
You're going to have a hard time convicing me that any of these are mutable. While the presentation of sex and sexual orientation may be mutable (someone can be female passing or straight passing) their orientation or sex itself is not. Similarly while someone can be white passing or codeswitch, their race itself cannot be changed.
Mutability of presentation doesn't make the underlying thing mutable. Nor does something being a social construct make it mutable.
To put it concretely, if I'm bisexual, just because I can date only opposite-gendered people doesn't mean that I'm straight. Similarly, just because race is in many ways socially constructed doesn't mean that I can stop being black or white or whatever, at least not without convincing society to change its definitions.
> I'm not the one making the argument. Other people are. And you are missing the point.
No, you're here, right now, making the argument.
> If you don't think you've made three hateful statements in one comment then you haven't been paying attention.
You're going to have to do more than type the word "racist" or "transphobic" to explain why the things I've said are transphobic or racist. I'm quite aware of the words I chose and the groups I chose. If you have a legitimate grievance as to why my statements were transphobic or homophobic, please explain. But short of that I have to believe you aren't commenting in good faith.
> Opinion and group identity are mutable
Sure. But the characteristics that people can pick to identify people as an out-group aren't. Once society has picked a definition of white, I can't stop myself from being under that definition. And while you're correct that it may, with time, be possible to change society's opinion on what is good or bad, in the meantime it harms a bunch of people discriminated against for things they have no control over. To those people, the characteristics society cares about are immutable.
So until society has progressed to the point that we don't give a shit what someone's race is (and don't tie it to a skin color or whatnot), and don't want to discriminate against people who are attracted to people of the same sex, we should prevent hate speech based on the immutable characteristics of race and sexual orientation.
> A trans-person can adopt the form of a male or female but can not actually become a male or female. It is impossible for that person to assume the reproductive function of the opposite sex. The characteristic is immutable.
You mistake my position. Perhaps disambiguation between sex and gender identity would clarify. Sex we can call chromosomal, and is mostly irrelevant to the rest of the discussion. Gender identity is what I perceive my sex should be. We should not discriminate on the basis of sex (the biological) or gender identity (the mental).
> The statement "trans-women are not female" is not hate speech under your definition. Correct?
Would be hate speech based on gender identity, the immutable trait.
> If so you are in an interesting position. You have a direct line of communication to our censor. I would encourage you to post on your company's discussion board "it is not possible for a trans-person to change their sex". Or "trans-women are not female". Or "sex-change operations can not change a person's sex".
Ultimately, of those three statements, I would consider the second hate speech, the third unambiguously true (and mostly uncontroversial, it neither changes biological sex nor does it change gender identity, it changes only presentation), and the first a generally true statement, though perhaps phrased badly: speaking strictly biologically, the answer is obviously no, speaking in terms of gender identity, the answer is still probably no because the question is malformed. One need not change your gender identity. It's immutable. One is free to change your physical appearance to better match your identity, and for some people a (to use the medical term) "Gender Confirmation Surgery" helps to better align their physical appearance with their identity.
Ultimately, we should neither discriminate based on what chromosomes a person has, nor based on someone's immutable mental image of how they should be. I don't really think I need to spend any time responding to the rest of your post, since it is based on faulty assumptions.
> Would be hate speech based on gender identity, the immutable trait.
Are gender fluid people considered under this definition? Having a gender identity might be immutable but gender identity is not static. It can change. That by definition is not immutable.
> Are you saying that the identity "genderfluid" is invalid, and one must pick one of the binary genders to identify with?
Not at all. I think you've just misunderstood what gender fluidity is.
Gender fluid is a class of non-binary gender expression. Non-binary is a spectrum of gender identities. Gender fluidity by definition is the ability to fluidly transition between different gender identities.
Gender identity is itself a personal sense and how you sense your gender can change if you are gender fluid.
So I ask again:
> Are gender fluid people considered under this definition?
And now I have a few more questions:
Are you willing to admit your previous statements can marginalize people and strip them of their identity? Are you willing to accept that your previous statements are, in fact, hate speech according to the social morays of our time? Should your innocent mistake be removed from the internet for fear of harming a gender fluid person?
> Not at all. I think you've just misunderstood what gender fluidity is.
This is certainly possible! But if someone is genderfluid today, and genderfluid tomorrow, they are genderfluid immutably, are they not?
I could be wrong, but from the genderqueer people I know, identifying as male one day and female the next isn't normally how they describe it, instead they wish to present as (note: this is not the same as "be". Gender expression vs. identity) one or the other, or even wish to present as more masculine or feminine. It's not "I am a man" or "I am a woman", but "I am neither but I'm left with three choices: present as (more-)man, (more-)woman, or put in a lot of effort to present as explicitly neither".
Like I said though, I could be wrong. I'd love to hear about some people who view their gender identity the way you describe (or documentation thereof), it sounds interesting and would certainly be something for me to think about.
> Are you willing to admit your previous statements can marginalize people and strip them of their identity?
Not specifically, but for the purposes of discussion, absolutely, I can certainly agree that things I've said in the past have done the same.
> Are you willing to accept that your previous statements are, in fact, hate speech according to the social morays of our time?
No. Innocent mistakes do not a hate speech make. This indeed relies on context. Stating, apropos of nothing "trans-women are not female" is probably hate speech since the context doesn't really support it being anything else. But the same sentence, in the context of an example, stops being hate speech. I generally believe people are intelligent enough to use context clues to guide the decision making process. You're correct that this leaves us without a completely objective way of making decisions about hate speech, but that's no worse than any other system. We have no objective way of making really any decision when humans are involved in the loop. The idea that we can define perfect rules that will be able to objectively discern someone's motives and whether or not something is "good" or not is a programmers fantasy. But that doesn't stop us from having a legal system, for example, even if that system is full of context clues, human judgement, imperfection, inaccuracy, and much, much higher stakes than keeping online fora polite.
Great. This seems like a good place to wrap up then.
I think we can both conclude that automated censorship systems will fail because they fail to capture "context clues, human judgement, imperfection, inaccuracy".
And, I think you'll agree, proactive censorship systems are authoritarian by default (even if that authority is private). Their purpose is prevention not resolution. In that sense, there can be no trial, no jury, no judge, not even a plaintiff to accuse you.
So we move on from the corporate world and enter the legal world. The world of government. How best to determine and punish hate speech? Does intent matter if the offense was deep and damaging? Do you jail the author? Fine them? Destroy their works? I think no matter which path you choose you can draw comparisons to every totalitarian government that has ever graced this earth.
If I am nothing else I am a humanist. I believe in the progress of humanity -- all humanity. You, your friends, and the white supremacists who post pepe memes to scare and annoy them.
Time is long. Systems that we put in place now will be with us for generations. Society's attitudes will shift -- for better or worse. The only thing protecting us from each other are the systems we agree to. The systems that permit the most freedom at the least harm.
In my mind, there is no censorship device that can withstand time.
The system only fails if it doesn't do what it intends to do. If the system reduces harm in the long run, even if it is imperfect, it may be successful.
I believe humanity will progress faster if we're able to prevent certain classes of ideology from continuing to cause harm.
I never said anything about the government. We've been engaged in a discussion about YouTube comments, I'm not sure when the government got involved.
If you assume the censor is grossly incompetent and overreaching then they don't need a rule against hate speech, they can just label everything spam. And good fucking luck if you try to make a site where spam is never deleted.
This comment has no place being downvoted and grayed (as of the writing of this comment.) It's a direct sign of people misusing the downvote per guidelines.
You made your point very well across this subthread. The fact it's being downvoted is a truly great illustration of the particular fuzzy borders problem with policing speech that you point out.
Neither race, sex, religion or sexual orientation are "immutable characteristics". As proponents of "hate speech" teach us they are all social constructs. Moreoever, proponents of hate speech often wouldn't consider "punching up" as "hate speech".
Something being a social construct means that when we group people by the trait, the boundaries we use are socially defined. That does not make the underlying trait mutable.
Race, for example, is entirely defined by genetics and interpretation. The former is not mutable, and it doesn't matter that the latter is mutable.
It's like the difference between blue and green. The boundary is a social construct, but the way an object reflects light is an immutable characteristic. No matter what you classify an object as, you're making that decision based on an immutable characteristic.
As someone who's regularly on the receiving end of far-right anti-communist rhetoric that, in places I have lived, includes death threats and a reasonably credible suspicion government may soon want to arrest and disappear some people, I welcome some measure of hate speech suppression.
Before I hit submit, let me add a mandatory "burn, karma, burn" because I know what I'm stepping into.
Yeah, it's stunning that someone who's experienced motivated authoritarian repression is arguing in favor of the CCP's bullshit regime-preservation distortions on speech, thought and discourse.
You know who the global leaders of disappearing citizens they disagree with are?
Automated filters on a global communication platform instituted for bullshit, regime-appeasing reasons are not going to solve community-driven hate in localities.
Anyone motivated to hate you will invent as many slurs as they need. Warping our institutions to play whack-a-mole against bad actors is shooting ourselves in the foot.
At the risk of being branded insufficiently anti-chinese, anti-communist, or overly suspicious: I don't believe it.
I mean obviously I believe putting the comment in youtube will get it deleted. I just don't necessarily believe it means what it says or the reasoning is because Google is pro-China.
First off, 15 seconds all the time means automatic deletion. Is this really a common enough phrase that they have automatic deletion set up for communist bandits, how about communist yak-fuckers? That sounds pretty unlikely to be set to catch that phrase, so maybe it would just be caught by an automatic sentiment/profanity analysis. How about just yak-fuckers, how about bandits? I'm not going to try all these out myself because
I don't have the linguistic expertise to know if that ideograph means communist bandits, I do have some co-workers I could ask I guess, maybe tomorrow.
Everyone is asking about the phrase in other google services, well in Google translate it translates it as Gangsters when I go to English and Italian. The second one is pretty suspicious because Gangster isn't an Italian word but that's what it gave me a couple minutes ago.
I guess I will wait until later to see how this pans out before getting my rage fully on. rage cautiously in prep stage for now.
Will the people who previously defended YouTube/Google's other censorship come out of the woodwork again? It's not as if it is no longer a private website able to moderate its content however it desires.
Will they respond to this controversy with that then-popular xkcd strip[1] about how, "if you're yelled at, boycotted, have your show canceled, or get banned from an internet community, your free speech riots aren't being violated. It's just that the people listening think you're an asshole, and they're showing you the door."?
To all the people think "共匪" is hate speech, what do you think we should do with such a group that killed millions? Go check the history of CCP. Calling them "共匪" is a gross understatement.
Dude, I am from Europe. I don't care what government does it just that somebody does something. In fact, I think the Trump administration is probably perfectly suited to do this.
Dude, I’m in Europe too. If you think the Trump administration is “perfectly suited” to do anything... well, that’s your opinion and you’re entitled to it. I certainly don’t agree with you about that.
The left invariably requires censorship in order to give the impression of prevailing and being strong. Those who’s interests are in line with their values implement it.
Implying that “the Left” and the Communist Party of China are in any way comparable by referring to them collectively demonstrated a remarkable lack of political insight and a remarkable degree of intellectual dishonesty.
So I posted this last night [1], it got to the front page (77 points at the time) and after about an hour, it was gone... also missing from the Ask HN page.
I could imagine YouTube toeing the Chinese party line, but Hacker News? Really?! Is this about the Y Combinator fund not wanting to upset Chinese money?
