The UK is leading the charge for legislation [0] to force platforms to impose certain types of censorship. Youtube and the others are just getting ahead of curve. They have known what's coming since they were invited into No. 10 to discuss these issues with Theresa May and Amber Rudd in 2017.
The legislation is based on the principle that everyone has the right to say what they want to say, but they have no right to be heard by others. This phraseology was used by several during the recent committee hearings, including by Facebook employees for example. So it will effectively enshrine in law: shadow banning, delisting from Google search etc.
Also enshrined in the legislation is the principle of banning content which is 'legal but harmful to adults'. 'Harmful', amongst many other terms, is not defined.
Also enshrined in law will be the principle that certain types of 'journalistic' content will be protected from this censorship if it meets criteria to be decided upon by the new regulator, Ofcom.
This will be an enabling act. It is full, from front to back, of opportunity for scope creep through secondary legislation.
As I said, the UK is leading the charge with this, but the EU has been keeping pace [1]. I haven't seen similar in the US as of yet.
Truly Orwellian double-think on display in that legislation. "Legal but must be censored", "you can speak but not be heard" etc.
The root cause of this is that our society has forgotten how to argue for free speech as a moral case. We've taken it for granted for so long, we can't remember why it's good. Meanwhile the enemies of it have spent years steadily attacking it, often with lies (e.g. the numerous fake claims of Twitter bots controlling elections).
It absolutely blows my mind how many of my friends support soft censorship that supports their points of view.
I try to listen to podcasts, occasionally, that are contrary to my own beliefs, not because of free speech but rather to make sure that I don’t end up in a “bubble.”
Coincidentally, I listed to something by The Hill on YouTube last week and it was reasonably good because they had three people speculating on the future economy with slightly different points of view. Not great stuff but worth having on while I was cooking dinner. Also, as a liberal, there is a conservative think tank at Stanford University that I occasionally listen to, not always comfortable for me, but worth a little time every month.
Free speech, in supporting views different from own own, is so very important.
I tell this to my liberal friends all the time. You don't have to listen to the swill on Fox News, but you should at least listen to valid conservative viewpoints to understand why the disagreements exist in the first place, to understand why there is a range of views on any topic to begin with. Living inside a singular viewpoint bubble doesn't help anyone. The same people that insist that human sexuality is non-binary, and runs across a spectrum, hold near totalitarian beliefs on other topics. As a liberal, that attitude makes me sad.
Who would you consider a valid conservative if not the most mainstream conservative news organization? I have the utmost respect for David Frum and a lot of the "Never Trump" type conservatives who clearly actually believed in their principled ideas, but even they would tell you that they're a minority of a minority. It's often hard to tell if Fox News is leading or following mainstream conservative opinion (and of course it's never that simple), but clearly they track the majority opinions of people who consider themselves conservative.
I’ve found that thoughtful opinions are best sampled on an individual to individual basis and not easily found by reading articles from a news organization.
News orgs are rushing to print the story and (at most) only include small tidbits of reactionary analysis. It isn’t the fault of the individual as much as it is the medium. The medium inherently lacks depth.
Just some retrospective on this. The more I look into Michael Tracy, the more I find myself regretting suggesting him. Perhaps replace him with Dan Carlin.
Reason.com (libertarian rather than conservative, but thought is multi-axis anyway)
realclearpolitics.com (they are an aggregator, but host some of their own content at well that leans right)
nationalinterest.org
wsj.com
www.theamericanconservative.com
Faith affiliated:
thetablet.org
Deseret.com
tabletmag.com
And this site appears to exist to aggregate quality news from every angle:
After the mid-terms, any Section 230 protection these companies have is going bye-bye. Any kind of active moderation of perfectly legal speech through 'terms of service'/'community standards' will remove any common-carrier liability shield.
Actions like this have turned this into political red meat for some. These companies really need to learn how to read the room. Ratcheting downward the ability of people to freely use these platforms just feeds into whatever persecution complex they have, and justifies it. You don't get rid of bad ideas by allowing them not be spoken no matter how well meaning you are.
That is the wrong solution. The problem isn't people making content decisions, it's market concentration. They have too much market power and it lets them get away with too much hamfisted behavior without losing users.
They've already gone far enough for the market to start to solve this. Rumble and Gettr and whatever else are gaining users. But it's producing an ideological split which is pretty dangerous. The other platforms don't set out to attract only the right, but when the censorship by the incumbents is one-sided, it's them who want to leave for somewhere else. Which only makes the incumbents lean more to the left.
What we need is some way to get left-leaning people to move to platforms without excessive censorship, which would both keep the balance and deter the incumbents from continuing to be heavy handed.
A lot of this is cultural. The thing where people cheer because their ideological opponent got silenced is cancer and needs to go away. Everyone of all stripes should quit platforms that do this, and then they wouldn't.
This is kind of like the thing where violence is impermissible except in self-defense. We need to cancel anyone who tries to cancel anyone.
> What we need is some way to get left-leaning people to move to platforms without excessive censorship, which would both keep the balance and deter the incumbents from continuing to be heavy handed.
There's no shortage of people trying to make these platforms but the problem is free-speech oriented sites get deplatformed. "Build your own hosting company!", "Build your own mobile operating system!", "Build your own payment processor!", etc, etc. A small handful of tech and payment companies can veto any website or app.
It's like the old days of broadcast television where if your show was too controversial for ABC, CBS, or NBC it didn't get on TV, period.
> They have too much market power and it lets them get away with too much hamfisted behavior without losing users.
I agree, but Section 230 also contributes to this. It eliminates the legal consequences for that hamfisted behavior and enables these sites to grow far beyond their ability to properly manage the site.
It's often been said that clumsy AI moderation is necessary because there's no other way to moderate sites with so many users. If true, I see that as an argument against enabling sites to grow "too big to moderate" rather than an argument for excusing hamfisted behavior.
Further segmentation into boutique social media platforms that cater to different groups will just make this "Hypernormalization" even worse and lead to more political polarization.
I absolutely hate what’s going on here with YT, but I think I’d rather have a company making bad decisions on its own than having bad decisions mandated by fiat. A law demanding that YT keep particular content up is at least as distasteful as YT taking down content. If we hadn’t as a society cast tech as responsible for disinformation then we wouldn’t be here. We dug this hole, I don’t think we can legislate ourselves out of it.
In this election year, Republicans will, at the very least, retake control of the House of Representatives, making Kevin McCarthy, speaker of the house. There is also an opportunity for them to take control of the Senate, returning Mitch McConnell to his leadership role.
The far right despises technology companies, and there will be a huge push by their members to bring them all to heel.
It's not just the 'far right'. It's anybody who has an opinion which falls outside of the technocratic consensus machine at the current moment. Right. Left. Anarcho-Syndicalist. Mid-century UFO Cultists. It doesn't matter.
This is fundamentally a business decision driven by advertising: they don't want ads for dish washing detergent pixels away from someone Chomsky posting or Brandon posting. They want a stream of inane pablum for the Skinner box.
If the midterms result in more Republicans being elected -- which is a possibility -- it would be easier to vote through laws like this.
That risk is likely one reason why Biden's state of the union speech echoed Trump policies: strengthening the border, moving jobs (like chip manufacture) to America, improving police funding, etc.
The midterms won’t, but the Fed losing control of interest rates will. You’re going to see a lot of valuation disappear in the next year as the bubble deflates.
Fuck YouTube. If they're going to control what news I get, I'll choose other than YouTube. I do not need them. I have read from both hard left and hard right, and am intelligent enough to make my own decisions about what makes sense. Let them play their games, whether silly or dangerous. I form my own opinions. Losers!
This isn't about you, it's about the 30-40% of YouTube users who don't have that skill, and become radicalized and violent when stupid bullshit like this starts gaining traction.
YouTube isn't a news network. It's a video platform catering to a global audience, many of whom are really really bad critical thinking. Same with Facebook. We all know what happens when content isn't curated, and it's really, really bad.
I'm glad that you're an adult and can make your own grown up decisions, and actually get news from a wide range of sources, and curate it yourself. I obviously wish everyone had that skill, but they don't, and it's actually really really dangerous to take that privilege you've earned for granted.
Basically the only news that should be allowed is news that satisfies the mainstream political narrative so that folks are kept fully sanitized. This is far more important than silly things like freedom of speech. Any critical questioning of the "facts" is "misinformation".
Who cares later if the "misinformation" later is found to be true ? The most important thing is to obey and follow the will of the collective - set by the whatever the media overlords and political masters judge as "correct thinking". Any attempt to deviate from the same is "radicalization" and must be suppressed by any and all means.
So did Clinton about the 2016 election and she still claims the same. Along with her consistent hardline that Trump is a Putin Puppet - which is misinformation that has been proved false again & again at great expense to the taxpayer - but still gets published. Zero bans for her - since she is a cherished member of the political mainstream.
Technically videos of Clinton Making such claims violate the YouTube policy stated below, but, as you said, YouTube selectively enforces their policies only against those that are not part of the mainstream narrative.
“Election integrity: Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of select past national elections, after final election results are officially certified. This currently applies to:
Any past U.S. Presidential election
The 2021 German federal election”
We have proof that Trump tried to blackmail Zelensky into framing his political opponents by witholding aid they needed to defend themselves from Russia.
When Putin started his invasion, Trump praised him for being smart, then praised him again, suggesting he'd captured a whole country for a small cost in sanctions.
What do you think you're expressing when you say that Trump isn't a Putin puppet? That he's not made of wood?
And what about Joe Biden's proud public boast that he threatened to withhold aid if a Ukrainian prosecutor wasn't fired ? (who was investigating Burisma - the company whose board Hunter biden was on.)
Anyways, it's pretty clear that there are different standards for different people for news that gets published/censored/suppressed and most importantly amplified.
As Elon Musk said just today: "All news sources are partially propaganda, some more than others" - when he was told by governments (not Ukraine) that Starlink should block Russian news.
Yes, the person being blackmailed, said that the person blackmailing him, who was still in a position to blackmail him about the (now realised) invasion of his country, which is likely to end with his and his family's death, and potentially could be in the same position for four more years said there was no blackmail and specifically said
"“I don’t want to interfere in U.S. elections,”"
I don't find that decisive on the facts given everything else.
Stormy Daniels denied sleeping with Trump, because someone threatened the life of her child. It was and is still a true thing that happened.
The transcript was released by the White House and there are no threats made to withdraw Ukrainian aid - quite unlike the explicit and damning public statement made by Biden to withdraw aid, which is also captured on Video - but fails to get any publicity whatsoever as its deeply embarrassing for the favoured media darling. You can continue to speculate further but evidence doesn't fit your claim.
> Although the United States did withhold government aid to pressure Ukraine into removing the prosecutor,[5] this was the official and bipartisan policy of the federal government of the United States, which, along with the European Union, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, believed the prosecutor to be corrupt and ineffective, and too lenient in investigating companies and oligarchs, including Burisma and its owner.
You've got the vice-president on tape repeating the official government line in public? And you want this to be front page news? Why?
And why did Trump disagree with all those people, in the blackmail transcript you posted he seems a real fan of this person who is linked to Oligarchs and corruption. What's that all about?
I want this to be front-page news because Biden explicitly threatened the withdrawal of aid unless a prosecutor of a sovereign nation investigating his son's company was fired. This was the same threat that you accused Trump of and everyone castigated Trump for - which was proven false. But Biden gets a complete media-free pass for the same bald faced threat.
Biden's own words below:
In December 2015 -- he told Ukrainian officials: "We're leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor's not fired, you're not getting the money."
"Well, son of a bitch," Biden continued. "He got fired."
A classified US State Department email from 2016 shows a leading diplomat warning that Hunter Biden’s lucrative job with a Ukrainian energy company “undercut” American efforts to fight corruption in the Eastern European country.
I don't care what Trump agrees/disagrees with or who he is a fan of. Irrelevant to this discussion which started with a verifiably false accusation. The media has noticeably different amplification standards depending on who they do or do not favour.
>I want this to be front-page news because Biden explicitly threatened the withdrawal of aid unless a prosecutor of a sovereign nation investigating his son's company was fired. This was the same threat that you accused Trump of and everyone castigated Trump for - which was proven false.
Do you legitimately not understand that it was the perceived motivation and not the action that people dislike? No one cares about the Biden scenario because it takes five minutes of Googling to find out that the whole thing was over the British being mad the prosecutor didn't turn over documents potentially indemnifying Burisma to UK authorities when requested. Why would Biden be personally mad at a prosecutor for NOT indemnifying his son's employer?
>A classified US State Department email from 2016 shows a leading diplomat warning that Hunter Biden’s lucrative job with a Ukrainian energy company “undercut” American efforts to fight corruption in the Eastern European country.
I mean, yeah, I don't think anyone has ever claimed that Hunter Biden is someone who only makes smart choices that help advance his father's aims. Unless you're aiming to criticize Joe Biden as a parent instead of as a political figure, that's not relevant by itself.
Whatever Trump was doing to handle Putin certainly seemed to prevent Putin from doing any Ukrainian invading. I think Zelensky and the entire world would prefer more Trump phone calls and less Putin aggression right about now.
You know that the Russian army have been in Ukraine for Trump's entire term, right? One of his early big gaffes when running was to say "Russia won't invade Ukraine if he wins" and the journalist pointed out they already had.
Putin invaded in 2014 and 2022. Putin did not do additional invasions when Trump was president, he remained in the part of Ukraine he took when Biden was vice president.
Yes, because Putin was too busy enjoying the other things President Trump let him do.
Taken from someone else:
Trump had the US military abandon their bases in Syria and Russia promptly captured them.
Russia was caught paying bounties in Afghanistan for killing American soldiers. Trump did nothing.
After Putin seized Crimea, Obama put sanctions on Russia. Trump promptly got rid of those sanctions for his buddy, then declared that Crimea belonged to Russia, recognizing the legitimacy of their invasion.
Russia keeps creeping advancing the border with Georgia. They just literally move fences and markers at night and take land a few hundred meters at a time.
This happened during Trump's administration. Trump did nothing.
Belarus, which is a puppet for Putin, as he wants Ukraine to be, is run by his puppet dictator Lukashenko. Lukashenko won a clearly rigged election in 2020, leading to mass protests. A similar situation happened in Ukraine during Obama's administration, and we backed the protests and they ousted Yanukovych, and Ukraine was able to elect a free government that wasn't Putin's puppet. So when a similar situation arises while Trump was President, guess what he did?
The Trump Administration has gone AWOL on Belarus.
Guess who ran Putin's puppet, Yanukovych's campaign in Ukraine? Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. Then they became Trump's campaign manager and deputy campaign manager.
Putin invades Ukraine, Trump calls him a genius.
He's a Putin puppet. Putin had a puppet President of the US. It's fucking insane that this happened. But it did. Wake the fuck up.
"We don't rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia." -Eric Trump, 2014
Sorry, what administration did Putin start a war with Ukraine under? Interesting that the one who was Putin’s supposed puppet, ended up being a better puppet master than the elder experienced statesman we supposedly have in office currently.
I repeat: I think Ukraine, and the world, could do well with some mean tweets and mean phone calls in place of what we have now!
Cool, so we 100% attribute problems to whomever was President at the time? So George W. Bush is entirely to blame for 9/11, and Donald Trump is entirely to blame for Covid-19. Glad we cleared that up.
Or, maybe, prior administrations are at least partly to blame? And maybe you didn't even bother to read the list I gave you, of things Trump allowed Putin to do?
Trump was useful to Putin, sure, but the amount of actual leverage Putin has over the leader of a rival nation is vastly less than he does over his smaller neighbors who share land borders.
The obvious gulf between how Trump was useful to Putin and how his actual puppets are useful to Putin is all people not disposed to agree with you can see. It doesn't matter that your tangible points are correct if people immediately discard it over your emotional appeal.
Latest update: Trump's National Security Advisor says that Putin was waiting for Trump's second term, as after being re-elected he was going to withdraw the US from NATO:
The problem is not that these people aren’t smart. It’s a good bet that they are. The problem is that they aren’t sufficiently benevolent. Their narratives are fundamentally optimized to benefit themselves first, and then others.
Free speech limits power and increases competition, which is the most effective way to decrease rent seekers.
And you don't need to do any research harder than reading history to see this in LBJ's prosecution of the Vietnam war with the "best and brightest" he inherited from JFK.
When will the egotistical narcissism stop? This type of “I’m better than you” talk is not acceptable when it comes to race, how come it’s acceptable when the subject is intelligence?
If we extrapolate this, these narcissists would be asking for an end to the Universal adult franchise and say that only the "properly informed" people should be allowed to vote.
I've heard this argument in my country already from certain circles
That’s also what YouTube viewers think. Not making a decision, is also making a decision. Develop your own news curation source and stop relying on a corporation to do it.
If that is too difficult, perhaps consider the challenge the news org faces.
Everyone makes bad decisions. While you are angry at YT for what they have removed, are you also praising them for each thing they did not action? If not, you are getting upset about a very small percentage. That may be valid for your own issues, but it does not make it representative
If you ever wonder why other humans don’t support your issue, and your issue is not representative, perhaps that is your answer to make more sense of things.
> 30-40% of YouTube users who don't have that skill, and become radicalized and violent when stupid bullshit like this starts gaining traction.
Taking away their ability to hear different viewpoints especially those they believe to be true just drives these people to radicalize even further. I’m not even touching the matter of dismissing almost half of a country. Very shortsighted perspective.
I don't think that's true. They're probably referring to the people who fall down into alt-right/whatever radical group "rabbit holes." These people aren't radical from the outset. I'd say the real issue is the youtube algorithm, which causes the radicalization "highway" in the first place, but apparently youtube can't be bothered to fix their harmful algorithm, and would rather delete the content that is being promoted by it.
I guess you are not a humanist. Your perspective is that people are easily manipulated and need to be told by other people whom are easily manipulated how they should think.
It strikes me that the effort that goes into trying to outright suppress disinformation is also a waste of time. It leaks through anyway and the consequences of being seen to suppress it leads to distrust.
All that you can hope is that the person reading it is open to information and changing their mind. If they are not then there is nothing that can be done anyway.
I have been drawn into trying to evaluate this claim that the Czech Republic / Czechia has had a statement issued by its "Supreme Prosecutor" that anyone supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine will face criminal penalties. I would love to be able to go to a reputable media source to evaluate it. It is inordinately difficult to judge. I would prefer that the BBC/CNN/LA Times spent time debunking this sort of thing or confirming it. As it is I am on my own with nothing but a wall of flag-waving and emotional condemnation instead of investigative journalism -- that's what I want from the media -- not opinion pieces: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30560672
In looking at that story it was fascinating to see the struggle within the Czech Republic with various sides accused of being Russian mouthpieces and the establishment of state censorship apparatuses well in advance of this phase of the conflict with Russia.
> We all know what happens when content isn't curated, and it's really, really bad.
Not true because law enforcement is still in place to take care of crime. Some amount of crime and confusion are also the price you pay to get the benefits of freedom.
How about you type up a response to them, and if you phrase it better than I did, and get the message across more clearly that I did, then I'll delete my post and you can get all the attention?
I did my darnedest when writing that post, and I don't really think your meta-commentary is adding to the discussion.
People should be able to watch what they want without a midwit nanny policing their thoughts. Have you submitted your application to run the ministry of truth yet?
If you don’t understand how this kind of thinking is bad for the people and good for those in power I suggest you go and do some reading.
The current "moderation" is in line with their opinion and they don't want to imagine what will happen when that changes.
And YouTube gets no love because they also removed the dislike button (which is a much more robust way of moderation) because they didn't like the outcome
It's not about the phrasing but about the message.
How can it not be condescending to say "30% to 40% of people don't have enough intelligence to filter propaganda". Whether that's true or not is debatable but there's no phrasing it better.
Perhaps if you dropped your arrogance you would realise that other people in the thread don't share your opinion and don't want to get the same message across more clearly?
You and YouTube seem to share the same sentiment that you somehow are smarter in every way than the said 30-40% of the population.
Why would you assume that some machines at Google would always be better at weeding out misinformation than actual humans? There are obviously going to be a lot of false positives, but there are systems to compensate for that, and they seem to work well enough.
Actually, you're right. You made very good points here. I always assume other people are rational. While many are, many are not, and I often forget the latter. Thank you.
> "We all know what happens when content isn't curated"
Curation is about selection, not exclusion. As in selecting art for an exhibition on the basis of its value or quality. Curating is not about excluding or banning content via clumsy and vague censorship.
> "and it's really, really bad."
When trigger-happy censorship is the norm, really really really really bad things can happen.
> "become radicalized and violent when stupid bullshit like this starts gaining traction".
Bullshit like what? They (The Hill) were discussing and analyzing news, not propagandizing vulnerable youtube viewers.
It's disappointing you imply we need mandatory shielding from information, including analysis of news and events, with penalties for those not falling in line. Putin would agree with you. He threatens and shuts down media outlets for mentioning the word "war".
Mindless youtube viewers are not the tipping point to society meltdown.
I've watched a few 'The Hill' clips on youtube before, and I noticed they disagree with each other and provide alternate views. It's not a propaganda machine, so shouldn't be treated like one.
You may want your news and analysis to be grounded in loyalty to a monolith narrative and distributed via sanctioned memes. Others want more than that, such as counter-points, alternate views, robust debate, transparency and discussion. We learn more that way.
In my country Australia, we have a national "Q&A" TV panel show on the public broadcaster, covering news and politics. The idea is discussion, yet on the recent episode a young Russian Australian man was booted out of the studio audience because he mentioned he supported Putin's action in Ukraine. Instead of challenging the man's views, he was booted out live on air.[1]
> Hate speech, predatory behavior, graphic violence, malicious attacks, and content that promotes harmful or dangerous behavior isn't allowed on YouTube.
Is Pro-suicide or self-harm content right-wing? Because it's not allowed on YouTube.
Agree - I don’t need some “ministry of truth”. Figured out for myself that these “alternative” news shows on YouTube (The Hill, Breaking Points etc.) are populist garbage. This isn’t journalism, but sensationalist cherry-picking of facts with an unhealthy dose of opinion sprinkled on top.
All that being said: i think that censorship does way more harm than whatever nonsense these channels put out.
My understanding is that Breaking Points at least is mostly funded by direct donations to purposely protect them from censorship by YouTube. I take their perspectives with a grain of salt and their discussions can get long winded. However, in comparison to main stream media, these programs provide far more detail and context than a 2 minute soundbite of talking points straight from the White House or the CIA.
You form fewer of your opinions than you think. YouTube is taking responsibility for their platform, and I encourage you to show your displeasure to them.
I also encourage them to form their own opinions.
If you form your own opinions through a mediator, you will be deceived. If you form it via direct connection, you will be overwhelmed. Nothing is new or old, here. It is just difficult to have good opinions while also not letting your platform be abused.
Based on what I have seen and what I have heard people say, the principle of freedom of speech is probably dead in the west. People will give their sanctimonious justifications like "it only means the government can't censor not us," "it's freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences," or misuse quotes like Popper's intolerance towards intolerance, or Schenck v. United States's yelling fire in a theater, but in reality the principle of free speech is a foundational social element from which the law is built upon, not the other way around. If society doesn't believe in freedom of speech then it doesn't matter if the government upholds that standard for itself anymore. If we as a society aren't capable of having empathy towards people who have differing opinions instead of dismissing them, then censoring them after ignoring them has caused their beliefs to radicalize to a point, that is the recipe for making politics more entrenched, polarized and escalated than they already are.
Yeah just go build your own platform they will say as if it had not been attempted numerous times only to be censored off every hosting/ payment/ app platforms they could use or hacked to have all the personal information of their users doxxed because they had "bad opinions." Even the ones that actually exist just become hiveminds of their own because they become populated by people who have been censored everywhere else, as if having every community devolve into hive minded safe spaces is actually desirable.
> as if it had not been attempted numerous times only to be censored off every hosting/ payment/ app platforms
Was this really something that stopped any of the services?
>or hacked to have all the personal information of their users doxxed because they had "bad opinions."
Come on this is not fair. This was caused by these services choosing to hire low skilled developers. The guy building Parler didn't even understand the proper way to set up his authentication strategy nor did he really understand his database and its advantages/limitations. If anything, this should teach the other side to respect the effort that goes into developing these platforms(this disrespect for the skillset is something I see A LOT among the right wing youtubers I follow). They are so freaking proud to be not one of the "elites" by eschewing the desire for knowledge and a love of learning so much so that it bites them in the ass when they are booted off an existing platform and then realize this tech stuff is so hard.
>Even the ones that actually exist just become hiveminds of their own because they become populated by people who have been censored everywhere else, as if having every community devolve into hive minded safe spaces is actually desirable.
These platforms need to welcome the other side then, the ones doing the censoring.
The point I was trying to make was that the argument that you can simply make your own social network is disingenuous and isn't the solution, the fact that Google has continuously failed to do that one thing is a testament to how difficult it is. Then in the case of censorship, you have to deal with being a persona non grata that socially conscious people and institutions won't touch, and that you need to build it in like a month before any political momentum gained dissipates and people move on. Even if you manage to succeed after all that, and get adoption, all you have done is manage to create the same type of platform that censored you in the first place, with the only difference being that it is your hivemind of your own beliefs.
If the problem is that people don't know how to talk to each other anymore, and that isn't solved by creating more insular communities.
Creating social networks is easy. Getting Billions in investment to use to lure people into your walled garden so you can gamble on extracting even more billions from them later when they and their nwtwork are locked in is hard. Competing with competitors who have done the above and have near infinite money is hard.
There's a very obvious solution to this, and it involves government regulation.
>the fact that Google has continuously failed to do that one thing is a testament to how difficult it is
Their network had nothing to pull people into. Parler didn't have that problem, in fact, I hear it was doing relatively well until they collapsed due to their own technical incompetence.
>Then in the case of censorship, you have to deal with being a persona non grata that socially conscious people and institutions won't touch, and that you need to build it in like a month before any political momentum gained dissipates and people move on.
Again it seems like we had evidence of a platform that managed to overcome this. Maybe I could have my memory wrong but Parler started off small, got promoted quietly by right wing people but was somewhat ready to organically grow as discontent grew among right wing people on existing platforms. Maybe it was just a honeypot all along (as some say) but it feels like they could have been an example that disproves your theory. The pieces were definitely there.
>Even if you manage to succeed after all that, and get adoption, all you have done is manage to create the same type of platform that censored you in the first place, with the only difference being that it is your hivemind of your own beliefs.
I wonder if liberal people went on Parler and confronted right wingers. I know they gladly ban people for doing the same on /r/Conservative but Parler being a "free speech" platform I wonder if they just let people be as they are.
I disagree, if you don’t like it you can move to another platform. No one is forcing you to use it. For that matter “The Hill” can create their own. Always silly, the entitlement to someone else platform based on some misunderstanding of censorship and the 1st amendment.
The only silly argument I hear is when people think any discussion of censorship must involve the first amendment, or that complaining about censorship implies being forced to use a product.
If I go to a restaurant and eat some food and complain that food tasted awful, I am not saying that the restaurant should be forced by the government to make good food nor am I saying that everyone is forced to eat at that restaurant. I'm simply saying that the product served to me was not good.
Similarly when someone complains about Youtube engaging in censorship, you should not interpret that to mean that Youtube is infringing on first amendment rights, or that everyone is forced to use Youtube... rather it's an argument that the product Youtube provides is not as good as it could otherwise be. People are welcome to have an opinion and discuss whether Youtube's policies improve its service or are detrimental to its service without it devolving into a discussion about legal rights and government enforcement.
You can disagree with a position about censorship and make good arguments that Youtube censoring certain content or being the arbiter of truth makes for a better product, just as you can disagree with someone about whether a restaurant serves good food... but don't change someone's argument about the quality of a product into an argument about someone being forced into something or having their rights violated since no one ever made any such claim.
The restaurant isn't forced to make good food. But in this analogy isn't it more like the restaurant being forced to put up a poster of your bad review? The overall point being made is, why should a private entity be forced to do something they don't want to do?
No one is forcing Youtube to do anything, all we're doing is criticizing Youtube for its policies which we believe make Youtube a worse product than it would otherwise be. Criticizing a video game, or a movie, or a restaurant or a streaming service does not imply the use of force to do anything nor does it imply having to get the government involved. It just means we think a product could be improved upon.
I think Youtube would be a better product and better serve their viewers and content creators if they didn't suspend The Hill for playing a clip of Donald Trump. My belief in this does not imply any use of force whatsoever.
Okay, but the problem here is you're making a moral statement based on what YouTube is, making it an is-ought problem. Youtube ought to share the message of a president who incited a riot and tried to overthrow a democratic election, because it is blocking it.
You're not addressing why YouTube is blocking it or the state of it's own rights as a private platform, just making blanket moral statements about opinion.
No the point is whether YouTube is better if it allows us to evaluate. I want YouTube to show me darker news and also keep my kid entertained without worry. I don’t want to be treated like the child here though. If I click on a Ukraine war video or I want to find a quote from trump to pick apart there should not be filters preventing it.
The product is better if I am in control. YouTube ought to stay out of it. It does not know my intent. If it guesses wrong it should be criticized, just like a restaurant guessing at my food preferences and allergies.
> I want YouTube to show me darker news and also keep my kid entertained without worry.
This is a different argument.
You already have the agency of being in control, you can pick any platform to watch from. Youtube is exercising it's own right to censor, similar to how you want to censor for your kid, based on what you think is harmful.
Reality is any platform without moderation turns into a cesspool. Individually you want to be in control, but in aggregate the product rots. I can’t really think of any user generated content product without some form of control that hasn’t turned into complete shit. If you know of any please enlighten me.
But you are saying in this analogy that the restaurant should post negative reviews from its customers, say on its website. Why should they? It’s not like they’re taking down negative reviews (videos) from things they don’t own.
I have. Nobody is saying that YouTube should post negative reviews of itself. We're saying that a website which pretty much has a monopoly on hosting videos shouldn't abuse its position by trying to be the “ministry of truth”, and it's fair to criticize it even though it's legally allowed to do that.
Isn't the basic question, should youtube be forced to do something it doesn't want to? In this case, host videos it finds objectionable for whatever reason. Same way they don't allow porn for example. From the way I see it there are only a few options:
1) Youtube hosts everything that's legal, no filters at all
2) Youtube decides what it does and doesn't host
3) Somethings are ok (e.g. news / fake news), others are not (porn). Who decides what's ok and not ok if it's not the legal system or youtube itself?
> you should not interpret that to mean that Youtube is infringing on first amendment rights
It is much more like 14th Amendment rights and the 1964 CRA enhancement of that. There are prohibitions on private organizations denying equal service based upon certain characteristics.
As Twitter, Youtube, Facebook are not actually broadcasters in any sense (what are they broadcasting?), their refusal to conduct business with others can't be cloaked in 1st amendment grounds. No one is forcing anyone to watch anything on any of these platforms.
The crux of this issue is political affiliation is not a protected class, and therefore it can be discriminated against. (And we do have non-immutable, changeable characteristics as protected classes.)
Any of 1) section 230 clarifications or changes, 2) expansions of protected classes under the 14th, or 3) monopoly regulatory power will make these prohibitions invalid.
Political association is a choice and is thus not a protected class.
There is a certain U.S. political party who has a persecution fetish that makes bad faith statements about their opinions needing to be protected, but I'll let you figure out which one it is.
The Civil Rights Amendment has no protection for political speech. I wonder how Trump’s new “Truth” platform would feel about being forced to post information discrediting his claims?
The First Amendment is always relevant to cases of free expression in the United States. It is what gives YouTube the right to control what is on their platform.
No it's not always relevant, in fact it's mostly a distraction that does nothing to contribute to the substance of the discussion. There is almost nothing of value to be gained by pointing out that Youtube is a private company that has the right to censor or serve any content it so chooses anymore than it's relevant to point out that a restaurant has the right serve shitty food and if you don't like it you can go to another restaurant.
Everyone already knows this... so instead of constantly bringing it up to make ourselves sound smart, let's instead actually discuss something more meaningful, such as whether the food served by the restaurant really is shitty? What reasons might a restaurant have for serving shitty food, do they perhaps gain financially from it? Would it be more effective to work with the restaurant to get them to stop serving shitty food, or would it be more effective to open up a restaurant next door that doesn't serve shitty food? What are the trade-offs?
Those are more interesting topics rather than pointing out the fact that a restaurant has the right to serve shitty food and you can't force them not to.
It’s true that YouTube is a private entity and should be able to do whatever is in its profit maximizing interest.
But, the issue that people are starting to react to is - are some platforms a natural monopoly?
Is it useful to have all user-generated public video clips be aggregated by one central provider? The answer seems like it’s yes.
If there’s only gonna be one platform, or it’s socially optimal to have one platform - is it right to give control of that to one entity into perpetuity?
> But, the issue that people are starting to react to is - are some platforms a natural monopoly?
No.
> Is it useful to have all user-generated public video clips be aggregated by one central provider? The answer seems like it’s yes.
The answer is no.
Vimeo exists. Facebook and Twitter both feature user-generated video content. I hear TikTok is a thing. In addition to these platforms basically anyone can self-host in 2022. Plenty of news outlets self-host.
> If there’s only gonna be one platform, or it’s socially optimal to have one platform - is it right to give control of that to one entity into perpetuity?
You have not made the case that there should be only one platform so the second part of your statement is irrelevant.
> That a political question.
Only for people who want to say things without suffering the consequences.
Yep, popular != monopoly, especially given the number of easily accessible alternatives.
Given the state of cloud computing in 2022, there has never been a time that it has been easier to host your own video streaming, so it's not a natural monopoly either.
The answer is not yes or no. The answer is whatever a large enough portion of the electorate believe.
I’m not making a case for anything - I’m explaining the narrative behind a growing POV.
But I will say that YouTube is different than Facebook videos or TikTok. YouTube is meant to be a searchable video index across topics and time. It’s a video search engine and hosting service in one.
Natural Monopoly is a technical term. If the electorate wants to change the constitution we can do that with no justification. It only has to pass Congress and be ratified by the states.
At this point, major platforms function like public spaces in online discourse, even though they are legally considered private property. Because of their huge influence in society, Youtube shouldn't be permitted to censor political viewpoints in their platform.
And see, there's always a fine balance between private property rights and other rights. For example: you can't prevent people from a given ethnicity from shopping in your store, even though it is a private property and in many cases you can refuse service to a particular customer - just not for this reason. And this is perfectly okay, because private property rights aren't absolute.
Yeah they could create a video platform, but until it gained the prominence of YouTube it would be just a niche hosting platform. I'm putting forward a view that YouTube has a status so powerful in global society that it should be held at a higher standard.
But regarding your question, I actually think that there's a serious dysfunction here in the way Fox News can legally spread lies that are very damaging to society with little to no legal consequence. They even alleged in a slander case that the Tucker Carlson show is actually just entertainment, and reasonable people can't expect it to be truthful - even though millions of people get their news primarily from Fox News, including Carlson talk shows, fully believing they are telling the truth.
And I see that YouTube is cracking down on a lot of the same misinformation that Fox News propagates (and sometimes, worse stuff), but my point is that this shouldn't be up to Google to decide what political talking points are or aren't allowed. YouTube functions as a public space in our daily lives, we express ourselves there, I don't think it's good for society for a single company decide this policy unilaterally.
On the other hand, it's good that platforms offer some kind of curation and differentiate themselves based on that. There are YouTube alternatives like Lbry in which practically everything is allowed, and I think both models are necessary.
I must have missed the covenant to not enforce their patents that youtube extends to parties they've deplatformed and the indemnity they offer against the enforcement third party patent rights that they've obtained through cross licensing.
I think you missed the bit where the platform removed content for the mere mention of Trump.
So you agree YouTube is perfectly ok to remove content because it mentions 'the opinion of a man about election results.'?
And if Trump was to hypothetically win in 2024, would it be perfectly fine for YouTube to remove any content which is dissenting of Trump? I'm sure a dislike or negative comment would stop that...
And of course nothing from stopping Biden creating his own platform should the tables turn, right?
It's true the large social platforms are privately owned and so they can censor to their hearts content, but given the obliquity and integration these largest platforms have in the social fabric, is that reasonable?
Should they at least have clear moderation policies? It's an issue that needs some hefty discussion and evaluation especially, as we're seeing in this thread, the outsized influence on and control of public discourse they have.
The incredibly dangerous outcome of all this is precisely what foolish commentators are suggesting: alternatives will be built, that themselves will become echo chambers.
If you disagree with certain ideas, you have to fight it in the open. That's how we get a big tent with general consensus across key issues, and avoid parallel universes of polar opposite information. The end result of all this is just going to be a truly Balkanised / multipolar world, but instead of geographical boundaries, it's all going to be in the mind. Your neighbour and you could have totally different ideas about certain issues - because you are consuming and contributing to totally different sets of information. And that will lead to immense physical conflict in the future.
> The incredibly dangerous outcome of all this is precisely what foolish commentators are suggesting: alternatives will be built, that themselves will become echo chambers.
What if the dangerous outcome is what's happening right here in this thread, and the thousands of others like it here on HN and elsewhere? Right in front of our eyes every day but we cannot see it, because it is normal.
Why would you imagine that anyone has a right to have their content on youtube. How is it in any way overreach. Surely its users can vote with their fingertips for a different site if they have a problem with it.
Believing that someone shouldn't do something and that someone shouldn't have the right to do something are not the same thing. GP comment only stated the first and I see no reason to pile on with retorts assuming they really meant the second.
Also, I don't see how systematically scrubbing video recordings of a man who loves to say "I never said that" about things he has said on camera is a net gain to truth-telling.
Agreed…the hypocrisy of these decisions grows increasingly outrageous each day. For example, the reasoning behind the banning of Donald Trump from Twitter was that his rhetoric was “dangerous,” in that it may have encouraged/not discouraged the January 6 riot. On Tuesday (March 1), a Russian official threatened actual war over the economic sanctions the world is taking against his country [1]. His account is still active and the tweet is still up.
Exactly. Lets assume Trump was completely the leader of January 6th and giving direct orders to go into the building and those people were his army. The only death by violence was one person and on a causality on his side. In Ukraine literally thousands are dying. There are people who literally attempted assassinations getting bail and keeping their online accounts.
It is reasonable to say that Donald Trump caused the January 6 insurrection. The bigger issue for platform owners is that the insurrection represents catastrophic risk to them, and it is within their power to prevent it.
The social media platforms can't prevent if Russia goes to war with NATO. Censoring the russian official won't do anything.
Jan 6th didn't "cause" catastrophic risk. Events like jan 6th present huge potential risks.
If the insurrection had been successful the best case scenario would be economic collapse and possibly civil war in the country where these platforms are based out of. It is likely that many states would reject the sovereignty of the federal government if it didn't honor the outcome of the election, and from there things would quickly spiral out of control.
The potential outcome from the end of democracy in the us would entail catastrophic risk for the companies based here.
War being threatened by a nuclear power like Russia carries with it the “catastrophic risk” of the end of the world, with billions of people dead. Even if one were to wholeheartedly believe that the hyperbole in your comment was an entirely plausible outcome of January 6, the Russian tweet is far more dangerous than anything related to the Capital riot.
It’s outrageously hypocritical that the Russian official’s account is alive today. They didn’t even slap a warning label on his tweet.
They couldn’t control January 6 either. Literally the only people charged with sedition - those who had a plan - were part of an extremist organization that coordinated in person.
The Jan 6 insurrection were organized almost entirely on social media, not the news. The news was barely talking about a "stop the steal" rally in dc on Jan 6 before it happened.
Much of it was organized on social media, and many those who participated it used the platforms to live stream and tell more people to come and participate, too.
Either all of social media should be white supremacist, holocaust denying 4 Chan, or it is those platforms' responsibility to enforce thought-crime intervention.
So instead of doing that we should just make the whole internet 4chan?
No it won't, not in meaningful numbers. Most people don't want that kind of garbage in their feeds. If they did 4chan would be more popular than Twitter.
Most people don't want to have disgusting, antidemocratic viewpoints forced on them by social
media. They want to not see that stuff.
No. What the hell is wrong with all this absolutism. As I mentioned elsewhere, these platforms should have moderation guidelines from the outset that they adhere to. Now they play political games instead.
If a platform is too large to be moderated effectively, there needs to be a discussion about what happens next, which indeed is either free-for-all, clear moderation policy or opaque random and easily biased decisions.
My boomer parents are now asking me about 4chan because of the censorship (someone in the mainstream was talking about it last year.) People are looking and they'll get sucked into this stuff.
Electricity is deemed a common utility and a regulated, granted natural monopoly - one considered a necessary requirement for all citizens and organizations.
Video streaming is not a monopoly, and no number of bad faith arguments about popularity or awareness in consumer headspace change the fact that there are a number easily accessible competitors.
Pray tell, what are those YouTube competitors with non-negligible market share? I'd love to move there and find all my favourite channels (or at least some chunk of them) posting their videos there.
A free market doesn’t mean you get whatever you want wherever you want it. It just means there’s no unsurmountable barrier to entry into the market.
Microsoft, Apple, Spotify, Netflix, etc. + VC money, all have the money and means to compete directly with YouTube if they choose.
The market for “I want to watch Trump claim he stole the election without a disclaimer in the description” might not be that huge. As others have pointed out, creating news about election misinformation is still no problem on YT provided it’s explained as misinformation and not just provided without context.
Also, these content providers can self-host their video content and promote their content as they see fit.
You have to decide if bookmarking the sites of your favorite content providers is a better option than accepting YT’s content guidelines.
But you don’t get to demand that YT host whatever content suits your views. They can curate their platform as they see fit and you can consume it or not as you see fit.
That's optimised for short-form videos, isn't it? It's also extremely addictive, so it doesn't speak well of the market if the main competition to the #1 player comes at the price of addiction.
It is more of a monopoly than Standard Oil was in terms of market share. There were plenty of competitors back then, just as now, and yet the Sherman Antitrust Act happened.
The network power of these organizations makes them monopolies even aside from market share. In Sherman era anti-trust, "Build your own rail network" would not have flown as an argument, because it was clear that coercive actions to force people into a different network were problematic.
The government can regulate monopolies for any reason. You can read the Sherman Act, court opinions during that time, and the argument of it removing centralization of power. The "predatory pricing" argument is a recent invention, ironically created with right-wing judicial activism, and neither historical or textual in nature.
>It is more of a monopoly than Standard Oil was in terms of market share.
Again, no number of bad faith arguments about popularity make it a monopoly. Standard oil was the only accessible supplier in the market in many places. The video streaming and hosting market has many easily accessible suppliers wherever there is internet access.
>The government can regulate monopolies for any reason.
Whether or not the government can regulate a monopoly is not being debated here. Nobody is talking about that straw man.
It's not about hosting. Anybody can host. The issue is discovery. You host somewhere else and YouTube isn't going to surface your video to their users, and neither is Google since they're the same company.
This isn't a problem if there are dozens of video hosting services or search engines that all have equal market share, but there aren't.
So discovery is now a basic right and Youtube must enable everyones boring or inciting videos to be discovered?
Can't you just share a link on $SOCIAL_MEDIA like others do?
You don’t have a right to have your views displayed on YouTube any more than you have a right to have your opinion piece published in the New York Times.
Private companies are free to curate their content as they see fit and you can choose to consume it or not.
These independent content creators and journalists can all self host.
Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that every view gets maximum amplification on private networks. It means that the government won’t take steps to repress the speech, which they aren’t.
>It's not about hosting. Anybody can host. The issue is discovery.
Again, no number of bad faith arguments about popularity or awareness in consumer headspace make it a monopoly. You are not entitled to being discovered in competitive markets, and forcing suppliers to host your content is anti-competitive.
If it’s that serious and important - nationalize them and have the federal government run it.
Or you could call your congress people and ask them to increase funding for PBS or NPR or whatever. Or start a tax funded service.
Or start your own service. I’m sure you’ll welcome everyone’s suggestions on how to run it.
Or is it that you want someone else to run it, you don’t want to pay anything for it, don’t want to pay taxes for it, but you do want a say in how it’s run?
I automatically donate money to Democracy Now and PBS each month because I like to support mostly liberal news that sometimes carries a different emphasis than more mainstream news. I am voting with my wallet.
That said, I hate to see conservative or any other opinions censored, and this is what YouTube is doing, because if we give up on true free speech then I think that bodes ill for our society long term.
Free speech was never made with the fact that 5 monopolistic multi-nationals would facilate damned near all speech.
Its amazing watching progressives grovel at the feet of corporations bc you agree with their censorship, and for free market conservatives to turn on them bc the corporations they rallied their whole lives turned on them.
I want Twitter and YouTube treated like my ISP, or my electric company.
When the government mandates people to stay home via lock down the definition of public square is null and void. You've just removed the right to assemble.
You can't take away the public square and then demand people only air grievances in the public square.
The line between corporations and government is so blurred online that we must blur the lines between public and private spaces online.
Is it just me or has YouTube gotten super boring at this point? It’s like I can feel they’ve turned down the viral KPIs, and they’re only showing established channels now, most if which are boring.
I was basically addicted to YouTube a few years back, first thing every day was go there, I could stop going to it many times a day, even when I felt it was too much. Now, I maybe actively go to YouTube 2-3 times a week, otherwise I just watch embedded videos on websites or Twitter.
I’m not surprised tiktok has taken over.
I think YouTube have basically neutered themselves over trying to “do the right thing” politically
Might be just you. I still find awesome content, new hobbies (recently picked up analog photography because of a recommended channel), new food, new shows to watch. There is some garbage in my feed (family clips) but overall I go there daily.
I’ll take the downvotes or whatever argumentation incoming but this is obviously (to me) Google being bad at technology and intentionally opaque about it, and just as mealy mouthed about the subject matter as always because they don’t give a fuck.
In that case, it is still bad. And it makes for a good cover to actually censor based on political speech. And it is hard to give Google the benefit of the doubt in this regard. But you are probably right.
It is bad but it’s not clear what cover it gives to censor. They suspended a neutralish account which would ostensibly be part of the “liberal” media for playing verbatim a far right media clip to report on the fact of it existing. Who’s being censored here?
Moderating a top web destination today isn't possible to do correctly.
You could automate moderation with ML, automatic recognition, user-flagging but the sheer number of false positives, and alleged false positives, means you basically need to have a full human moderation team to have real accuracy.
You could just use human moderators, but then you have to pay for them all. Ads based websites can't afford that.
You could charge users money and not be purely ads-based, but then you won't be a top web destination because people aren't willing to pay for the internet with money.
So the only remaining option is to automate, ignore the false positive problem entirely and rake in money while abusing your content creators and users. This is 'The Google Strategy'.
I think the main thing lacking on modern platforms is a quick, reliable way to verify the reputation of any given content creator.
First off, it obviously needs to be relative reputation, and not centralizedI think some sort of cross platform web of trust, where you publicly endorse some friends, some content creators, and some investigative journalists, etc. You also publicly repudiate sources of information that you don't find credible. This means that if anyone goes off the rails there's a visible trail of distrust, and that information is de-prioritized in your network.
This also has a bit of sybil resistance built in, because upvotes or downvotes of thousands of bots isn't relevant at all to your trust graph unless friend of friends actually endorse some of these bots or something. Still though, it would probably also be good to have some burnable staking mechanic. Everyone needs to put in a dollar, or 10 dollars, or something to participate (which could be removed at any time), and people who clearly violate terms of use would have their stake burned, and all of their endorsements or repudiations would be invalidated.
I feel like eventually someone is going to have to build something like this. Incentives are hard to get right, but if by some miracle it works, and the trust graph takes off, then lots of these problems just go away. Imagine something like DNS that you could just query to see how much you should trust some chunk of information. It would be a game changer.
Recognize the difference between a centralized score and a relative score.
In the model I proposed, your "score" of anyone else would only be affected by people who you've selected to "score" others. This is exactly how people build trust mentally today, but assisted by a graph that lets you expand your trust network beyond Dunbar's number, which is required for filtering modern media.
The Dystopian centralized credit score seen in the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" is what will happen if we fail to build something capable of calculating relative trust relationships.
> So the only remaining option is to automate, ignore the false positive problem entirely and rake in money while abusing your content creators and users. This is 'The Google Strategy'.
Actually, I see this as both not the only remaining option and also as not an option.
If you can't moderate, then you're being irresponsible on your platform. Reduce the load (disable comments, limit uploads, etc), hire, or shut down.
"We're too big to moderate" is an absurd and irresponsible statement by some of the biggest companies in the world.
Before internet, the village idiot was just that and laughed off. With internet, they got a group and justified themselves and now people are falling for that.
If these idiots were taking just themselves off the cliff, then sure. But they are taking villagers who cant tell the difference between legit or not off the cliff too.
Even worse, those idiots are turning these misguided villagers onto the rest who know better to not listen to these idiots.
This is a failing of the education system here. But no one is talking about how to really distinguish propaganda from real. Sure they misguided people have freedom of speech, but they are growing like a virus and a virus needs to contained. Social literally has the term "viral" for crying out loud.
The other more important thing to contain would be the medium on which this infection is spreading. Which mean reducing the impact of the feed algorithm. Access to the feed should be limited. Also, facebook and youtube dont want to give up the feed. That is what keeps the humans hooked.
If one part of the body is cancerous, you cut it off. You dont stand around arguing if that part of the body has right to free speech.
I agree the news feed algorithm is pouring gasoline on the fire, but how do you expect human beings to react to being persecuted and censored as "viruses" and "cancers"; untermensch? What is the ultimate end game with that line of thinking?
"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."
To continue the analogy, the way that information flows now allows the exposure to infect everyone else. Is it the information a boil of injustice or an Ebola cough of Nazism?
I’m not arguing either way. I lean more toward keeping information uncensored, but let’s recognize that the ready ingestion of poison isn’t in the majority’s interest. And society always is willing to say “we’ll censor our taboos”, we didn’t really mean uncensored anyway.
Is it really the village idiot? Or is it a national-level genius, masquerading as a local villager?
Most of this stuff is really just memes being shared around. And memes, as much as they sometimes look like utterly uneducated trash (complete with errors of spelling / grammar / logic) are usually created by one person then shared by many. I suspect that one person is something of a mastermind; the many, of course, may be morons.
The discussion always seems to go toward censoring the many. I don't support that, even if I vehemently disagree with them. If my aunt, who I don't want to call a moron but does share some utterly insane memes, continues posting things, that's fine. I vehemently disagree with her and hate her viewpoint. She should get to share it anyway.
But I feel like social networks could do a lot more in locating and halting the mastermind that's 50 shares back in the chain, whispering in in their ears. It's like the story from a couple weeks back about a 3-person media shop being responsible for a huge amount of misinformation on Facebook. That was exposed by journalists. Facebook, I feel, would let them go on forever and invests basically nothing in finding out where some of the more virulent content comes from.
Which they have.[0] And they didn't even need to do that. It's up on Twitter. [1] Of course, the issue isn't just this one video but the week ban which undoubtedly and perhaps ironically, has a chilling effect.[2]
[2] I'm speaking of course of LumenDatabase, which used to be called "chillingeffects.org" back when Google was ostensibly in accord with its philosophy.
I really don't know why people think elections are not rigged.
In my opinion all elections are rigged, why on earth would you risk losing power to the whim of the 'unwashed'.
Both parties are two sides of the same coin and go back and forth to give everyone the illusion of choice. But when people mass together and demand social change, BLM ect its allowed to happened only until it starts working, then the authorities crack down with a iron fist.
Its well documented that the USA rigs elections in other countries. So if the technology exists and the appetite exists, what's stopping them? Laws? Morals?
Do we really think that the intelligence community is going to let a random popular citizen have command of the biggest military in the world and a finger on the nuclear button, just because a couple of extra people put their name on a piece of paper?
I think that is absurd, all elections are rigged and to suggest otherwise is naive, holding on to a romantic notion that we choose our leaders.
This is ridiculous hyperbole. Maybe what you’re saying is true in the US and several other places but there are absolutely unrigged elections elsewhere.
Then you could respond with how things are effectively systemically rigged through gerrymandering/news media/misinformation/propaganda/mind control/harassment/selective enforcement but that’s something else.
What are your sources that elections are rigged in Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, New Zealand, Austria, Ireland, Japan, Taiwan, Czech Republic?
If they were actually rigged, do you honestly believe there would be a mainstream (government approved) source saying that? There are plenty of sources saying that, of course, just none you would believe. So it's really a rather unfalsifiable position innit? "The election isn't rigged, and anyone saying it is is a conspiracy theorist. But please post a source saying it's rigged."
Well Ireland was made to vote twice on ratifying the Lisbon Treaty. The people's vote got it wrong the first time with a "no", but after suitable re-education they got it right the next go around. Luckily there was no need for a third vote. There's a nice wikipedia article on it:
In Kill All Others[0] (excellent), there was only one Party, but everyone must vote for it anyways, as a gesture of approval and submitting to the authority.
> What casual observers might not understand, however, is just how far the policy goes. Not only does YouTube punish channels that spread misinformation, but in many cases, it also punishes channels that report on the spread of misinformation. The platform makes no distinction between the speaker and the content creator. If a channel produces a straight-news video that merely shows Trump making an unfounded election-related claim—perhaps during a speech, in an interview, or at a rally—YouTube would punish the channel as if the channel had made the claim, even if no one affiliated with the channel endorsed Trump's lies.
This is it. This isn't really a discussion about freedom vs. censorship, it's about how social platforms need moderation, but they've become so big that they're utterly impossible to moderate properly.
The Uber strategy, services with no possible path to profitability being propped up indefinitely by billionaires that refuse to stop believing the dream of infinite growth, is incredibly damaging to any ecosystem it infests. Youtube only exists because Google wants data. Video hosting is just too expensive for any realistic business model to support storing and distributing every vacation video ever made, for free, forever. This cradle-to-grave life support preempts all competition and creates monopolies so large they begin to creak and splinter under their own weight.
The strategy for Youtube moderation is maximum efficiency per dollar: deal with as much muck as possible with the smallest budget possible, and just let the errors happen because it's too expensive to prevent them (but if the public outcry is big enough, they can reverse the decision.) They can't make things better. There's just no money for it, because Youtube is just too big and it doesn't, cannot, and will never make any money.
I was in a chat with someone who worked with Google once and they said, paraphrased, "Our company suggested we could have a team for providing support for non-Partner users, and Google flat-out said 'It doesn't matter how cheap you go, it cannot be done.'"
I'm really glad Patreon exists. I think the only solution to all of this is to break the notion that web hosting (and, on another topic, creative work) is free, or that it can be supported by ads. Things cost money. People should be expected to contribute to support services they use.
(And of course, that brings up the issue of those who don't have money being excluded. There is no societal problem more than six steps away from poverty/income inequality. Probably no more than four steps, even.)
Not at all. Google is a private concern with the right to publish or not any content they see fit. That they can defacto censor opinions they don’t approve of is a failure of the market.
This argument is only valid if the government wasn't pressuring Google. Because they are Google can now use it as an excuse to censor whatever it wants. The government also has big contracts with Google so they can use that as leverage too. This is another form of government censorship that actually benefits Google. The government and Google are both at fault.
The government would not be able to bring that pressure to bear if YouTube, g-suite, and Google cloud weren’t all the same company, and if there were a competitive market for internet video distribution.
Corporations do not have rights, they are government-defined entities—not people. There's no "Bill of Corporate Rights" or "UN Convention on Corporate Rights."
Corporations have locally-defined privileges and exist by, and at, the will of the people where they reside. Governments can change what those privileges are at any moment, for any reason—or no reason at all.
If we don't like what Google is doing, we can simply write laws regulating it differently.
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In reply:
> "In a U.S. historical context, the phrase "corporate personhood" refers to the ongoing legal debate over the extent to which rights traditionally associated with natural persons should also be afforded to corporations."
Hint: ongoing legal debate, i.e. it's up to government to decide what "corporate personhood" means—exactly what I am saying. It's up to government, not "inalienable" or "natural" or whatever.
It's a purely legal question whether trillion dollar corporate mega-platforms with billions of users have the same regulations and responsibilities as widows and orphans. We don't have to let the Googles and Facebooks and Amazons and YouTubes of the world trample on basic human rights "because ackshually, corporations are people too." Certainly nothing about the 14th Amendment requires it.
Corporations do have rights, including the right to free speech and association, because even as entities they are not separable from the people (or the rights of the people) who create and interact with them.
> >Government can change what those privileges are at any moment, for any reason—or no reason at all.
> No, this isn't the way government works anywhere outside of a dictatorship.
It really is. The executive branch is the most constrained in practice, but the legislative branch is relatively free to do whatever they want (spend money, create or abolish departments, set the rules, change the rules, allocate money to enforce the rules, etc. Even revise their own deliberative procedures), and the judiciary is even less constrained except that it is the other two branches that control who gets appointed as judges.
There are checks and balances, but those are pretty much always another part of government, so ultimately, anything the three branches agree on gets done. Anything.
There might be consequences including failing to get reelected for the executive and legislature, but that doesn't necessarily undo what's already been done.
The government cannot easily remove the rights of the individuals who make up said corporations without going through the cumbersome and probably impossible process of amending the constitution.
Please stop using 1984 to make extremely insipid and banal points that don't even really make sense in context. This doesn't really map to anything in 1984, if anything Google makes an attempt to say there is such thing as a shared reality, and that reality isn't just whatever the propagandists say it is.
EDIT: all these talking points are the same ones I remember the alt-right getting in a tizzy about when Google started adding information about the Holocaust under holocaust-denial sewage.
It's just bad 'AI' because they won't give up revenue to do what would be required to actually avoid censorship while still cracking down on coordinated bs.
This makes sense. The use-mention distinction does not exist in common parlance. For instance if I were to say “The n-word is reprehensible” this is acceptable but if I were to use the alternative signifier for the same referent, I would likely be banned. If not here, then in most places.
With this shift in society, it makes sense for our AI banning tools to also conflate use/mention.
It is less a programmatic problem and more a real problem. Since even if you don’t use but mention you are considered to have signal-amplified and therefore used. That is, mentioning is now using.
> If a channel produces a straight-news video that merely shows Trump making an unfounded election-related claim—perhaps during a speech, in an interview, or at a rally—YouTube would punish the channel as if the channel had made the claim, even if no one affiliated with the channel endorsed Trump's lies.
Welcome to our new algorithmic future, brought to us by VCs and software engineering.
Suppression of misinformation is an important function if you want a marketplace of ideas to actually work. However building massively scaled platforms for information dissemination ensures that it will be done by robots with no judgement (either the machine kind, or poorly paid people following a script).
>However building massively scaled platforms for information dissemination ensures that it will be done by robots with no judgement (either the machine kind, or poorly paid people following a script).
The article makes it seem as if a human made the decision, not an algorithm. At the very least, humans came up with the policy and wrote the algorithms, and could override them if they wanted to.
> The article makes it seem as if a human made the decision, not an algorithm. At the very least, humans came up with the policy and wrote the algorithms, and could override them if they wanted to.
Yeah, but to do that you need a humans with judgement and time to think, and that's expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if Youtube's human moderators are paid on production, and quite separate from whoever's writing the policies they execute.
This isn't a sophomoric forum like reddit. This is meant to be a place where adults discuss. Adults can see that there are democratic implications of the scenario you're describing worthy of discussion. 'Another platform' may take years to develop, and nothing stops Youtube or another hostile player from simply buying it out and kneecapping it, and how many elections are influenced while that takes place?
Please don't just repeat talking points, it adds nothing to the conversation.
I agree with this sentiment, although I agree it's stupid that The Hill was suspended.
If anyone wants to give a reason why these arguments are always about freedom of speech VS censorship, instead of being about private property + free markets, please I'm open to this.
1. Markets fails under the weight of monopolies. Youtube needs to be broken up or regulated.
2. There was a supreme court decision that a platform (in that case a large mall) that makes itself a de-facto public square has to act like one, accruing responsibility to protect speech. I believe this is the right link: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/583/pruneyard-s...
1. People without content share video on the internet and even sell it on plenty of sites. You might as easily not organically get it front of as many people who aren't explicitly looking for it but you can certainly share it and your content being unpopular doesn't imply that they have a monopoly.
2. Regarding the shopping mall they found the CA state constitution not the US constitution protected their right to promote nazi literature at the mall. It is also completely bonkers nonsense and invention. It is in fact the exact sort of judicial invention our current majority claims to be against it says.
> Every person may freely speak, write and publish his or her sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of this right. A law may not restrain or abridge liberty of speech or press.
It nowhere says that the mall ought to provide a venue. Notably it says you may publish not someone else must publish for you with their ink and paper.
This is just CA making up law from whole cloth to suit their disposition.
One issue you should consider is that the government can exert soft power on these companies.
The same people who regulate, pass laws, and appoint prosecutors who oversee litigation against big tech, also hold hearings and blame social media for fake news and extremism. There have been explicit calls to clean up their content or face regulation. That starts to implicate government censorship.
Google doesn't give a fuck about election integrity. They do business all around the world in places without elections. They use slave labor. But they are afraid US politicians might do a privacy crack down.
Googling "Google slave labor" reveals a lawsuit from 2019 or so from folks whose children were injured & died in cobalt mines that big tech ultimately received refined cobalt from.
The case was thrown out[] because the companies were found to have just purchased refined cobalt down the supply chain, and the labor did not fall under the definition of human trafficking.
Because then Google (YouTube) would force the competing app off the Google (Android) App Store for not meeting Google's (YouTube) own censorship policies.
It's literally their written policy and has been enforced multiple times. App store and GPlay apps have to adhere to Apple/Google set content standards. You can't host 'free speech' apps there because trolls instantaneously fill the 'free speech' apps up with visibly anti-semitic content then report it to google and down it goes.
>The platform makes no distinction between the speaker and the content creator
But this actually is a potentially thinly veiled way to spread
disinformation, right? If you wanted to push a dishonest narrative, all you'd need do is show clips of someone else speaking the words and call it "reporting".
And this is all within the context of a massive surge in d/misinfo across these platforms. They're already having trouble keeping up. I think that context is important, because it warrants a different level of "aggression" in policing. If someone is spouting lies is it reasonable to, say, block the original producer of those lies, but let thousands of other accounts repeat them and generate millions of impressions for the lies?
Because, the lies would still be getting out there, and these platforms are trying to combat being the conduit for them no matter where it comes from. Seems reasonable.
This is what people don't get about these policies; they think that it's a debate between people who believe Trump's lie and people who don't believe Trump's lie. And sure, there are people in full force coming out here to argue that the election was stolen, but it's not just about whether or not those people get to speak. Inevitably, these policies always end up clamping down on people who talk about misinformation, because at the scale of Youtube, moderation can't really figure out context.
This happens all over the place; policies around abuse end up getting applied to people that report that they are being abused, policies around misinformation get applied to people who report that misinformation is happening. It's kind of big news that Trump is still pushing this narrative in 2022. It actually is entirely legitimate to report that he's still saying this, he's likely to be the Republican candidate in 2024, people should know that he hasn't stopped making this claim.
There's a debate about disinformation censorship that's all about whether or not censorship is the right way to stop people from telling these lies, but even before we get to that debate, regardless of whether or not someone believes that censorship actually helps prevent the spread of misinformation -- the reality is that platforms like Youtube/Twitter are too big to effectively apply many of these rules, and often they end up affecting the opposite of their intended targets.
We have these high-level conversations about whether or not censorship on broad platforms that are nevertheless private is appropriate, and there's some value in having those conversations. But how often do we step back and ask, "are the platforms even capable of pulling off the censorship that they claim in the first place? Is Youtube even capable of censoring election misinformation without also censoring a bunch of other stuff that they didn't intend to?"
A conversation about censorship on tech platforms that doesn't take into account how clumsy these filters are in practice isn't really an accurate reflection of the reality. We have debates about whether or not private censorship on a broad scale is a good idea, but it's not even clear that any of these tech platforms are capable of doing censorship in a targeted way for any context-dependent topic.
It reminds me of how we used to have a bunch of conversations about the morality of self-driving cars making moral choices during accidents, but you zoom out and realize that even those debates are just incredibly optimistic, and in reality the cars just crash into guardrails because their sensors aren't good enough. We should not go into these conversations assuming that accurately targeted censorship of the kind that Youtube proposes even is possible at the global scale Youtube wants to operate on, we have a lot of data showing that large platforms aren't really capable of moderating with the same degree of precision as smaller platforms.
They got hit for signal-boosting Trump's nonsense without correcting it. YouTube is well within its rights to say "hey, we aren't a platform that exists to signal-boost Trump's lies."
This is lunacy. If a YouTube video contains a clip of an elected official (or former) making a false claim (which they almost all do to varying degree), that is simply highlighting an event that occurred. The politician said X, and here is the video documentation of that event.
The state of our world is comically broken, and it’s getting worse by the year. I cannot fathom any viable solution to turning things around. Roger Waters album “Amused to Death” was astonishingly prescient.
If it's instructions on drinking bleach, why censor it?
The discussion has to be one of nuance, but i think back to the days of TVs (lol). TV and radio had (to my understanding) laws about what you can say on air, different than what you would encounter on the sidewalk. It seems to make sense. After all, piping instructions on drinking bleach into everyones home seems bad. Inciting riots in mass seems bad. I don't know, but it seems logical to me.
The internet is obviously different.. but not different in every way, in my view. It seems like we need to be honest with ourselves. The internet is different than just yelling things on street corners. What should be allowed? I don't know. But i don't think it has the same freedoms as yelling on the sidewalk.
That's fair. Instructions on drinking bleach might cause others to be harmed. This is different because nobody has ever come to harm because of this. I'd imagine if people believed this, there would have been some kind of violence on say, January 6th the day of the insurrection-- sorry, inauguration.
Please let me know if you know how to fix this unfortunate typo.
>” Please let me know if you know how to fix this unfortunate typo.”
You can click the edit button. But you’re probably trying to make a snarky point.
If we are going to say that censorship is justified because you want to prevent violence or insurrections, we open the floodgates to some seriously bad things. Here’s a scenario:
Claiming that people are being systematically discriminated against could lead to violence and death. Saying that police officers kill minorities could lead to another CHAZ/CHOP, which was also an insurrection where people died. As a result, we need to silence ACAB and anyone who delegitimizes our police.
We don't do prior restraint on speech in the U.S. Only if there's an imminent threat of violence (and that imminence is not interpreted liberally) do we allow the government to stop a speaker. If speech eventually leads to violence, we expect law enforcement to deal with it, and there can be consequences after the fact, but not before.
>>If we are going to say that censorship is justified because you want to prevent violence or insurrections, we open the floodgates to some seriously bad things<<
If it were just as bad as "The censors want to prevent the bad things", I think I might feel that it would be justifiable. This type of thinking also robs the broader public of its agency to reason. The broader public is not comprised of petulant children, regardless of what the media outlets would tell you and what the behavior of Twitter might show (very few of those people display that sort of behavior in actual life, where consequences happen).
This "moral highgrounding", to protect us from the corruption of verbiage that may occur on one platform or another is a ridiculous idea to think that functional adults might need. We are not so weak as to be protected from ideas that "must not be named". Words are not magic, and people cannot be enchanted by their mere utterances. They can be enticed by them being outlawed and the verboten mystique that makes the forbidden seem so savory.
People may be uneducated, but it is impossible to educate them through silence and the silencing of ideas. These verboten ideas will get spread around, major platform or no. They'll spread without any kind of resistance or discussion and no disinfectant light of truth by debate will be shone on them because they will be pushed down to the nooks and crannies, off of the popular platforms where the light of day can show them to be the BS that they are. They'll find their place in small groups and factions, I felt and grow and split people apart. They'll make people not talk to each other and they'll make us a weaker country and a less educated one. A country that tries to run away from hard questions and conversations because it's easier to tell someone or some group to shut up and don't talk about that, rather than address a topic with an open and honest conversation with facts and dialogue.
You realize this is YouTube's position right? They're fine with the exact clip The Hill used if it's to criticize those ideas. To oppose YouTube's stance is to argue we shouldn't pair false claims with the evidence that refutes it.
I'm not sure I represented myself well at all. I'm not for censorship or any form of "Ministry of Truth". Those ideas will be paired with videos naturally by people who would choose to refute the ideas put forth. And I think fair use should cover rebuttal videos (though I'm unsure how copyright works in that way). I don't think anyone needs to be banned for showing a video discussing any topic... it's legal, and a private platform. They have the right, but it seems a bit tacky. I don't see how I could have been misconstrued as for not rebutting poor arguments or false information with facts, good arguments and critical thinking skills. I apologize if I did - I got a little long winded and should have kept it shorter and to the point.
> I don't see how I could have been misconstrued as for not rebutting poor arguments or false information with facts, good arguments and critical thinking skills.
Again, you're agreeing with YouTube on that point. The Hill's ban was because they didn't contextualize the false information they shared.
EDIT: and I think I see where we're breaking down in our communications. We are basically agreeing (I think). I don't think YouTube's need for an immediate tag or rebuttal around "misinformation" leads to further discourse. I think rebuttal videos which would be linked, by way of the shared interest algorithm, would further discourse. Instead of scrounging for ad revenue and pushing people down into their own little bubble, YouTube has an obligation to offer up rebuttal videos, videos which offer an alternative to supposed misinformation, not to outright ban something like raw footage of political figures putting their foots in their mouths.
> If we are going to say that censorship is justified because you want to prevent violence
Nope. Just agreeing with my parent comment that there is a significant difference between harm-causing misinformation and this very good election business.
While there is certainly a case for criminalizing direct prompts to imminent violence, attaching consequentialism to ideas is a very slippery slope, given enough creative hermeneutics by whoever currently wields state power. (I recall no shortage of conservatives circa 2004 who genuinely believed Michael Moore was guilty of treason.)
See, THIS is incomparable because anti-war pamphlets are ideas being banned. This policy from YouTube is not doing that. It's saying that ideas based on misinformation must be paired with the evidence to contextualize it.
Obviously the context is different (particularly in the difference between a state and a private corporation, quasi-monopolistic or not).
The key comparison is this: who decides what is misinformation? who decides what information/disinformation is "dangerous"? The right consequentialist narrative can frame any idea as dangerous.
Obviously it's dangerous to advise people to drink bleach. But you can find millions who'd make the same claim of vaccines (both "the jab", or pre-COVID childhood vaccinations); or, of ivermectin (while claims of its COVID efficacy are dubious, neither is it categorically unsafe for humans).
I'm not going to lose much sleep over YouTube attaching "The more you know..." links on controversial subjects, paternalism and "the backfire effect" notwithstanding. The concern is algorithmically putting their thumbs on the scale of discourse (and with second-order self-censorship effects). Even if/when they're mostly right (COVID vaccines work; global warming is anthropogenic), that is a disturbing level of unaccountable power.
> And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning?
Seems to me like he is very clearly talking about the viability of injecting disinfectant.
> Our team has shown that administering a specific spectrum of UV-A light can eradicate viruses in infected human cells (including coronavirus) and bacteria in the area while preserving healthy cells
UV light was mentioned prior in the presser. Trump wasn't specific, but you can't say he said inject bleach, read the transcript for yourself:
The Politifact article even clarifies that Joe Biden's error was saying Trump advised "drinking bleach", as opposed to "express interest in exploring whether disinfectants could be applied to the site of a coronavirus infection".
I don't really want to defend Trump, who is proudly stupid and mean spirited. But at bottom, it was a question about whether it was feasible, not a suggestion.
And "something like that" in his statement is not necessarily just filler. Read charitably, he could be asking if a similar effect can be achieved with something else. We use some types of disinfectants for broadly similar effects--like mouth wash. In the past, we've used iodine to disinfect water for drinking, which was ingested.
I'm not saying its a plausible strategy, but its not pants on fire stupid to wonder out-loud if you can get something like a disinfectant inside. I'd imagine you can't, but I can't articulate why you can't beyond the likelihood the required concentrations would destroy your bodies' cells too.
I watched that press conference on tv when it aired. It wasn't even the top 20 dumbest things he said in that conference.
The more people learn to do this, the further we'll get in our discourse.
I'd love to watch a breakdown of current news stories done with charitable interpretations only. Does anyone know of a news source that doesn't drop down into mischaracterizations of every opposing viewpoint?
> Many people seem to chose when to give him that consideration.
You mean everyone, from either tribe, when it suits them?
Personally I always try to figure out what a politician is intending to say, even if they are only semi-coherent in conveying it. This is the leader of the free world, after all, with his finger on the button...
You have to forgive his genius occasionally overwhelming the average human’s ability to comprehend speech.
> “Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart —you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”
YouTube is just a wolf in sheep's clothing; another media outlet disguised as a sharing platform.
“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses. The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he’s a the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. It will make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” ― Malcom X
It's a media outlet for those that treat it as such. If I come there for news, it's from channels I know and trust. Other than that, it's mostly for non-political entertainment.
This argument would work equally well to support spreading neo-nazi propaganda material. Trite catchphrases are nothing to base a belief system around.
An argument doesn't have to make logical sense for it to convince millions of people. Especially not if they like the conclusion.
That's Godwin's law territory. I remember being taught in the very liberal NY schools I went to that the ACLU defending the free speech rights of Nazis in Illinois was part of the deal in a free society, and in this case we're not even talking about Nazis. But I'll defend to the death your right to say ridiculous nonsense.
Youtube isn't saying that no one has the right to say ridiculous nonsense, they are saying that they can't use their platform and infrastructure to do so.
Well, on one hand, there's a group's right to say what they like, and on the other, there's the discussion of what a corporate platform should host for free, what they can remove, what they ought to remove, what they're required by law to remove, and whether/how monopoly status changes any of that. Those are thorny and nuanced questions that catchphrases are no use in solving.
Also, we were already off topic when you mentioned censorship, so Nazis aren't that much further a digression. I think the real topic here is that Youtube can never possibly support a moderation team proportionate to its size while still offering free uploads, so it's limping along with garbage moderation that often has disastrous effects.
Yeah but are you going to print out all their insane bs in gigantic lettering and put it on signs on your lawn and the exterior walls of your house? You going to print it on tshirts and wear them to work or out in public?
There’s a difference between letting people think and say what they want, vs letting them use you as a megaphone.
Because people believe the nonsense and then storm the capital, and/or support overturning democratic elections in order to allow would-be dictators to seize power.
Misinformation can have a serious and deeply negative impact on the world, and the general public is clearly not immune to it.
Specious argument. First of all, the democrats did a lot of calling of elections into question, and so have republicans, and so what? Second, there has been an enormous amount of violence in the U.S. in the past several years, and the vast majority of that did not happen on 2021-01-06. Third, "storming" of capitols is a thing that has happened plenty in the U.S., and fairly recently too, once in the past year alone in Georgia, and in Wisconsin in 2010, and so on.
Your argument seems to boil down to: “bad things have happened before, so bad things aren’t bad”.
1. In a close election, contesting it or demanding a recount is fine and sane. Step aside once the results of that process are in. Trying to discredit the entire system with a mountain of bullshit and overthrow an election when it is overwhelmingly clear that it did not go in your favor is an incredibly dangerous road for us to go down. The two practices are incomparable.
2. I can’t understand this argument. Are you saying that 1.6.21 must compose a minimum of 51% of all violence in the US over the past several years before it qualifies as an issue?
3. Presidents inciting their supporters to violently overthrow elections that did not go in their favor is not a thing that has happened plenty recently nor should it ever.
And YouTube is saying that it is not obligated to carry content that convinces stupid people to do dangerous things. Doing so causes chaos, which ultimately reduces advertising spend and hurts profits.
So storming the US Capitol is okay, and to be expected in the future? What will you say when Democrats do it? Will it be insurrection in that case? I mean, explicitly stating the purpose is to overturn the election. When does it become insurrection, exactly? Does it not count when 'patriots' are doing it to 'save the country'?
That's the purpose of newspeak and doublethink. To ultimately communicate by their absence from official channels the list of things that cannot be said. Of course, Russia has has more experience with this than anyone. But as a sibling post says, they've reached the point where plenty just enjoy killing, and the west could too, at some point.
Most of us do still like each other, if we can get past the mediation of our conversations by platforms and the kind of tribalism it inculcates. I just wrote this rant here. It's hard to put into words what I see happening, but I'm trying desperately because I think there needs to be a framework for understanding it. Which I'm not eloquent enough to state, but I hope people can build on these simple statements like "Most of us still like each other".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30584851
The machine thrives on fear. Twitter is a rage machine... its function is to generate tribal anger and mass hysteria, and its mechanism and chief innovation for doing so is shortening the language. When everything is a soundbite, nothing real can be expressed, only affiliation with one group or another. Any thought that tries to explore both sides of a conversation and weigh their relative merits requires more characters than Twitter allows, and that's by design. We sleepwalked into this.
/Rant. About your point about enjoying killing and carnage, it was also something Hannah Arendt talked about extensively, and we can see it on both sides of the political spectrum in America now, both "mobs" of totalitarian/authoritarians. It's the end equilibrium of the totalitarian state to have generations of killers weaned on brutality who enjoy it for its own sake, and in theory the normalization or stabilization of a state which breeds those minds is the most frightening thing for the future of humanity. Nazi Germany was almost there.
I'm still trying to formulate this. But I've begun to come to the conclusion that the only important thing is to stop thinking in terms of who's right or wrong. The only way for civilization forward is to re-introduce the civic principle, to enforce the rules of debate; to ingrain the reflexive ability to absorb the other person's point of view and see them as a human like yourself; even if you believe they are wrong. The ability to put their wrongness into context so you can accept it and treat them as an equal before you go about dismantling their arguments. Without that, we're just bloodthirsty savages. And that, sadly, seems like the way it's going.
Ask Argentines. I'm not sure how many killers they had during the Proceso, but however many it was, they killed many. And, crucially, people knew, and they looked the other way, and if need be said of the victims that "they must have done something". (What else were they going to do anyways? If you live under a murderous regime, maybe the best thing to do is not rock the boat and hope you survive, and the last thing you want is a knock at 3AM and the cattle prod put to your genitals a few hours later and your drugged broken self tossed out of a plane into the ocean a few days later.
There's a always enough people who would enjoy the killing, if only someone would employ them to do it. And most people would probably deal with it as long as they aren't the victims. It's really sad. Our societies are very vulnerable to falling into such messes.
It's scary how many of the systems we were worried about in China (e.g. social credit system, censorship, etc.) are basically being created now in the west through the proxy of critical companies blocking access and/or working together.
I don’t get why people think youtube should be forced to host stuff they don’t want to host. Youtube should be socialized and forced to become a content-neutral storage? But why?!?
We have the internet, where you can rent or run your own server and storage and post your conspiracy theory videos.
Youtube is a major information source for two billion people, that has largely supplanted the online 'public space' of video hosts. No other video site is remotely comparable, and it's not even feasible for the vast majority of individuals, companies or even governments to compete with it. Google also controls the largest search platform, so good luck growing that 'conspiracy theory video' platform.
I don't believe any entity should ever have the power to frame what is and is not acceptable to believe to such a large amount of the world, be it Google, Facebook or a government.
> it's not even feasible for the vast majority of individuals, companies or even governments to compete with it.
You haven't defined what "compete with it" actually means here.
> Google also controls the largest search platform
If it was only a search platform, this would hardly matter, because search engines are not hard to replace. But Google search is merely the entry point to a much larger system (notably, a vast online ad platform and data collection system), and that's a problem.
Companies with monopolistic power and revolving door political hirings need to be held to a different standard as they are beyond competing for views and shape narratives.
It doesn't matter whether they are shaping it politically or profitably or via AI for clicks. It isn't neutral and drowns out or outright eliminates competing views.
Heres an example: Bari Weiss was fired for commissioning an op-ed by a US Senator Tom Cotton calling for the national guard to be called in to break up riots. Note that she did not write the essay, but merely commissioned it. They sometimes have op-eds from varying voices. NY Times apologized and said "This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards"
Pretty extreme view sending in the national guard, right? Except according to a poll around that time, 52% of Americans answered yes to "Do you approve or disapprove of sending in the U.S. military where there are violent protests?" So obviously that op-ed wasn't a fringe belief, but it was enough to end the career of the person responsible to bring it to print, in addition to apologies and a commitment to never do anything like that again.
Being critical of sometimes violent disruptive protests is a view that has been highly suppressed.
Are you arguing that Bari Weiss, who was brought in specifically as part of an editorial decision to appeal to alternate viewpoints, is an example of alternate viewpoints being censored?
By all means argue that they made her feel that it was not possible or sensible to try to do the job she wanted to do. But she resigned, and that's not the same thing.
She's a popular Substacker and left the NYT in a wave of journalists starting lucrative Substacks. I'm sure the NYT Slack was quite inhospitable to her (she's a troll, and they're snowflakey), but she wasn't forced out of the NYT; she was lured out. Either way: good riddance. Just because a bunch of irritating snowflakes got what they wanted doesn't, by itself, make an outcome bad.
That's not been eliminated. Quite a few people believe the election was stolen. Also, it's not a view worth keeping around. There's no evidence to support it and it's just used to justify violence and division.
There's no evidence to support the fact that corporate greed in an otherwise competitive market leads to inflation, yet we have plenty of politicians pushing that.
There's no evidence supporting price controls to be an effective way to fight inflation, as was shown to produce awful results in the 70s among many other eras, yet we have politicians pushing for that.
There's no evidence to support that nominal wages rising, but at a rate lower than inflation leads to people being better off, yet we have politicians pushing this.
I think Google should ban any videos promoting these effectively disproven and dangerous economic ideas.
Agree on the economics, but I think it's weak to compare these to the purely forensic question of whether the election was stolen.
Economic opinions are generally not that clear cut, requiring an awful lot of theoretical harness and qualifications to explain. Evidence is similar, you can quibble about a lot of things in economics.
Whether the election was stolen, well, where is a shred of evidence? It's not hard to define what we mean by stolen.
Most things aren't clear cut, and there have been many times in history where widely held beliefs have been proven largely false.
If you'll recall there was a multi year period of mass belief that the president colluded with Russians to steal the election. On the back of very little evidence, other than news heads talking about it and "he said, she said"
There was also a multi year investigation that found nothing, and actually was able to largely disprove documents that helped to kick off the speculation.
I believe we should mass purge all these videos proposing that the ex president colluded with Russians. We don't want the public to be misinformed.
Consider which regimes throughout history have used silencing political opposition the most, and whether you want to be aligned with them.
I would hate for people to fall out of the practice of critically thinking about what they see in the news. Our whole open society depends on people practicing deciding what they think it's right.
My preference is to leave all content up, but perhaps provide filters to users so they can choose to look at a bubble if they like. Or have an open standard for video data, on which anybody could build a UI layer.
Just saying, there's a clear double standard here. Saying the election was stolen due to collusion with Russians seems to be along awfully similar lines.
I'm happy to allow companies to do whatever they like, but the data needs to be decoupled from the UI then. Otherwise it's a natural monopoly.
I think history will see it that way, though it may take another decade or two.
>If you'll recall there was a multi year period of mass belief that the president colluded with Russians to steal the election. On the back of very little evidence, other than news heads talking about it and "he said, she said"
>There was also a multi year investigation that found nothing, and actually was able to largely disprove documents that helped to kick off the speculation.
"Ties" are irrelevant. The question was whether the president colluded with Russia. Unless you believe him to be a genius or master of stealth, I can assure you 4 years of all media investigations and official investigations would have uncovered anything compelling were it to exist.
Also, you can tie most government officials to Russia in some capacity. Everybody in politics is well connected.
It was a widely spread conspiracy theory with 0 evidence given a veil of credibility because many talking heads brought it up as if there were something tangible backing it.
Just because many people talked about and bought into it doesn't invalidate that it was a conspiracy theory
Ties are absolutely relevant when the guy is doing stuff like removing Ukraine aid or Russian sanctions from the Republican platform. Look up Paul Manafort.
Nobody is claiming Trump is a genius. The Russian ties are all out there in the open. The only open question was whether they rise to a criminal level. Trump apparently thought they did when he panicked and fired James Comey to halt an investigation. I don’t think the connections were necessarily criminal, just un-American (that of cozying up to corrupt dictators while denigrating allies).
This comment is unrelated to my point. I asked for an example of a viewpoint being eliminated. Instead, I get a wrong answer and a pivot to a request for my views. You're changing the subject yet again to just listing other things politicians have said. That doesn't substantiate the claim that there are viewpoints being eliminated.
It replies directly to your point. You imply that dangerous views shouldn't be kept around.
"Also, it's not a view worth keeping around. There's no evidence to support it and it's just used to justify violence and division."
So I listed some very dangerous economic views that have been proven to fail throughout history, and are widely agreed upon by economists.
So we should silence anybody promoting these views, following your logic. It's for the good of society
We should ban all videos proposing the ex president colluded with Russia too, as it was always a conspiracy theory with no evidence. No matter how much people wanted it to be true. Undermining the legitimacy of a validly elected president should be a silence-able offense. All the better if the party in power or their affiliates are the ones to do the silencing.
Maybe take into consideration which regimes throughout history have used silencing speech the most and whether you want to align with them.
But generally I don't expect holders of these views to acknowledge the hypocrisy of them, or how closely they align to the tactics of authoritarian regimes throughout history.
Let be real here. It's very likely the former guy may run again. You may be against that, as would I. But I think its pretty creepy that a handful of large tech CEOs will be able to get together and prevent that from happening by shutting him off from every social media platform and biasing search results, even so far as censoring our private communications via FB messenger, email or similar chat apps.
You want to argue he did something illegal, should be in prison, should not be allowed to run? Fine, that's what the court system and respective political parties are for. But please don't tell me it's completely cool that tech CEOs get to decide who can and can't run. You may like the side they fall on this time, but how confident are you that you'll agree in the future? What if leadership changes? What do you think would happen when a politician has a credible shot of winning on a promise to break them up?
> But I think its pretty creepy that a handful of large tech CEOs will be able to get together and prevent that from happening by shutting him off from every social media platform and biasing search results, even so far as censoring our private communications via FB messenger, email or similar chat apps.
None of what you've described would prevent him from running. And in fact, thanks to Streisand Effect, much of it centers him in the public eye.
Do you think it was weird that when a damning article about a presidential candidate's son came out a few weeks before the election, every single media company and social network decided at the same exact time not to cover the story? Even so much as censoring the one paper that carried it and on private messages between people? Twitter, Facebook, NY Times, NPR and others.
The former guy got banned on all the services all at once. Even tiktok which he was not on. Hell, even grindr banned him.
There may not be direct coordination (maybe there is), but there's a signal and no one likes to make waves
They all took a different direction about the "pee tape":
Seems a bit weird, there is quite a story there [0]. In the grand scheme of things is looks like a pretty routine case of potential corruption, but that being associated with the president's son like a big deal. Vigorously suppressing the story was a pretty suspect move.
The complaint seems to be that the corruption he was probably involved in is slightly different than the corruption Trump was talking about. Which again, standard political fare but the crackdown on the story seems suspicious. If it had been Trump there is no way such a story would have been quietened down.
Making up a story about someone doesn't make it a story worth reporting until they disprove it, there should actually be some substance as table stakes.
> In the grand scheme of things is looks like a pretty routine case of potential corruption, but that being associated with the president's son like a big deal
If you're making the claim that simply being on a board of directors or part of a venture firm because of who you know or are related to is ipso facto corruption, unfortunately we're unlikely to ever rid ourselves of that short of random work assignments in some kind of scifi YA novel.
He's being subjected to a federal criminal investigation. There is a bit more there than "simply being on a board". It is a big story and deserves public investigation to find out what was going on. The world is currently teetering on the edge of a Russia-Ukraine * war spiralling in to a US-Russia war. It is materially interesting what business connections the US president has with (famous for being corrupt I might add) Ukraine. Especially if they involve cash for influence. These things matter.
And, frankly, the reason these left-leaning outlets were suppressing the story was because to a lot of people the situation does meet the standard of ipso facto corruption. It seems clear that the people who were interacting with Hunter thought they were buying influence in the US political apparatus, probably the executive given his father's position; otherwise the decisions don't make a lot of sense. To a lot of people that basically is corruption. Although I doubt it is unusual in the US Congress if we poked around a little.
> He's being subjected to a federal criminal investigation. There is a bit more there than "simply being on a board". It is a big story and deserves public investigation to find out what was going on.
It came out in December that his taxes were being investigated and it was widely reported. Easy to see from the wikipedia article where there are multiple citations from major news outlets.
> It is materially interesting what business connections the US president has with (famous for being corrupt I might add) Ukraine.
What is interesting? You're playing connect the dots and taking possible tax issues from business in China and connecting it to made up stories about Burisma and saying "now prove me wrong". Again, the impetus is on the person making the argument to make an actual concrete claim. The Senate republicans already have you covered on the Ukraine part, of course (nothing).
> otherwise the decisions don't make a lot of sense
Henry Kissinger got a bunch of people to heavily invest in Theranos. You're going to need more substance than "why do rich white people keep failing upwards?" for a story here.
Which lends some rather solid credence to all the people back around the election who were saying this looks like fairly obvious corruption. I mean, the facts haven't really changed much, the only change is that the political establishment is OK with it being reported on in December. Anyone reading the initial story could have told you there was going to be an investigation.
Whether they'll find anything is an open question since the person who controls the executive is currently president - but it looks as shady as anything in US politics. There is little question that the big tech giants were making a political move when they took the story down on its first arrival, it would have swung votes and they didn't want that.
Not finding overwhelming evidence of money laundering can't be the story unless the original - silenced - accusations of corruption were also a story.
This is a whole lot of words to refer to nothing specific.
> Not finding overwhelming evidence of money laundering can't be the story unless the original - silenced - accusations of corruption were also a story.
Not finding evidence can't be the story because the original story (which is what had no evidence), er, was a story? Again, an accusation can't pull itself up by its bootstraps. There has to be a there, there.
The son of the president is under criminal investigations and is being offered board positions in a country famous for corruption. There is surely a cash-for-influence scheme going on. There probably is something there.
Now you may not care. I certainly don't think it is the biggest issue, this sort of corruption is pretty small biscuits compared to the damage that US politicians of Biden's tenure typically manage to do. However, the fact that there was a vigorous campaign of censorship leading up to the election is extremely weird. Which is the polite phrase for "this was a partisan lie by omission because big tech is showing their cards and those cards are Democrat".
It’s sad that youtube can choose what content to host?
As I suspect you know, his point was that it’s sad that YouTube is making politically motivated censorship decisions, just like China would. While we all know that Silicon Valley leans left, I think that those of us who want good things for the world would like to believe that these companies can check their politics at the door when it comes to running platforms that serve people across the political spectrum. Sadly, that’s not the case.
If YouTube identified itself as a partisan platform where speech that is not left leaning is in danger of being curtailed (which is what it is), I wouldn’t have a problem with these actions. But it masquerades as a neutral platform that is open to all, in the same way that CNN, MSNBC, and Fox masquerade as news outlets. That is a threat to democracy, because it creates the impression that only content which aligns with the platform owner’s political ideology is newsworthy or acceptable for viewing, and anything else is fringe.
Really? What's the difference? It's not whether it's public or private making the decisions (they are both considering the amount spent in lobbying), it's the degree of control you ought to worry about.
There needs to be an actual free market where people have a realistic set of alternatives.
Pointing out public versus private is IMO misidentifying the problem.
> It’s sad that youtube can choose what content to host?
There is virtually no competition to youtube in the video streaming space (in terms of sheer reach and volume), so choices that youtube make have clear political implications on what voices get heard.
Because, like telephone companies youtube can be considered a monopoly and classified as a common carrier, as some states and proposed federal laws have argued.
not a monopoly on paper, but a monopoly in terms of reach. When 99% of videos seen on the web are from youtube, can you pretend it's not akin to some kind of monopoly?
So because you can’t afford something, that means it’s the responsibility of another private party to publish your video for free?
If you think it is a right that people should have, talk to your representative and get the government to create GovTube where anyone can post any type of conspiracy crap they desire.
Sure it has “reach”. Any user can go to any website. It’s up to the publisher to market it. It’s not like there isn’t plenty of right wing media that wouldn’t be glad to accept the advertising.
> To what extent does that apply to the Internet, which effectively has unlimited spectrum?
It's about having equal reach for different political opinions. If you completely remove one voice without any legal mandate to do so, you are just the same as a political tool.
Broadcasting uses a highly limited resource, local TV freqiencies. Especially until recently, these were really limited to a dozen or so channels per metro area.
There are far more than a dozen websites out there.
Many people historically only had a single phone provider available at their home. Last mile internet isn't competitive for most people, I would agree they should be considered a common carrier. This concept of "common carrier" is important in this debate.
A train line that is the sole means of commerce in and out of a town is a common carrier. There's no competitors really possible to enter into that market. For that train line to decide to not run certain cargo outside of safety concerns is to then control all the commerce with no reasonable competitor.
Literally right now I'm watching streaming video content hosted from some service other than YouTube. I probably spend less than an hour a week watching YouTube content. It's hardly the only rail line in town, nor is it the only way I can view video content. Now if the only viable ISP said "you can't connect to YouTube, if you don't like it sell your house and move to the next town over" then yeah that's a common carrier and shouldn't be allowed to do that.
DNS names aren't limited by the US government. There are lots of TLDs which are controlled by other governments. And largely they're pretty much managed by lots of different corporations. Either way, the government directly getting involved in taking over your domain name without any due process just to silence your speech probably does become a first amendment issue at least for US nationals. Either way, they're massively less limited than how many effective TV freqiencies or phone providers are in a given metro area.
Aside from whether that’s happening here, there’s an argument to be made that an equivalent of common carrier laws make sense for the largest platforms. With the centralisation of attention onto those platforms, deplatforming effectively lets them act as a law unto themselves, and I think there’s a fair argument that in exchange for their outsized impact on society, those platforms have obligations to it as well.
(I don’t necessarily think it’d be the best idea for the most part though.)
Bad outcomes are assured when people who simply don't care make decisions that affect those who do.
Between the trio of media, tech, and government there's enormous control over what we hear and learn about. The filters they apply are powerful, yet inconsistent, and often populist, political, or irrational.
These 3 groups have this control, yet are incapable of using it to optimise for citizenry well-being.
> why people think youtube should be forced to host stuff they don’t want to host
For the same reasons that AT&T can't terminate your phone service if they hear you talking about something that's opposed to the political preferences of AT&T or its leadership. These companies have become the public square and the law needs to be updated to reflect that. If they have to become public utilities fine.
There's a big difference between a small company being coerced by the government into some action, versus the same action on a very small handful of multi-billion dollar companies that have a collective monopoly on our entire public and political discourse.
What's really bizarre is how the left is supposed to be opposed to, e.g. Citizens United, and the establishment neoliberal take is ultra-pro corporate rights and autonomy and 0 government intervention. IMHO thinking a few companies should be free to make a cooperative agreement and shut whoever they want out of communicating on these popular platforms is a radical right-wing position.
Youtube doesn’t have any kind of monopoly on posting videos to the internet.
What they do have is a brand and a social network that surfaces, promotes, and moderates video content to drive engagement and ad views.
They’ve grown large by moderating and curating content but now that they’ve done so they should no longer be allowed to moderate and curate content? Makes no sense whatsoever.
You’re pronouncing youtube a “public square”, which should therefore be seized by the government… But what is this extremely strong claim based on? youtube is just one of an endless series of options for posting videos on the internet.
> Youtube doesn’t have any kind of monopoly on posting videos to the internet
Of course they do. There are channels that can be removed that would instantly lose access to millions of monthly viewers that can't practically be replaced anywhere. They have a monopoly on that type of reach (the most important type), and especially when these platforms decide to blacklist in concert.
> now that they’ve done so they should no longer be allowed to moderate and curate content
Yes, because once your business decisions have the power to decide who gets elected President, for example, it's in a different class and has to be regulated differently than a corner flower shop. There are many examples of laws and regulations that apply to business based on size.
> what is this extremely strong claim based on? youtube is just one of an endless series of options for posting videos on the internet
Again, it's not one of endless, it is entirely unique -- for many channels, their reach on YouTube is not replaceable anywhere. That's like saying, AT&T can shut off your phone service for your political opinions because you can always go meet someone in person to talk. That's simply not how we've historically agreed to interpret the obligations of massive communications platforms, and there's a very good reason for that.
I don't want who gets to speak to the public decided by some faceless, unelected tech oligarchs. That's a dystopia. "They only get to decide if you easily get access to an audience of millions, you can always get an audience of 5" is a deeply flawed argument.
I'm sympathetic, but you're going to have to define some thresholds.
If I set up Paul's Video Hosting Service next week, and someone wants to post videos of kittens being tortured, I'm not hosting their videos. I'm not even hosting videos of a presidential candidate making certain pronouncements. No US court would agree that I should be forced to do so.
To whatever extent it is reasonable for YT to be forced to host any legal content, where's the boundary between the putative pvhs.com and youtube.com?
Utilities haven't been "seized" by the government because there are regulations on them. Telecoms haven't been seized by the government.
YouTube has monopoly level dominance in terms of engagement. Competitors can't gain market share because YouTube is already prevalent, and video is a "solved" problem. Consumer gets no benefit by using a different platform, and there is essentially no product feature that could be invented to make an alternative platform compelling enough to use over YouTube.
Instead of regulating YouTube, we could define an open database/protocol of video content and allow anybody to build a UI around the same set of content. In that way, there is no network effect gating people into a single platform. This is where things will likely trend in the longer run with social etc. And I would bet the free market will get to it eventually.
Then YouTube is just a web UI. And I guarantee you in this world there would be many other widely used sites, as there's no content/network effect lock.
Monopolies appear on the basis where it is effectively unreasonable to expect a competitor to form. E.g. railroads. Anybody can build their own railroad. Is it going to happen in practice? No, because cost to do so is prohibitively high.
A bit different considering the west has alternatives which are not blocked, whereas China doesn't. You can even spin up your own sources and serve whatever you want,a right not afforded the average Chinese citizen.
How much does it matter in practice ? If you personally decide to host your own blog from your house, nobody will probably come after you.
If you get enough traction, you’ll need to host a whole operation that can be managed by a full staff and serve millions of views every day. There’s now in the picture one or more platform providers, and payment processing that you depend on for your income.
A bunch of entities are now allowing you to have your soapbox, that can be swept away at any turn if you’re too much of a problem for any of them. No need to arrest you or kidnap you, “violate your rights”, they just cut your supplies.
I probably did not explain enough in my original post. It's not about having an audience even. It's the right to spin up some storage for encrypted data, run an encrypted matrix node for family, use a VPN, have a small blog for people to follow your travels and thousands of other options afforded non-Chinese nationals.
You can't anonymously access information as almost everything is tied to you ID number. You can't buy things, chat, watch TV (smart tvs), or do most anything with any sense of privacy.
Living in China as a Chinese means living with a drastically different mindset when it comes to these sorts of things. It's hard to understand how it changes you unless you've lived there.
This just shows that many of the policies in China are wanted by many, probably the majority, in society there. The policies are not always used for good, but they are indeed used to stop the spread of harmful misinformation or harmful practices (eg. detox via drinking bleach). In the US, you have the right to say something, but that doesn’t mean anyone has to listen to you or have to help spread your message; if you try, you might find a (possibly large) niche that people are interested in such as “the 2020 election was rigged” or “COVID doesn’t exist” or “the moon landing was filmed on a sound stage”, and you won’t be robbed of your autonomy of movement and speech by being sent to jail or a “re-education camp”.
More and more I have the feeling that we focus a lot on the freedom to say some political things (“the 2020 election was rigged”), and accept stuff like jail for breaking DRM or life breaking monetary amounts in penalty for copyright infringement as some benign issue we should strive to solve, but if we can’t that’s just too bad, gotta live with it.
I’m not saying I’d live in China, but I feel we’re putting too much credit in our own system. Even comparing ourselves to China doesn’t feel productive, we all have our local issues and should probably focus on solving them.
Streamers on twitch were getting banned for saying the word cracker, temporarily losing their livelihood because of joke outrage from some loosely organized people on Reddit/Twitch. Meanwhile Covid variant Omicron was just about to peak and the amount of misinformation about Covid peaked too.
Sacrifice another ~350k Americans and countless others around the globe from our refusal to stop misinformation, I sleep. Save some gamers' mock wounded pride; real stuff.
Every single day on HN, people mix up giving someone a platform to censoring someone. Social platforms are megaphones. Up until a decade ago, it was impossible for nearly everyone to reach out a large audience, especially worldwide. Nowadays, anyone can make a video accessible by billions of people with a single click.
If people banned from that is "censorship", then by that definition the whole world was censored 2 decades ago.
Before the printing press most people couldn't mass produce their written word. The printing press was a megaphone and a platform. Is taking away someone's access to a printing press censorship?
Not too many years ago no one had the ability to call anyone with a telephone. That service is provided by private companies in many countries. Is denying someone the ability to call their associates censorship?
And that’s fine. Not everybody can or has to be heard by everybody else. There no such as a thing as an expectation to be heard by others.
That becomes more problematic and debatable once infrastructure companies such as a DNS provider or a hosting company refuses to deal with some content given that you remove the ability to create your own soapbox.
Just to note, the US legal definition of free speech, at least according to the courts, includes the expectation to be heard by others. There is actually such a thing as a right to an audience; free speech is not fulfilled if someone is excluded from any space where someone may hear them.
But that doesn't mean, for example, that I'm allowed to force myself on your house and shout at you because I have a right to you being my audience. You're not entitled to Youtube hosting your content, just as you're not entitled to NYT hosting your opinion, just as I'm not entitled to have my words on your private blog.
The US definition of free speech also recognize companies freedom of speech. Which is exactly what makes them able to decide what content is shared or not on their platform. You’re using their properties, you have no entitlement to them relaying your message.
Well, the public forum doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_(legal) holds that the point of free speech is communication among citizens. I don't have a cite for the direct quote I wanted (it's lost in my browser history), but the idea was that free speech is not satisfied by just making available a space in which one is not going to be heard by anyone. This doesn't imply a positive right to a particular audience, of course.
You said, specifically, that "US legal definition of free speech, at least according to the courts", included the expectation to be heard. That it implied an audience be made available to you.
You need to be able to cite a source, ideally a case or specific law, on such a claim because no one else I know holds to that definition. A link to a Wikipedia article about a different concept does not satisfy, because it does not cite a legal definition of free speech by US courts.
I don't think it's a heavy claim? Consider the notion of having free speech standing alone in a room. This is obviously pointless. Why would it be a stretch for a court to make the observation that the point of free speech is that people hear you?
I remember thinking "oh yeah, that makes sense, they wouldn't view free speech in isolation but as a tool of the democratic process."
It is a heavy claim, because it implies you can coerce others. It implies you can grab someone passing by your hypothetical room and force them to be your audience.
No. That's never been the case. Your room is open to all and people who want to listen aren't prevented from going into it.
However, I'm also not obligated to host you in a room I own. The government guarantees my freedom of association as well. You want to opine, do it in your own room, or do it in places owned by the public at large.
Your recollection of what you were supposedly thinking doesn't mean you didn't misread what was written either. If you want me to even consider your claim, you are going to need a source on it. Because, like I said, it's a heavy one.
It doesn't really matter that much if you want to use the word "banned" in preference to "censored"; the facts of the matter is that the entire right wing's viewpoint is under threat on these channels to the point where people have been decamping and moving on to other platforms in large numbers. There have been quite a few notable social media plays (thinking Gab, Parler & Truth Social) that may as well have started in response to the 2016 election.
So we don't have to use the word censorship but there is a lot of voting with feet going on that suggests some sort of speech suppression. The persistent banning of private opinions by American big tech is probably the major cause of that.
And that's perfectly fine. If anything, that's proof that there is no censorship, the fact that they can go and make their own platform. Also, the fact that you're not allowed to say anything bad about Trump on those platforms without getting banned.
> You can even spin up your own sources and serve whatever you want,a right not afforded the average Chinese citizen.
It's difficult when the backbone of the internet isn't available to you. For instance, AWS can be denied cutting off vital internet infrastructure we take for granted. Further payment processors like Visa can cut off access. Even banks could cut you off and even seize your funds if they got the directive.
You can spin your own service is a nice fiction we tell ourselves but with financing getting cut off it becomes impossible to build a service that reaches a lot of people without a lot of money and a disregard for profit.
In China maybe someone would come knocking on the door to take you away to jail. But in the US, we don't need to go that far. All it would take is the press secretary telling big tech they need to help fight "misinformation" and pointing them in the right direction.
I'm sceptical that is technically possible. If it was, it would have been deployed against the torrent websites by now. Despite countless attempts to shut them down, trackers are still easy to access with only basic technical knowledge and no specialist software.
Communication is even harder to block than torrent traffic. At least torrents have an unusual characteristic traffic pattern that could be checked for. Watching wrongthink videos over an encrypted connection doesn't even have that.
That's a good point. It just keeps moving upstream. I'm especially worried about the tie between big tech and the government. There's open communication between the two and the current administration is helping tech companies craft their "misinformation policy". On a certain level its inevitable. If you want to make sure people have reliable resources, someone needs to identify whats reliable and what's not (usually a three letter agency).
But when you have the white house openly call on a Swedish company to censor a popular podcaster, that's where I draw the line. Artists can pull their music, people can boycott, but the government shouldn't have their finger on the scale. That's exactly what the 1st amendment is about. If the state can declare something should be censored and it is (voluntarily though!) then it's no different than force. And when you exert that same pressure on upstream providers, you've essentially rebuilt the great firewall of China without any casualties.
You can do this in China too - just get a VPN. If you think a VPN is too high of a hurdle for the average Chinese citizen, I'd argue it's just as high for American netizens as well.
Note all the attempts in the article to paint them as "armed" and "extremists". There was no violence, no destruction of property. It was a legal demonstration until it was made illegal by invoking the Emergencies act. And this use of the law in my opinion was an abuse as it clearly is for terrorist threats. Not Canadian working class people peacefully demonstrating.
Using the emergency act was abusive, I would agree. But I don’t believe it was a peaceful protest the way you describe. They were clearly blocking critical infrastructure and hurting the neighborhood.
But I don’t see how that’s related to the discussion about YouTube suspending a channel.
Blaring horns and blasting music continuously through the night and day, keeping thousands of people from sleeping is not "peaceful" nor legal.
Blocking a nation's highways and borders for weeks is not legal.
People screamed blue-bloody-murder when BLM and Occupy protesters chained themselves to barrels across interstates, disrupting traffic for an hour or two...but the Canadian government tolerates a complete shutdown of a border, along with near continuous public disturbance for weeks - before finally clearing the protesters, and that's somehow an example of oppression?
ANTIFA and BLM riots caused billions of dollars of damage, destroyed buildings, including federal ones, burned down multiple businesses and involved extensive looting. There were also multiple cold blooded murders and rapes during the riots as well as occupations. The US and Canadian governments did not enact anti-terrorism measures as they did with the truckers.
The Canadian truckers picked up the trash. I never saw a cleaner protest.
Honestly, we are so far into what was considered dystopian in the past century, I don’t know if that even make sense to still use that type of categorization.
But to actually answer your comment:
1. A company removing proven disinformation is quite far from what censorship is. Also not really something that would be considered dystopian.
2. I would disagree that Orwell work is about “censorship is bad”. His work is IMHO more about exploring risks caused by attempt to do population surveillance and control. Spreading lies and falsehood consistently to destroy any understanding of an actual situation, the way Trump does by lying about election fraud, is way closer to the Orwellian nightmare than YouTube removing that content.
2. It's more extreme than that though. YouTube banned a reputable news source for reporting on a story in which Trump tangentially mentioned election fraud. That's pretty Orwellian imo.
Some political websites have been blocked on the hosting level and even the ISP level. I can't defend these website's political views, but I can defend their right to at least host their website somewhere.
Over the past year I've switched from Google search to DDG; Google Maps to Apple Maps; Chromecast to Apple TV+; and Drive to Dropbox. I've held off on switching away from Gmail, but I'm switching to something else tonight. Suggestions welcome.
By the way, not that I would support this at all (since I believe in free speech), but any idea if any speeches from Putin or Xi, or official government accounts from either country have been banned from Twitter or YouTube et. al. like our own US President's social media accounts were? I'm guessing not likely, given that they've really done nothing about ISIS accounts in the past, or posts from those on the "left" side of the culture wars calling for and supporting outright violence in US cities or against individuals.
> I'm guessing not likely, given that they've really done nothing about ISIS accounts in the past
This is inaccurate. The precedent for removing extremist content was set in the late 2000s when Facebook, Google, and Twitter started massive campaigns to investigate, report and remove Islamic extremist content on their platforms. A lot of legitimate non-extremist Islamic content and users got caught up in the censorship. I didn't hear anything about it from free speech absolutists, though.
A common suggestion, and one that I myself chose, is Fastmail. I have nothing but good things to say about them. Fairly inexpensive, fast, and great tools for using a custom domain (which I also highly recommend).
i use (and pay for) protonmail myself. then main reason i chose it was because it has a free tier, so if i ever miss a payment or can't pay for some reason, i can still send and receive email. if it wasn't for that reason i would probably just go with fastmail
I personally use ProtonMail but have been looking at FastMail or Hey.com because the encryption on ProtonMail can be cumbersome for setting up external email clients.
Youtube is fighting populism. The common people no longer believe anything the mighty have to say. You can see it in this reporters eyes when he gets relentlessly mocked during the trucker protests in Canada.
This is a path where all this censorship will lead to if they don't stop it. It will be as bad for the modern day Oligarchs as it was for the French nobility during the revolution, if they can't control it. But the problem is during the last year only more and more trust has been eroded.
All week on twitter Pfizer, and vaccine side effects has been trending. Today on twitter it's "They lied" is trending. You can see how alarming this is to some at the top.
It's one thing to have people making false claims, but covering the former president tying of election his claim to the current Ukraine crises should not fall into that category.
Seems like the underlying problem is that YouTube is 1 generic platform that contains news, entertainment, random home videos, etc.
Perhaps the right answer is to “divide” it up and set requirements for each category of video, similar to how “YouTube kids” is a thing now. News and podcasts would go under its own section and have some level of sanity checks while home videos can be as random as they want to be.
I don't think there needs to be division by topic, there just needs to be alternatives. If you divide by topic you still have effective monopolies, just smaller ones.
I think we need to focus on how to make it easier to consume content from multiple platforms together. Small starts are things like web notifications (which are unfortunately abused) so that you can be notified about new videos from an author your just discovered, even if they aren't on your regular platforms. Of course RSS is an awesome version of this but needs some UX built for the average user.
The harder thing is getting curation and recommendation across platforms. But this definitely isn't impossible.
Youtube kids is just an excuse to put the blame on creators if a video happens to be problematic. For a lot of reasons actual kids targeted content is not there, and a ton of predatory stuff still thrives there.
To your point, Youtube has a strong legal incentive to make Youtube Kids succeed, and they failed. I’m not sure we can expect better for other category splits that are no less controversial.
I think once your an international multi billion dollar monster corporation, we should have serious checks and balances. And we did but now all of those checks are paid off to ignore anti competitive practices and abuses. Make career lobbyists illegal. Also, politicians should not be able to buy stocks, let them have a 401k but no picking stocks.
It's wild to read HN comments advocating for significantly more government control of private companies.
A decade ago that would be pure heresy on any tech forum. Now it's (currently) the top comment on one of the top stories on HN.
That said, I guarantee that a government-controlled or otherwise heavily regulated platform would have far, far more instances of benign content removed for violating obscure rules. Once the consequences rise to the level of regulatory violations, the companies will pull content without thinking because nobody wants to risk the fines or worse.
These companies are rushing to self-censor their own content as a way to get out ahead of potential future regulation. Politicians and journalists can, and will, seize upon even the slightest missteps or unpopular comment to lambaste tech companies as evil. This move was definitely a mistake, but it's part of a larger movement to aggressively err on the side of safety when it comes to any potentially controversial content.
Very few people on this forum would disagree with the government telling private companies that they cannot discriminate against people based on protected classes. And yet, the idea of the government telling social media companies they cannot discriminate between types of user generated content is so much more difficult to swallow?
"Private companies can do what they like" should only apply to companies that are not monopolies.
Due to network effects there is no legitimate competition to YouTube, so YouTube needs to be regulated as a monopoly (unless maybe TikTok has started hosting longform videos instead of just people doing stupid dances).
This isn't a problem, there are alternatives. Attacks that involve choking off access to the banking system are dangerous because starting a up a new bank is legally challenging. Attacks involving deplatforming are just a temporary annoyance, there is already a fairly healthy constellation of alternative platforms growing that can host serious political debate that have grown up in a few short years once these companies went off the rails circa 2020. There are competent competitors out there to at least Twitter & YouTube. Probably Facebook too in time.
YouTube can play politics if they want. It isn't a good thing, but life has survived CNN and Fox News and it doesn't get worse than that for biased publishing.
They're also doing what their regulators in the House and Senate have demanded they do. The line between a private operator exercising their will, and acting on the will of the government, is very thin and quite blurred.
I think of YouTube (and many others) as akin to state media anymore.
I’m becoming more convinced that the future I’ve been planning simply won’t be possible in the decades to come. The world is scarcely recognizable. And having experienced nothing but peace and prosperity makes me feel woefully unprepared.
The WEIRD world is becoming increasingly more authoritarian. I’m already detached from real conflict and scarcity, knowing nothing but peace and prosperity, and the TikTok generation behind me meming about WW3 doesn’t inspire much confidence.
I always enjoy a well crafted comment like this in which the reader can't tell if the "authoritarianism" you are decrying is the former president trying to circumvent democracy or the censorship of people who are spreading that message. It allows you to collect upvotes from people on both sides thinking you are accusing the other of authoritarianism.
Perhaps he means both? Both of those are examples of behavior that is unusual, particularly because they're done in such a brazen way. That's what makes the world less recognizable.
It depends how you see "left" and "right". I see the left as promoting equality, and generally freedom, and the right justifying or increasing inequality. An authoritarian system by definition gives far more power to some people than others, which is an idea of the right. However, systems of government in practice are generally not strictly left or right, and you get the likes of the Soviet Union which gave some degree of economic equality but little equality in terms of power.
I think this word should be banned from such comparisons. Equal outcome can equal opportunity and different takes on what matters. Right-wing libertarianism tends to be the most "pure technical freedom" for the individual but tends to lead to little practical freedom for those without significant capital.
You could rightfully argue that the far end of either in its pure form is the meaningful flavor of "freedom".
Authoritarianism is orthogonal to that, in either case.
Left to me feels more pro fairness but anti freedom. Either way though in most conceptualizations libertarianism/authoritarianism is usually separated from left/right
It depends what freedoms you are talking about. In a communist system you wouldn't have the freedom to own somebody else's house and charge them rent, for example. It's interesting how we throw around concepts like "left" and "right", or "liberal" and "conservative", either not understanding what they mean, or having many different understandings. I'm puzzled about how we manage to communicate at all, but maybe we don't.
I'm a bit vague about how exactly it's used in different places. In Australia, it's the name of one of the major political parties, and it's considered a moderately "right wing" party. There was the classic 19th century liberalism, and its modern version neoliberalism.
I guess the Liberal Party in Australia has some similarities to the Conservative Party in the UK.
Thank you. The ambiguity really reflects my own feelings though. I feel uncertain and precarious, like many people regardless of where I sit on any issue, and this divisiveness is exacerbating everything which is part of my point.
Either people have and live by principles or they don't. Part of our division is these sides you speak of, instructing their followers what to believe about individual topics.
Everyone quoted this in regards to theocracies. It's clearly a way more abstract principle.
> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
I think you're right and I can only assumed you've been downvoted because people didn't like your use of the word "principled" (which we usually reserve for good people) being used to describe idealogical absolutists.
The world is sadly more complicated than that. Often people's principles contradict each other, especially when it comes to bad actors. Consider the person with a principle of non-violence who is still willing to fight to defend their family. Are they a hypocrite?
"Defending" assumes an attacker, which is the one breaking the principle of non-violence. So no, you're not a hypocrite to defend yourself if you believe in non-violence
Said differently, the belief in non-violence can be stated as "I believe in pursuing non-violent means in absolutely every situation except for those in which another actor acts violently toward me"
Why not both? After all, this isn't a case of someone genuinely supportive of Trump's coup attempt being censored, this is an algorithm blindingly censoring journalists reporting on it. Humans not even in the loop. The rise of algorithmic censorship is the world becoming more authoritarian. It's not even a matter of individuals changing their values in this case, it's the system.
Though individuals have been changing their values as well. On the left and the right, and the center as well, there is more support for authoritarian. Part of that is due to COVID, so maybe it will fade. Hopefully it will, but we'll see I guess.
Just wait until GPT3 deep-fake audio. Closely followed by Deep-fake video. And algorithms will amplify this content to the echo chambers that "want" to hear it to increase ad revenue a few percentage points. All this will enter society at a time when trust in institutions is already low; you already hear some people predicting that there may not be an election with uncontested results (in the USA) ever again. If we solve/survive all those problems maybe there will be enough sense-making to actually tackle climate change come 2032. and maybe people will claim that the 20's were the true great filter of civilizations.
On the other hand, the world is probably the most united it's been in a while because of Russia so there's that.
Do we see much change with photoshop? Personally I don't recall seeing much, but a "photo" of someone in the wrong place at the wrong time is every bit as damning as a deep-fake video in many circumstances.
Good looking post processing used to be exclusively reserved for movie studios with render farms. Then it became available to any YouTuber with a PC and a license (or not) of Adobe. Now the average phone can do more impressive special effects for Snapchat filters than big budget movies had not long ago.
I'm convinced that deepfakes will be as easily generated as a Snapchat filter within a few years, substantially less time than society will require to adjust to this reality.
I hear that cameras that sign video files are coming. It sucks that we have reached this point but it seems like some mitigations against deep fakes will appear.
The minute fakes are a serious issue we will sign utterances. Exactly the same as DNS or anything actually important. Deepfakes will not be a threat or issue.
According to Fiona Hill, we’re already in it. She doesn’t really indicate when we crossed the rubicon, but I guess there doesn’t always have to be a Franz Ferdinand moment?
> but I guess there doesn’t always have to be a Franz Ferdinand moment?
The official start of WWI was a month after Franz Ferdinand's assassination, even though it's so heavily identified nowadays as "the start of the war". It's entirely possible that in the future, the instigating event will be identified as something that already happened and it's just taking a while for the shooting to start as alliances solidify, and that people who think we're already in WWIII have the same "the instigating event is the start of the war" association.
Russia's incursion into Ukraine near the end of February could, for example, end up being it.
I agree with Fiona: the clear nuclear threat was over the line. Freezing the assets of the central bank of Russia was also unimaginable a month ago (they are not Venezuela). That's why I used the words containing/deescalating.
Nearly 9% of US presidents have been assassinated. Over a much much smaller timeframe. I would bet you would be less likely to have been assassinated as a Tsar than as a President.
That seems substantial, at least compared to Presidents, especially considering the threat of assassination was a serious consideration given all the political intrigue. Whereas AFAIU U.S. Presidents didn't take the threat of assassination seriously until the 20th century, exposing themselves to the public in ways that would be unthinkable to Tsars; or monarchs and, later, autocrats generally for that matter.
On the other hand, likelihood of death per year looks more comparable. For Tsars I get 2.1% (5 / (1917 - 1682)). For Presidents I get 2.3% (3 / (1917 - 1789)) or 1.7% (4 / (2022 - 1789)), depending on the range.
These days autocrats don't invest themselves much in establishing national political legitimacy or institutional legitimacy, focusing almost exclusively on building and grooming a power base where everyone in power has a vested interest in keeping the leader alive. So Putin probably doesn't have much to worry about, excepting perhaps some patriot military General.
EDIT: It's 27% of Tsars and 1.6% likelihood of death per year if starting from 1613, the start of the Romanov Dynasty. (Refreshing my Russian history as I go.) Numbers don't really change if we go back to 1547, Ivan the Terrible and first self-styled Tsar of Russia, as we add another intervening murder. And that's being charitable on the first metric given rapid succession and overlap during the Time of Troubles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_monarchs
I think it's hard to divine trends from such small numbers. 14 Tsars, 45 presidents. It's not even enough to determine if the odds of one outcome or the other is better than a coin toss. This is before getting into confounding variables like availability and quality of medical care. How would the numbers change if they all had access to emergency care available to the next person to face an assassination attempt? Or if they all had the Secret Service looking out for them. The President flies around with a world class hospital with some of the world's best staff.
My guess is both attempts and successes are fewer over time and will approach 0 until some structural change shocks increasingly complacent protections.
The factors in World War 2 were much different, public sentiment didn’t matter. Nazis would have taken Poland in 1939 and pursue the Soviet Union sooner, it was inevitably a World War. World War 1 was editable.
World War 1 was very much avoidable. Time and time again World War 1 has been called unnecessary because the original dispute that triggered the conflict was limited.
There were people who foresaw, if not perfectly, how bad WWI would be, and tried to stop it. Many of them were socialists - Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany, Jean Jaurès in France for example - and their final hope was that the proletariat of the European nations would not fight against one another, but we know how that turned out.
The problem was that there were not enough who were afraid, and that goes for WWII too.
There is also the view, which I think has considerable merit, which regards WWII in Europe as a continuation of WWI, and the Pacific war as a largely separate, though concurrent, event.
There is a thought provoking book about how terrible the repercussions of WWI really were. The author claims the world was on the verge of a renaissance in technology, medicine, energy, music, trade, etc. The thought of a world war was incomprehensible at the time—no one believed it could happen. Who knows how the world would look today without WWI.
(If any one is interested in the book I will hunt it down as I don’t remember the name).
This was discussed shortly in: A Study of History by Arnold Toynbee
Another anecdote that speaks to the sentiment of the beginning of the war is Britain’s initial deployment of troops. The troops were literally marching towards Germany with music and percussionists that was supposed to motivate the troops and strike fear into the enemy. I imagine an army like you would see in Game of thrones (walking from point A to point B and making camp in between). Germany used their planes and promptly dispatched the British troops which suffered devastating losses. After this event Britain changed their tactics and took the war seriously.
(This event may have been WW2 which would make the story even more ridiculous).
I think the point is that WWI was precipitated by a chain of events that could have, in theory, easily been interrupted if the belligerents had been sufficiently fearful of conflict.
I agree in a sense. But my point is that the memes don’t carry purpose or urgency because the possibility of a catastrophic world war feels remote. Just like the possibility that our democracy might vanish in an instant.
I’d say joining the army or building a factory that can crank out precision guided munitions is better to contain the threat of war than cooking up some spicy memes.
Ukrainians using anti-tank weapons to fight on their own land against a different nation trying to take ownership of the country is the definition of defence.
Escalation is what Russia is doing: cluster munitions, rolling elite troops in, and shelling apartment buildings. Sending weapons to the people who live there to fend off invaders, and imposing sanctions is a fairly tepid response.
I think what's changed is that the ability of a few outlets to control the narrative is diminished. The interstate always cut through poor communities. The bridges were always designed to keep buses from carrying people out of the cities to the suburbs. Certain demographics were always over-represented among the poor, and the policies responsible were always there. (US examples, but systems keep some people down for the benefit of others everywhere.)
But now you hear about it. The world you planned for was always an illusion. It never existed outside a narrow slice of time in post-WW2 peace and prosperity, and only for the thin slice of humanity that got to enjoy it. Now the hard part is: what do you do about it now that you know you were fed pleasing lies?
I would recommend reading about people that have gone through revolutions/war conflicts. Especially worker-led movements that have toppled Tsars, Kings, and Militaries. I'd also recommend this for non-violent weapons against dictatorships(https://www.aeinstein.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/FDTD.pd...)
The world is certainly dark but I find comfort in knowing that the majority of us simply want to live peaceful lives, and watch our families prosper.
Hard times and war change people. Many changes are negative: poorer, less secure, less trusting, more fearful, devastating losses.
But other changes are for the better. And you don't need war to make these changes. If you make them before hard times come, you'll be better prepared for them: becoming more stoic (less emotional, less offended at everything), becoming more serious, more resourceful, more self-reliant, lowering your expectations, being more humble, being more careful with your words and who you speak openly with, knowing your place instead of speaking for the whole of humanity, being better able to negotiate, being better able to compromise, being more tolerant of other opinions, appreciating the wisdom of our ancestors more, and focusing more on what really matters.
All of the things you wrote as good things are (mostly) good things, glittering generalities that have no bearing on whether hard times are good or bad.
To connect the two, you'd have to complete the scurrilous reference made that we are currently in a time of "weak men". You may or may not be aware that the "Hard times..." meme is widely used among not just stoics, but also fascist groups to suggest that the current generation is soft and weak, and that only by adversity can men become strong again.
One can do almost everything good you listed, and indeed aspire to it, without becoming stoic and emotionless. To have feelings isn't weak.
I think you misunderstood what the commenter was trying to say. He didn't mention anything about becoming emotionless, but becoming less emotional. I think we can all agree that new first world generations are on the extreme side of the spectre of emotions and would benefit from leaning to the opposite side a bit.
> I think we can all agree that new first world generations are on the extreme side of the spectre of emotions and would benefit from leaning to the opposite side a bit.
"We all" find our opinions are unwelcome on the internet when we say things like that.
The "hard times create..." meme was originally shared by actual ethno-nationalists who have since been banned from most platforms.
I don't know if the person I replied to knows that - I think there are a lot of people who don't. It's worth pointing out though there's a disconnect from the first sentence to the second. Why is it that we have to have hard times for us to be better? Well, the argument from the meme - which many people take seriously even if you or I don't - is that recent times have been easy and this has created weak (and other pejoratively described) men.
The GP did point out that war was not needed to make the changes suggested, and they are good in times of peace and plenty as well. We understand that striving to be less offensive is good, but we hesitate to advocate that people become less easily offended because it can sound like we are blaming the victim. But it is good for everyone's emotional health to be able to be unaffected by the intentional or unintentional offenses of others. And the benefits of stoicism aren't about being emotionless, but not letting those emotions you let yourself be open to, be the guiding total of who you are. Anger and joy can be like other instinctual needs like defecation or hunger, just signals to cue your intelllect. Eastern traditions would say something like embracing the moment and how you feel, but not becoming attached to it or it's source.
I’ll be more blunt about it: cultivating emotionality is a disservice, especially to the most disadvantaged. Being offended doesn’t serve you at all; it’s a merely feeling that makes you easier to exploit.
We do not live in the time of weak men; we live in a time which has not made men strong in the way other times have. endurance through hardship is what makes strength. Being strong in the way that many hardships make you comes with its own complexity.
I compare it to kids having allergic reactions. If you grow up in a sterile environment your immune system reacts to minor environmental irritants. And that is maladaptive.
My parents were in their 20s during the Bangladesh independence war, when Pakistan engaged in genocide of Bangladeshis: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/genocide-us-cant-reme.... Even leaving aside the violence—when they were growing up, 1 out of 4 kids didn’t make it to age 5. They can talk about the war in, if not neutral, objective and unemotional terms. They would never suggest they’ve encountered any adversity in their life. But certainly nothing that happens in America gets them all that worked up.
And I can’t help but feel that this really does make them better, more capable, and more effective people. They’re able to grapple with reality in all its messiness in a detached unemotional way.
Stoics in fact embraced emotions and feelings. It is a common misconception that Stoicism means to blunt your feelings. It’s a long explanation, but it basically encourages you to live in the moment and leave every day fulfilled.
Everything you said I agree with, but I'm very pessimistic that the average person has either the intellect or the will to change their outlook (and thus behaviour) voluntarily, at least over the general population. I do think it's an interesting hypothesis (and I'll claim it for the moment) that the current world, with its facile TikTok morons and the litany of other issues that I think the Romans, Greeks, and even people from the early 20th century would chalk up to stupidity, ignorance, and naïveté, is the result of TOO MUCH peace and prosperity. The overwhelming majority (more than 99%) of the Western world has no idea what proper existential struggles look like, and they haven't for 80 years now. I recall Jefferson's prognostications about the need for repeated revolutions.
I think we need catastrophe and suffering to bring out the best in ourselves, because without them society writ large trends inexorably in a direction that nobody would argue represents the best of our species.
There is no easy answer: on one side you have censorship but on the other you have noise. Decentralized solutions produce a lot of noise and there is no existing protocol to automatically separate noise from signal.
It's all because of ads. Everything is done in the name of getting more advertisers, and more ad-clicks. So everything must be sanitised, and strictly regulated lest you upset the advertisers
Perhaps people want a more authoritarian world (without realizing it). The ratio of static to noise has been increasing year by year. People don't want to take (nor have) the time to balance alternate view points and spend the time to independently determine fact from opinion. I think the current lack of direction creates turmoil--there are too many options, too many sources of information, and the quality of all of them have gone down while they compete to pull at our amygdalas for seconds of our time. Maybe there is a higher percentage of people who just want answers from someone they trust so they can get on with their lives.
I think I've been on HN long enough to know that (re)implementing limitations on the control of information would make most of you scream. But maybe its for the best. It's already been proven many times over that people aren't going to research facts themselves. So having fewer organizations spoon feed choice bits of information can't be worse. Note that I am not suggesting to deliberately block information, but rather have organizations that are more selective (i.e. exactly like it was during the newspaper era).
I think it's incredibly unlikely for the USA to become a dictatorship. We have too many checks and balances, and the decision making is cordoned off into many compartments, and the country is split 50/50 on who they vote for. An authoritarian-bent president would have to fight three branches of government, 50 governors (all of whom have their own state-level army, by the way), 100 senators, hundreds of congressmen, thousands of judges and lawyers, 150 million citizens, and so on and so forth. And on top of that, manage the country on a national and international level. I just dont see it happening. Trump did not bring us any where closer to that reality by the way (name one legislative/judicial change that moved the needle closer in that direction).
All this to say, there's nothing to be scared about. The internet has been a fun experiment but it's given a microphone to too many people, and has crumpled the gatekeepers who had the job of filtering out the diamonds from the mud (and did that job extraordinarily well, by the way, because they had to, or die). It feels like our culture has been dying. The influence artists had up until the 90s was comparatively huge. If resources were pooled to support the most talented (be it artists, journalists, architects, musicians, corporate / government leaders, etc), I think we would experience another golden era of culture.
> Authoritarianism is not a good thing, hard stop.
On a spectrum, where e.g. anarchy is on the other end, it is a good thing. Where to place the pin however is a challenge. Binary decisions such as that ("this thing can only be good or bad") is an extremely restricted way at seeing the world.
>The US is not a long way away from authoritarianism. It's one strongman with actual brains away from it.
Authoritarianism and anarchy are not opposite ends of a spectrum. Furthermore, there are many that reasonably believe that certain forms of structured anarchy are a good thing, and not just teenage punks, but also intellectuals and academics.
Regarding the US falling to authoritarianism, there are at least two factors: 1. Most people are in a state of conditioned helplessness where they don't feel there is anything they can do to affect change. 2. Most people don't have minds of their own but just parrot what they hear in the media that aligns with their party. These two in conjunction leave an opening for someone to execute a soft coup. In fact a draft Trump executive order to discard the election results was released recently. He had convinced his base that the election was fraudulent. Seeing how far Trump got at eroding democracy, imagine someone like Trump but competent in the same situation. Every democracy that has gone authoritarian had plenty of branches and politicians and checks and balances in place.
> I think it's incredibly unlikely for the USA to become a dictatorship.
Yes but only until a violent event that strikes fear in the minds of the people. Then the government may convince people to give up their freedoms in the name of security.
I think the question is how dedicated are we to our values, not in good times, but in uncertain times.
Alphabet/YouTube should seek for government regulations that requires them to not delete the videos that are not explicitly illegal.
They keep removing videos to keep their advertisers or customers happy. If they are not allowed by the government to delete videos that are not illegal, they can just blame the government.
Of course, they should not be forced to keep every video. It has to be profitable for them.
Clearly you have not considered the scale they operate in.
What you are thinking would apply if they were handling 10s of hours of video everyday from dozens of individuals.
They have about 10 hours of video uploaded every second, throught the day, all week, every month, every year... and their platform has 2 billion users. What you are suggesting would not be possible even if they hired everyone eligible to work in the world.
>Clearly you have not considered the scale they operate in.
Youtube literally operates walk-in 'creator spaces' where creators with popular channels can go to make use of editing equipment and resources. They can staff a media liaison office. They can staff a media liaison office in every major city of every first world country. They have those offices already existing to sell adverts, after all.
It would be trivial for them to operate those media liaison offices and ensure that things like this don't happen. They choose to hide behind the 'oops, the algorithm did it, nothing we could have done' excuse.
1. At what point will the information on the internet become so obfuscated that communication and "truth" is difficult to discern from "lies", if not presently today? Consider a person using the internet for the first time in order to find more information on a current event. How many sources (and what qualifies as one) does one have to traverse to weigh what one can consider to be "truthful enough"? Does a person have enough time to sift through all the available sources? To me, this is why media outlets filter their content, in order to protect their version of "truth". News outlets have always been biased, I don't see why YouTube or Twitter or FB cannot do the same thing.
2. Democracy will always be a thin line. There must be a point of "truth" of recording votes that the population is willing to accept. If the majority consistently challenges results or insists that the results are false, then democracy cannot exist, and another form of governmental control, possibly an evolution of authoritarianism or dictatorship, will take its place. Is that more acceptable than less-than-perfect democratic outcomes?
Just to break up the angry posts self-radicalizing themselves:
This is a good thing.
Basically every media outlet mentioned here has a long history of publishing really big lies about important stuff they know to be false for monetary gain.
The Hill had to quietly oust one of their own top propagandists recently because of how badly his obvious lies about Ukraine helping to steal the US election from Trump went down with people familiar with objective reality.
We're seeing on a big scale where this leads right now, and it is no coincidence that all these people seem big fans of Putin and dislike democracy.
And we've got all these people on HN carefully avoiding mentioning that they believe, or worse? support, these lies, and taking the pure and noble stance that we should never censor lies. Which would be a bad stance even if that itself wasn't just another obvious lie for political gain.
I dont want to be harsh, since you may well have lost people close to you because of this specific propaganda, but wishing further pain, misery, suffering and death on the victims of propaganda and their families isn't really cool.
Some things are complicated and murky, but there's fairly clear boundaries too sometimes.
If their single death will stop senseless spread of a harmful virus to MORE innocent people who do their best to stay safe, it's good riddance. Some family members or even relatives are stuck with some people who are ignorant and just cause it to spread.
This makes no sense at all. Are we supposed to just pretend that Trump never made these claims? It's one thing to try to continue supporting these claims with false information and an entirely different thing to post him repeating those claims in an unrelated matter.
When reached for comment, YouTube policy communications
manager Ivy Choi confirmed that the channel had been
suspended for posting content in violation of YouTube’s
policies. “We removed content from and issued a strike
to this channel for violating our election integrity
policy, and as a result, this channel is suspended from
publishing new videos or livestreams for seven days,”
Choi told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We do allow
for content with sufficient educational, documentary,
scientific or artistic context, which the removed content
did not contain.”
Wow. If you want another Trump elected, Ms. Choi, then by all means, proceed.
If you've got a better way to stop the spread of malicious lies and misinformation, please share with the class!
If you're Republican, conservative or "libertarian" (riiiight), you need to be quiet and go sit in the corner while the rest of us decide what to do with you.
When it comes to political stuff it was a good way to identify "contraversy" which is very useful in this world of information: should I research this further or can I trust this? Is there more going on with this subject?
I think our minds naturally stray to find these patterns to reduce computational load. For example, reading news on reddit and seeing hundreds of comments and very few upvotes puts your mind into "investigation mode" while seeing something average makes you much more trusting of it.
The article has a link to a Twitter thread that starts with an excerpt from the video.
(This feels meta: HN links to a Tampa newspaper, which links to a Twitter thread, which embeds a clip from a video released by The Hill, which contains a clip from Fox News, where one half of the audio comes from a phone line to Donald Trump. Pointers to pointers to pointers. Oh, and now you get me, talking about it.)
The framing is interesting. (I have always found it hard to pin down The Hill.)
First, what Trump said: Mostly, he tried to take credit for cancelling Nord Stream 2. This is a little weird, because it didn't seem especially cancelled. Related to this, he told an unverifiable but plausible anecdote about giving Angela Merkel a white flag, to say that she was "surrendering" to Russia: I say "plausible" because he was pushing Germany (and Europe in general) to increase its defense spending (by threatening not to defend NATO, which you could say emboldened Putin, but you could say that about other things too, like Obama's "red line". "Mistakes were made."). And at the end of the Trump clip, a little unnecessarily, they leave in one sentence from him to the effect that "this would have never happened if I'd been re-elected", which of course he expresses in terms of a supposed "steal".
Could the Hill have cut the clip just before that last sentence? Yes. They would have lost none of their main message. They would have lost something to react parenthetically to, though.
Did they include that one sentence simply because it was adjacent and it gave them some shock value? Or was this their way of smuggling the message to their (not-so-Republican) audience? ("We are ostensibly laughing at Trump, but at least this gets you to listen to him"?) I don't know.
Their reaction is one of implicit mockery. They also imply that Trump typically would also insert some talking point about his supposed healthcare plan (which never happened). Which again they laugh at, because everybody knows there was nothing there.
They also refer to Trump's supposed "defense" of Putin: From context, it sounds like Trump said that Putin's use of the word "peacekeepers" was clever. But there is a weird moment where the host repeats the word "peacekeepers" several times, almost unnecessarily. A paranoiac could say he was trying to reinforce the message.
So what is The Hill's slant? With Rising they lean towards a kind of moderate populism that I have always associated with Russian propaganda. Though that has only ever half- made sense to me: Sure, Russia would want to get support away from the more interventionist centrists ("first choice Trump, second choice Bernie, last choice Hillary"), but you'd think they'd also want to push division, and The Hill's moderate populism is actually not so inflammatory (it does not shove wedges into cracks between identities, like, honestly, CNN/BBC/(CIA?) do. Or did until Biden got them to moderate themselves, a little?)
And The Hill has tended to give time to writers like Matt Taibbi who emphasize that they think "Russiagate" is fake. (Maybe they're right though?)
So then how do we put it all together?
Maybe I should just take The Hill at face value: They're trying to do an "inside baseball" thing, and this really is the compromise political position they've decided they believe in (presumably because it looks like a way forward that seems "good" to them while also protecting their interests).
Anyway, I guess the lesson for The Hill is that, if you're using sarcasm to deal with Trump's claims, you're being too subtle. And if I can write a post this long wondering what their angle is, then they're being too subtle.
Which might be necessary and true, but would still be a little sad: "We can't have interesting things because the other people are too stupid."
Death and calamity is going to be the theme of the next 100 years and beyond. Climate change, mass displacement, cheap & effective propaganda, ignorance, resource contention, soil degradation, nuclear proliferation.
We've only had nuclear weapons for 70 years. We used them to blow each other up on day 1. The odds are not in our favor that nuclear warfare will be contained.
Death and calamity has been the theme of the whole of history. We're still generally in a much better situation than 100 years ago, even better than 200 and so on.
What is your metric? We have weapons that can end our entire human species. Never before in the history of our entire planet was this even been a possibility. Its like living with a loaded gun to your head. Not to mention the impending climate related crisis domino effect we are going to face in the next 50 years. I'm sure having nuclear weapons will make that go smoothly.
Is anything other than blind nationalism what we're calling "propaganda"...?
The west absolutely has a role in the current state of the world. I don't think it's propaganda to acknowledge to situation is messy, and far more complex than "Russia is bad guy. Everyone else: good guy with no wrong doings."
If anything, I feel as though the propaganda is strongly flowing the other way. I'm blown away by how quickly popular media snapped back into war mode. Just like the early days of the Iraq war, it's a bombardment of war memes, the good guys are amazing, "did you hear about the Ghost of Kyiv?", "Russia is surrendering!", "One Ukrainian soldier dismantled a tank with his bare hands", "A sniper killed a top general."
The war is heartbreaking to see in real time. It's also frustrating to see all the simplified, good/bad hot-takes that perpetuates the US' "I'm not responsible for any of this" attitude. Meanwhile, we continue our own regime change wars, arming of states hostile to others, and then feign surprise and outrage when people call out the west's meddling when things go tits up.
Most of the states in eastern Europe have been victimized by the Russians. All the countries which aren't partially controlled by Russians have tried to join the west (EU, NATO) to protect themselves from Russians.
Countries which weren't enthusiastic enough about joining the west (Ukraine, Republic of Moldova, Georgia) are occupied by Russians.
Russians are the orcs. It is literally as simple as that.
John Joseph Mearsheimer (/ˈmɪərʃaɪmər/; born December 14, 1947) is an American political scientist and international relations scholar, who belongs to the realist school of thought. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He has been described as the most influential realist of his generation.[3]
...
Mearsheimer's books include Conventional Deterrence (1983), which won the Edgar S. Furniss Jr. Book Award; Nuclear Deterrence: Ethics and Strategy (co-editor, 1985); Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (1988); The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), which won the Lepgold Book Prize; The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007); and Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics (2011). His articles have appeared in academic journals like International Security and popular magazines like the London Review of Books. He has written op-ed pieces for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune.[9]
Mearsheimer has won several teaching awards. He received the Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching when he was a graduate student at Cornell in 1977, and he won the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Chicago in 1985. In addition, he was selected as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for the 1993–1994 academic year. In that capacity, he gave a series of talks at eight colleges and universities. In 2003, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[9] He is the recipient of the American Political Science Association's 2020 James Madison Award, which is presented every three years to an American political scientist who has made distinguished scholarly contributions. The Award Committee noted that Mearsheimer is "one of the most cited International Relations scholars in the discipline, but his works are read well beyond the academy as well."[10]
Mearsheimer's works are widely read and debated by 21st-century students of international relations. A 2017 survey of US international relations faculty ranks him third among "scholars whose work has had the greatest influence on the field of IR in the past 20 years."[11]
I very much do not agree with Mearsheimer's point of view, but describing his lectures as "Russian propaganda" suggests that you are the one in the grip of an extreme form of propaganda. Rethink where you're getting your information.
I don’t think the content of that video, or mearsheimer, are Russian propaganda. But I can believe that the title alone might’ve inspired some inorganic pushing by Russian shill accounts. After all, it’s a long video, most people probably click away within 30 seconds.
Wow, John Mearsheimer is now a Russian propagandist? You can disagree, but you may want to listen to one of your best thinkers in international politics.
He predicted this crisis in 2014, and I think he has been quite consistent on saying Putin will act, just that Putin will not occupy Ukraine. Now there is the possibility of Russia taking the eastern part, but his main thesis is still valid: the west should leave Ukraine as a buffer state.
"If you really want to wreck Russia, what you should do is to encourage it to try to conquer Ukraine. Putin is much too smart to try to do that." John Mearsheimer, 2015.
Today you and me can debate what "conquer" means, but if policy makers follow his advice, this war won't happen at all. I think that's what really matters.
Nonsense! Putin had always planned to rebuild the USSR. Ukraine, Moldova,... he was going to get them back piece by piece.
Putin's argument that Nato was a threat is just a distraction. There's nothing Nato could do if Ukraine joined Nato that Nato couldn't already do without Ukraine.
Mearsheimer's argument that Russia should be left alone to violate the sovereignty of her neighbours is just bonkers. Thank goodness he was ignored.
"If you really want to wreck Russia, what you should do is to encourage it to try to conquer Ukraine. Putin is much too smart to try to do that." John Mearsheimer, 2015.
i got this recommended too, watched the video and the only piece i was suspicious about is where he's suggesting to turn Ukraine into a buffer state, basically ignoring/denying their right to self-determination and rejecting them as independent state
I got this video recommended before the war became worldwide.
I also got Ukraine propaganda unfortunately: "President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the troops on Snake Island ‘died heroically’ " but a few days later we learned [0].
If China backed a violent overthrow of the Canadian government to install a pro-Chinese leader, and then was working on installing nukes in Canada while selling them weapons, what do you think the US would do?
John Mearsheimer is one of the few voices trying to shield us from the risk of a nuclear war that the arms and energy industries are happy to encourage for their own bottom lines. You are being fed propaganda, but it's not from John Mearsheimer.
You may have to reconsider this one, the title looks bad, but it's from a few years back and his opinions don't seem to align with Russia's in the slightest (among other things he has stated Ukraine should have kept their nuclear weapons as a deterrent for Russian invasion, in 1993).
His thesis is an explanation not an endorsement. He basically says Russia will not let Ukraine join NATO, for the same reasons that if in 20 years China wants to put a military base in Canada. It’s not right what Putin is doing but it makes sense…
There's a lot more to Putin's motivations than just Ukrain's membership of NATO. Both according to his own words as well as what makes sense given Russia's geostrategic and economic interests.
I think you are seriously mistaken as he has been keeping a constant message for years and has not changed. I think this is just one of those "you don't want to be right" situations.
When it's what we believe in, it's factual information. When it's the other camp's opinion, it's propaganda and misinformation.
You can't claim to be able to distinguish truth from falsehood if what you believe to be true is chosen before you even have the chance to form a rational thought. You're just proving it after the fact.
So anything that places any blame on the west is propaganda? So you think this Russia Ukraine conflict just started in 2022? These people aren't claiming that Putin did the right thing. They're just claiming that the US isn't completely innocent in all of this.
My very point is that it is a partisan policy and a hypocrisy. If pointing that it is a partisan policy is partisan and therefore cannot be said, we are exactly in the same sort of circular "you can't express that opinion" policies than on YT.
Ok, but your comment failed to disambiguate those two levels. That is, it could be read either as a point about partisanship (which is what you intended), or it could be read as a garden-variety partisan swipe. When there's an ambiguity like that, the flamebait interpretation always wins out in the mind of the median reader, which is what determines the expected outcome of the thread. Therefore, the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate.
For those of us who lived through the years of "selected not elected" it is a remarkable double standard. Or, being charitable, a remarkable reversal of opinion.
(I tried to slip the expression "flip flop" in there as a joke since that was a popular and widely over-used term at the time too, but I couldn't make it work).
Let us just take a moment to remember that Gore conceded, as did Hillary. On the night of the election, in her case. Former President Trump still has not conceded. There is no double standard. Citizens thinking the election was rigged is one thing, but when the President of the United States refuses to respect the democratic process, it is a very big deal.
For what it's worth I think it bit him the ass with the senate election in Georgia. If he hadn't told all his voters that it was rigged and there was no point in voting, the senate seats might have gone differently.
Overall I'm hoping that most people see through it and are tired of the stupidity and games that he plays. God help us if he wins the Republican primary in 2024.
There's a huge difference: in Bush v. Gore, Gore stepped aside for the good of the country, choosing to respect the institution of the courts even if the decision was dodgy. Trump is willing to burn down the institutions if it gives him an edge. The danger from the Trump narrative is not that die-hards are still grumbling, it's that the candidate doesn't seem to care about anything beyond his own interests.
>There's a huge difference: in Bush v. Gore, Gore stepped aside for the good of the country, choosing to respect the institution of the courts even if the decision was dodgy
And why would that be the better way to go about it?
Respecting an election you consider stolen that an institution favored to "respect the institution" means you're respecting a faulty institution - and encouraging similar behavior in the future.
Because that institution then worked another four times without incident. The institution, as flawed as it is, still kept transferring power peacefully.
In 2020's case, there was no dodginess, but nevertheless one candidate would rather discredit the institution rather than admit he lost, and -there is nothing to replace it with-. We've had 250 years of peaceful transfers of power because of this system; without a universally agreed to system to transfer power, we will have civil war.
There was plenty of dodginess in 2020, not the least of which was States executive branches unilaterally making changes to their electoral process rather than going through the Constitutional mandated legislative branch.
But judges don’t have time machines so that doesn’t change the outcome of anything.
Anyone that can say that there is zero shenanigans in Philadelphia’s electoral process with a straight face should consider becoming a professional poker player.
> ...States executive branches unilaterally making changes to their electoral process.... Many of those changes have since been thrown out by State level supreme courts for being unconstitutional: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/28/pennsylva...
That's a ruling by a single state court that's going to be immediately appealed, and it's of a law passed by the republican-held legislative branch.
Uh, your own link - "The state’s Republican-controlled legislature passed the law establishing no-excuse mail-in voting for all voters in 2019 with bipartisan support". That's not the executive branch unilaterally anything.
But, perhaps I should clarify then, rather than the abstract "dodginess", I'll instead say "uncertainty as to whether votes were cast legally, and counted correctly".
> Because that institution then worked another four times without incident. The institution, as flawed as it is, still kept transferring power peacefully.
The question you aren't answering is: At what point do YOU draw the line. Stop trying to explain that the line wasn't crossed in 2020 election (or in any other election before that).
When, according to you, is the line crossed and the system has shown itself to be faulty.
My claim is that your answer will be either a deflection or implication that the system can never be faulty (anything but a clear answer).
-I- said that the system "worked" in the sense that power was transferred peacefully. I didn't say the system was flawless; just the opposite. But to tear down and discredit the system, as Trump has been endeavoring to do, without providing a replacement (other than "Trump is president no matter what the vote says", if that needs clarifying), means that power will no longer be able to transfer peacefully. That's the -one and only feature- that the system HAS to have; and it's that one that we'd be dispensing with.
I have no idea what any other lines being crossed has to do with anything.
eh, I think you're being pretty generous to Gore there. It was a long, drawn, fought out battle involving many lawsuits and lots of court coverage. In the end, when Gore had basically lost all of his challenges, he did "step aside" as far as dropping the lawsuits. But he continued to be a presence and he was still pretty bitter about it many years later (and brought it up nearly every time he was on TV). 6 years later in 2006 his movie "Inconvenient Truth" he reopened the wound all over again.
Now that said, Gore is a lot better than Trump on this for sure.
There's nothing wrong with a long, drawn-out fight through the proper channels. A couple of months is not really a long, drawn-out fight by the standards of the American legal system anyway. Gore owed it to everyone who voted for him to fight for his win to the full extent of the law, which he did. When that was exhausted, he stepped aside and stepped out of the public eye for a long time. He did not push beyond the limits of the law, he did not rally his supporters against the new administration, he did not immediately start running for the 2004 nomination. When he finally did start making news again, it was, as you said, 6 years later. Bush had already been reelected with no interference from Gore. He didn't reopen any wounds, "An Inconvenient Truth" was not a political statement, it was not a diatribe against his political foes, it was not a platform on which to build another run for president. It was a return to the core issues that drove him earlier in his career. Issues that should be non-political in the first place.
To say "Gore is better than Trump on this" is to imply that they are both operating in the same universe, just on different levels. That is a false premise. There can be no comparison here.
I think the bigger difference is intent and actual facts (or non existence of any) behind the legal battles.
Trump simply does not live in reality and was enabled by lawyers abusing the legal system and attacking our institutions and literally attacking the government. On absolutely bonkers baseless accusations.
Gore had solid arguments, actually argued in court (didn't get thrown out with prejudice).
That's funny, I remember Roger Stone staging fake protests to stop court-ordered recounts until the Bush team ran out the clock. Guess memory is a fickle thing!
It's really rich (in an olfactory, not financial way) that a Trump Big Lie supporting bitcoin shill would whine about hyperbole and exaggeration. Are you under the illusion that you have an exclusive monopoly on that, and you're mortally offended when you find yourself on the receiving end of what you believe you have the sole right to dish out?
After debasing yourself by jumping to Trump's defense with "Trump is obviously being sarcastic" when all the evidence from his previous statements and behavior and impeachment trial proves that he most certainly was not, you're certainly easy to trigger into instantly flip-flopping to the other extreme when it's the other side.
So why are you so eager to believe and defend Trump's "sarcastic" "pure hyperbole and exaggeration", but so disrespectful of anyone else's freedom of speech?
Hillary has been claiming the 2016 election was stolen by Russia for Trump for six years now, and nobody seems to fret about how she’s undermining democracy. There were even many faithless electors that tried to overturn the results. Much like Trump, she just can’t seem to admit she lost.
Both parties need to learn that if you lose it’s because you didn’t get enough votes and to reflect on why that is. Although I’m sure it’s a lot more fun to complain about how you were cheated.
No, she doesn't use the word stolen, and she conceded; but the article you linked to provides evidence of interference.
> The investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III concluded that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election “in sweeping and systematic fashion” with the goal of helping Trump and harming Clinton
> Both parties need to learn that if you lose it’s because voters just didn’t like you that much.
What you're saying is only true in a dream world where gerrymandering, closing polling places, and preventing access to ballot boxes (in-person or otherwise) isn't happening. Unfortunately this isn't the case. So, no, you are wrong.
Sure, for every NY, and Maryland, etc. there’s a Wisconsin, Ohio, Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Texas, etc. the parties are not equal here, this is way more prevalent among republicans in swing states.
It’s a serious problem for all citizens, but republicans are incentivized to keep doing it.
Instead of trying to "both sides" gerrymandering, why don't you work out how many votes it takes on average for a Democrat to win an election, and how many it takes a Republican. With that information, you can infer which party has the most motivation to end gerrymandering.
There is no districts or gerrymandering at the Presidential level. It’s State wide. You could argue that the electoral system gives an advantage to smaller States because that’s true. But that’s by design to force a consensus at multiple levels.
Large scale change is supposed to require multiple types of majority, not just a snap mob decision. That’s a feature, not a bug.
> There is no districts or gerrymandering at the Presidential level. It’s State wide.
You make it sound like the number of states has always been the same, and cannot change. In reality, Congress gets to decide which states to add (and which potential states to deny), and it does so with deliberate consideration of how the electoral votes would be affected.
One could even argue that states gerrymander their own electoral vote by choosing to give all their electors to the plurality winner within their state, when they could choose to assign electors proportionally instead. They don't literally draw up per-elector districts to produce this skewed result, but the result is the same as a very skilled after-the-fact gerrymander, so I think it's a reasonable comparison.
Anyway, I wasn't just talking about gerrymandering at the Presidential level. The problem exists in the individual state legislatures too (although it's hard to calculate an average across different states), and in Congress. For example, an interesting analysis[0] from 2016 found that:
> In the past four congressional elections, then, Republicans, as the party with the majority in the House, received a “seats bonus,” wherein members of their party secured a larger share of the seats in the chamber than the share of votes won nationwide.
> You could argue that the electoral system gives an advantage to smaller States because that’s true. But that’s by design to force a consensus at multiple levels.
Millions of votes of a difference and complete capture of many states. My vote, living in Massachusetts, has no value in the presidential election because there’s a 100% chance it’ll be blue.
> But that’s by design to force a consensus at multiple levels.
It is a flaw. Republican votes in California count for much less than Democratic votes in Wyoming. It's a national election, the counting should be done nationally. We did away with states voting for Senators, it's time to do the same for President.
Not buying it. The races are so polarized that it basically doesn’t matter who runs at all, which is why so much focus is on voter suppression and gerrymandering.
> Not all voters are equal, but if people dont like you, you won't win
Does that sentence not completely contradict itself?
How often in modern times has a Republican president won a majority of the popular vote? Seems like the will of the people is not consistently respected, and even if people like you then you may very well lose. Especially if the people that like you are urban voters.
Hillary Clinton wasn't making those claims via deranged tweets and speeches from the Oval Office in her position as President of the United States. A private citizen on one hand versus the leader of a country with the power of the press and an angry, violent mob on the other. One person's complaints versus a firehose of misinformation, lies and possibly Russian-backed agitprop being spread by the leader of the country, his party and millions of his followers over four years, culminating in a violent, seditious riot against the very apparatus of democracy and the peaceful transition of power itself. These are not even remotely equivalent in terms of their damage to democracy.
Also, Hillary Clinton wasn't entirely wrong. That there was Russian interference in both the 2016 and 2020 elections on behalf of Trump's campaign is a fact - only the effect of that interference in the first case and the degree of Trump's foreknowledge are in dispute. Meanwhile, there was no actual conspiracy to steal the election from Trump... that was entirely bullshit. Like Hillary Clinton's weird brain disease. And Hillary Clinton's kill count. And Hillary Clinton's pedophile sex slave ring. And all of the Benghazi hearings. And whatever "treason" was supposed to be in the DNC email leaks. And Joe Biden being a pedophile. And Joe Biden having crippling dementia. And whatever Hunter Biden's briefcase was supposed to be about. And whatever the bullshit sandwich du jour for 2024 turns out to be.
Yes. I actually don't agree with Youtube's policy here at all, or with continuing to deplatform Trump (as long as he follows the rules like everyone else.) I did agree with his initial banning, because of the damage he could do in a position of power in a critical moment of political transition. But his views are basically mainstream in the Republican Party now, Jan. 6 was a failure, Biden was elected and the promised rural uprising and reckoning didn't happen, so the damage is probably done.
It's the false equivalence I'm objecting to. It seems clear to me that one side went off the deep end further than the other in this case.
That is completely different than claiming there were millions of hacked ballots and all kinds of other crazyness.
Those are legitimate political arguments about voter suppression laws.
No one on the left claimed Kemp and Republicans stuffed ballot boxes or China hacked whatever.
The argument is based in facts. Many Republican controlled states, especially in the south, have historic issues with suppressing the votes of black and brown Americans.
You can argue over the extent to which this suppression still exists and how much it affects election outcomes.
But it is not even close to the same as arguing that the election was completely fraudulent because of real voter fraud, that the SOS or whatever bureaucrats should overstep their authority to throw it out.
> - The Pennsylvania Supreme Court (not the legislature) changed their voting laws to accommodate widespread mail-in ballots and drop-boxes which was against the state constitution.
And yet no one challenged the law until after the third election it had taken effect. Until after the results had come out. There's a doctrine called laches: you have to complain about things that wrong you when you find about them, and if you wait too long, you don't get to complain anymore.
Furthermore, as for election challenges go, you're not going to invalidate any votes that had already been validly cast under the existing interpretation of law, even if the interpretation is incorrect per court rulings. For example, when there were last-minute challenges to absentee ballot procedures, any absentee ballots cast before the decision came out under the old procedures would still be valid, even if they didn't meet the new procedural requirements.
So anyone thinking that courts would invalidate election results via after-the-fact court challenges is either ignorant, lying to themselves, or is stuck somewhere in la-la land.
You are right about the first part. You won't know you have a dead raccoon in your basement until it starts stinking. I was hearing the conservatives complain about the mass mail-in voting rules and Trump himself also, long before the actual election.
On your second point: If a state holds an election contrary to their constitution and it's proven that it was contrary to their constitution, the votes wouldn't be constitutional. In other words they're illegal. So wouldn't it be sensible to hear calls to count only the legal votes?
There are many, many more irregularities that are too numerous to list but here are a few:
> On your second point: If a state holds an election contrary to their constitution and it's proven that it was contrary to their constitution, the votes wouldn't be constitutional. In other words they're illegal. So wouldn't it be sensible to hear calls to count only the legal votes?
No. Those who voted using improper procedures had reasonable basis to believe that the procedures they used would have been proper. If they had known those procedures where improper at the time they availed themselves of them, they very well could have used proper procedures instead. After the election and the votes are counted, it is absolutely too late to cure any defects. Why should those people be penalized for actions that they have done through no fault of their own?
the conservatives in Pennsylvania supported the change in the law that allowed for mail-in ballots.
Traditionally, older Pennsylvanians support conservative candidates. And with the state's population skewing older, Republicans in the state realized the thing that could dampen votes for their candidates was that the state's ancient, overly-tight restraints on what constituted a valid excuse for an absentee ballot meant that older Pennsylvanians who were shut in in nursing homes and couldn't find transportation to the polls increasingly wouldn't be able to vote for their candidates.
It was one of those bipartisan pieces of legislation that passed because Democrats believed the more of the population voted, the more would vote for them, and Republicans believed supporting the elderly's right to vote meant more Republican votes. In the end, they were probably both right.
Point is, the state Supreme Court rightfully saw through it when the people who'd supported the law in the first place called foul, but only in the third election the law was used, when their candidate wasn't the one who won.
... well, their candidate for President. An awful lot of their down-ticket candidates won. Which would be a weird thing to happen if the election had been rigged, wouldn't it?
Whether or not county admins overstepped legislature's authority is a legal argument that doesn't involve fake votes or stolen votes.
No one of reasonable mind is questioning whether ballots that were automatically sent to people - without explicit laws instructing counties to do that - were somehow sent back en masse by fake or dead people, or adding additional ballots onto it.
Yeah a lot of places like that get very high turnout. Especially older people in general.
One reason is from what the right calls 'ballot harvesting' which is usually legal. where someone goes into a high voter concentration area and goes door to doo, helps to vote, then turns the ballots in on behalf of the voter.
Both sides do this.
While there are a few instances of bad actors filling in ballots for people (almost always Republican..) that would have to be proven. And there isn't any evidence in those instances. Even if it did happen for a few hundred votes - which I personally doubt - it would not have changed the outcome of the election, likely not even at the very small local level.
- Stacey Abrams is running for Georgia governor in 2022 (AJC.com)
"Abrams lost to Kemp by less than 1.4 percentage points in 2018, the closest Georgia gubernatorial election in decades, and her refusal to concede defeat because of what she called an “erosion” of voting rights"
https://www.ajc.com/politics/politics-blog/breaking-stacey-a...
Her whole platform for her new gubernatorial race is predicated on the "fact" that she was cheated out of her last election.
Exactly. Georgia election system in particular is proven to be corrupt. Maybe Abrams is right? From 2020 a whistleblower say he was paid to ballot traffick ballots illegally to drop boxes
This is an example of us living under Marcusas repressive tolerance where people with the correct ideology can make claims with no evidence, while the other side is censored and persecuted even when coming with concrete evidence. It’s a Mao style cultural revolution. For Bernie, orange man and many other candidates we have proof of rampant cheating.
The 2000 Presidential election was attacked as illegitimate.
I was watching the latter seasons of X-Files and Fox Mulder made a comment on 2000 elections, something like “that sounds about as reliable as our elections.”
Plenty of folks, Howard Dean comes to mind, said they were straight up illegitimate.
Even now many on the left insist it was a tie or something.
This thing of “if you don’t win the elections, question the results” started then.
The press had no problem allowing baseless speculation and outright dishonesty in 2000. But when it was a Democratic cadidate, suddenly the truth matters.
To make matters worse, so many journalists are Democrats … it’s insane. Not just Democrats, but urban, college educated Democrats. Not exactly a cross section of the country.
The Bush v Gore fiasco is nothing like what is going on now: in 2000, in Florida, after all votes were tallied, the vote totals were so close a recount was legally mandated. During the recount a large number of ballots (actual, tangible evidence) were noted to have unclear undervotes and overvotes on them and were simply not counted. To compare this to the utterly baseless claims that lack even a scintilla of evidentiary support made by the current republican congress-folk is wacky.
Read that article. Nowhere do you see the “this is a lie” disclaimers. Yes, Trump is spreading disinformation, as Howard Dean did (and probably still does.)
Here’s another good example: by the end of the Democratic Primary in 2020, Biden had more than enough votes for the nomination. He had won, plain and simple.
But he and Sanders kept campaigning, because they knew an active campaign would turn out Democratic votes in downstream elections.
The press went along with this facade. At no point did they “declare a winner” even though Biden had effectively won.
They allowed the charade of a campaign to go on, allowing Democrats a heavy advantage in elections like the Wisconsin State Supreme Court.
Again, the election was already over, and a winner should have been declared. But it wasn’t.
The press is very selective. And study after study after shows journalists are almost exclusively Democrats.
> Trump is spreading disinformation, as Howard Dean
President Trump. What was Howard Dean? The distinction really matters.
> They allowed the charade of a campaign to go on, allowing Democrats a heavy advantage in elections like the Wisconsin State Supreme Court.
Primaries are not elections, though, and there is no reason a political party has to call them off just because someone believes the game has already been effectively won. I.e. it ain't over until it's over. It's bad enough that voters in later primaries basically believe their vote doesn't matter, but you're suggesting that we should formalize that? The parties are private organizations, so who do you propose gets to decide when to call the whole thing off?
Though it is as old as democracy. Thinking about the scene from citizen kane where kane’s newspaper prepared two alternative headlines for the day after the elections: “kane elected” and “fraud at the polls”.
> It doesn’t help that the US system can have a winner who didn’t get the majority of the vote
This is incorrect.
You require a majority of votes in the USA in the presidential election. What you seem to be missing is that people do not vote for the President but vote to direct how their state votes.
States vote for President. People vote for states.
I think you have described the problem. More specifically, states vote for the president but not in a way that is proportional to their percentage of the union’s population.
There you go, there was a pretty mainstream and "approved" campaign to try to get the electoral college voters to not vote for trump in 2016. It wasn't condemned as an attempt to undermine our election and democracy, but more as a heroic last ditch effort to save it which is very ironic lol.
> “There’s just a lot that I think will be revealed. History will discover,” the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nominee continued. “But you don’t win by 3 million votes and have all this other shenanigans and stuff going on and not come away with an idea like, ‘Whoa, something’s not right here.’ That was a deep sense of unease.”
Hilary Clinton again in 2020 (which is the same election that Trump complains about, by the way) [2]:
> The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee predicted that among several scenarios, Republicans are going to try to “mess up absentee balloting” so that they could get a potentially narrow advantage in the Electoral College.
> “We've got to have a massive legal operation, I know the Biden campaign is working on that,” she said. “We have to have poll workers, and I urge people, who are able, to be a poll worker. We have to have our own teams of people to counter the force of intimidation that the Republicans and Trump are going to put outside polling places. This is a big organizational challenge, but at least we know more about what they're going to do.”
I also remember well the "Selected not elected" days after Bush v. Gore. That went on the entire time that Bush was president and went to sleep for a couple of terms when Obama won.
Just to be clear, I'm not making a judgement on who is right here. I think the truth is a lot more nuanced than "right or wrong." I;m just pointing out that we have a long history of politicians/parties questioning election results, but until now we've never had widespread attempts to silence it.
The difference is that with Bush you have hanging chads and a court decision that after the votes were counted would have probably come out differently, and a concerted political effort to turn that to their advantage.
The republican party just literally spent months on questioning the election in places like Arizona with no evidence of any fraud, and there's plenty of documentation on how (almost always republican) politicians use lies to get people to not vote: https://lawyerscommittee.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Dece...
Basically, if you want to argue that its a "he said, she said" thing, you're going to need to come to the table with receipts about it, and trump is just completely full of shit on a level that's untenable and weirdly turned into this January thing where we almost had lawmakers killed.
I'm not trying to argue that it's a "he said, she said" thing, and as a matter of degrees, Trump is way worse. My main argument though is that humans (no matter which "side") are terrible at holding themselves to the same standard as they do other people, especially their opponents. For that reason I expect the rules to soften the next time the pendulum swings to the right.
That's very fair, and I am just noting that people like to "both sides" problems when as far as I can tell the democrats are fucked up and the republicans are actively acting as traitors to the nation.
I am not happy with either, but I don't really compare them in the same sentence.
Actually, it shows I'm correct, at least for the court decision. In all of the counts requested by the Gore team (those effected by the Supreme Court decision), all of them came out in favor of Bush.
Had there been statewide recounts, according to that page, things may have been different.
... actually conceded the night of the election. Bitched about it later, for sure. But conceded the election immediately. Something that hasn't happened yet for Mr. Trump.
What is the falsifiable hypothesis of the stolen election? There's nothing coherent about an ever evolving list of grievances. I'm convinced this is by design. If there were a sound theory, it could be disproven. But if its just a nebulous collection of disjointed complaints, the wound can stay open forever, which is the actual goal.
The 136-page 2nd interim report of the Office of Special Counsel of the state of Wisconsin, recently released, raises troubling issues.
See especially:
Chapter 6: Wisconsin Election Officials’ Widespread Use of Absentee Ballot Drop Boxes Facially Violated Wisconsin Law.
Chapter 7: The Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) Unlawfully Directed Clerks to Violate Rules Protecting Nursing Home Residents, Resulting in a 100% Voting Rate in Many Nursing Homes in 2020, Including Many Ineligible Voters.
The author, Former Supreme Court justice Mike Gableman, concludes:
"This Report has documented not just one, but a great collection of Wisconsin election law violations. As a political matter, the actions of state actors certifying electors in any Presidential election can be reconsidered as the Wisconsin Legislature sees fit using its plenary power under Article II of the federal Constitution, as recognized in McPherson and Bush v. Gore. Indeed, McPherson noted that “there is no doubt of the right of the legislature to resume the power at any time.” McPherson, 146 U.S. at 35 (emphasis added)..."
Citizens have names. There's no reason to try and rely on statistical analysis to suggest whether improper voting has occurred. Provide evidence, not conjecture.
In Milwaukee County, 30 nursing homes vetted, 1084 registered voters, 1084 votes, 100%
In Racine County, 12 nursing homes vetted, 348 registered voters, 348 votes, 100%
In Dane County, 24 nursing homes vetted, 723 registered voters, 723 votes, 100%
Etc.
An exemplar of the problem is detailed in the case filed in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, by one Paul Archambault on behalf of his mother, "Jane Doe", who was "adjudicated as incompetent by the Waukesha County Circuit Court due to a degenerative brain disorder on June 23, 2015." But, it was discovered that, "Jane Doe had cast ballots in the August 11, 2020 Partisan Primary, and the November2020 General Election".
Lack of signature matching, mail in ballots with little to no oversight, removing poll watchers from one party and video of ballot harvesting are all things that happened.
It doesn't "prove" a stolen election but it does raise suspicions.
Signature matching doesn't really change anything, though. At best, that would allow someone to vote on behalf of someone else, but there is still one ballot per voter. And pretty quickly I'd expect it to make the news when people complain that their vote got rejected because the state says they voted already.
The "ballot harvesting" video was debunked thoroughly in a matter of hours after it was released.
"Removing poll watchers" was in response to those poll watchers intimidating the poll workers. The lack of signature matching/oversight is not evidence of wrongdoing. Its the possibility that wrongdoing might not have been caught. Once again, none of this is a falsifiable hypothesis. It's simply a list of grievances designed to erode trust.
Even the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee agreed that Russian collusion was a real issue:
> It is our conclusion, based on the facts detailed in the Committee's Report, that the Russian intelligence services' assault on the integrity of the 2016 U.S. electoral process[,] and Trump and his associates' participation in and enabling of this Russian activity, represents one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats to American national security in the modern era.
A couple of Facebook groups, memes, and Twitter posts by Russian trolls != collusion.
The left was screaming about Trump directly colluding with the Russians. When the facts came out and it was clear he didn't collude, the goal posts shifted to "well the Russian troll farms helped Trump win!"
We're talking about more than "Russian troll farms" here:
> Trump and his associates' participation in and enabling of this Russian activity
If you want to understand more, there is a summary of "Links between Trump associates and Russian officials" in the Wikipedia article about "Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections"[0], including this section, for example:
> In the email, Goldstone said the information had come from the Russian government and "was part of a Russian government effort to help Donald Trump's presidential campaign". Trump Jr. replied with an e-mail saying "If it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer" and arranged the meeting. Trump Jr. went to the meeting expecting to receive information harmful to the Clinton campaign, but he said none was forthcoming, and instead the conversation then turned to [US sanctions against Russia]
>We're talking about more than "Russian troll farms" here
Not really, no.
From your own source:
"The Special Counsel's report, made public in April 2019, examined numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials but concluded that there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy or coordination charges against Trump or his associates."
It literally states there was no evidence of collision or conspiracy.
The Wikipedia article doesn't actually provide a citation for that conclusion, and if you follow the link through to the article about "The Special Counsel's report", i.e. the Mueller Report, you'll find that:
> Mueller privately wrote to Barr, stating that the March 24 Barr letter "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office's work and conclusions"
Bear in mind that Mueller was a Republican special counsel, whose remit was set by Trump's DOJ, and that:
> On May 1, Barr testified that he "didn't exonerate" Trump on obstruction as "that's not what the Justice Department does" and that neither he nor Rosenstein had reviewed the underlying evidence in the report.
and:
> In July 2019, Mueller testified to Congress that a president could be charged with crimes including obstruction of justice after the president left office.
so he was prevented by policy (not the law or the facts) from bringing charges against Trump.
The article summary concludes:
> In 2020, a Republican-appointed federal judge decided to personally review the report's redactions to see if they were legitimate. The judge said Barr's "misleading" statements about the report's findings led him to suspect that Barr had tried to establish a "one-sided narrative" favorable to Trump.
In any case, the Senate investigation (which is what I originally quoted) came later, and was more forthcoming about the connection between Trump's team and Russia.
>The Wikipedia article doesn't actually provide a citation for that conclusion, and if you follow the link through to the article about "The Special Counsel's report", i.e. the Mueller Report, you'll find that:
Yes it does, it links to the Mueller Report Wikipedia page that directly states:
"Volume I of the report concludes that the investigation "did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.""
With several linked sources.
>Bear in mind that Mueller was a Republican special counsel, whose remit was set by Trump's DOJ, and that:
And? There were multiple Democrats in the special counsel that also did not find any collision.
"On May 1, Barr testified that he "didn't exonerate" Trump on obstruction ... Mueller testified to Congress that a president could be charged with crimes including obstruction of justice after the president left office."
Obstruction is not collusion. I can hear the goalposts screeching from here.
>so he was prevented by policy (not the law or the facts) from bringing charges against Trump.
And no one, not any of the state or federal ADAs/AGs/etc. brought any charges up for collision... because there was no evidence of it as reported by Mueller. QED.
>In any case, the Senate investigation (which is what I originally quoted) came later, and was more forthcoming about the connection between Trump's team and Russia.
And also found nothing.
I'll say it again: There is no evidence that Trump and Co. colluded with the Russians.
What you believe is an Alex Jones level conspiracy theory that just so happens to be politically expedient to believe.
I don't recall the Women's March on DC storming the capitol in an effort to prevent ratification, but sure, if you define 'messed with' broadly enough, you will be 'technically correct'.
In much the same way as dying of starvation can be technically described as 'missing a couple of meals'.
The difference between the two sides is that one believes that the system works, but is unfair, and the other one believes nothing.
I mean the anti Vietnam war movement blew up a bomb in the Senate mail room in the Capitol on two separate occasions (and got a pardon from Bill Clinton 30 years later). Is storming worse than bombing?
No doubt. And perhaps Vietnam was a more just cause.
I do get a bit sick of all this talk of "unprecedented". Of course, if you define an event precisely enough, everything is unprecedented, but a violent riot at the seat of government of a democratic country is hardly that unusual at the end of the day - we see a couple such riots every decade.
I think these folks rioted for a bad reason - I don't believe the election was stolen - but the lack of nuance and historical perspective in the media is certainly frustrating.
To provide more context, Nixon's government openly sent thousands of men to their deaths in Vietnam against their will, because of the draft. That of course doesn't justify violence against politicians, but it does suggest a very different motivation compared to "We think there might have been 40,000 fake ballots flown into Arizona from China".
I'm only old enough to remember two Republican presidents - Trump and Bush. Both had widespread and, to some extent, mainstream narratives about why their elections were illegitimate. It will not surprise me if future Republican presidents or politicians are illegitimately elected as well.
To be fair they let Trump run with this stuff a long time. It was really only after he led an attempted insurrection based on these "claims" that they shut down his ability to keep spreading this stuff.
What would you call it if Democrats and BLM protesters had stormed the Capitol in 2017 demanding the vice president be hanged for not agreeing to turn over the election result?
Please don't try and with a straight face claim it would be trespassing. I'd have called it insurrection.
You do realize left-wing protestors did actually destroy a fair bit of DC in 2017, right? And when DC boarded up again in late 2020, it wasn't in fear of right-wing protesters.
Anyway, while I do disdain the use of violence for political ends, I do think the events have been exaggerated and misrepresented by the corporate press for political purposes.
I have trouble with this idea that there is equivalence between violence on private property (or even public property), and violence in the US Capitol. Especially when that violence is timed to happen while Congress is in session counting the votes from a presidential election, and the people committing the violence are explicitly saying things about overturning the election results.
My feeling is that everyone actually agrees it was an insurrection, and the arguing is pro-forma.
Violence against innocent civilians is unequivocally worse than violence against the government, regardless of the politics that motivate it.
You also seem to miss the point that violence by the pro-Trump protestors had no hope of actually capturing control of the government. Interfering with its operations for a time, sure. But not actual control. That's just not how any of this works.
The only hope the pro-Trump faction had (and a slim hope at that) was to peacefully pressure Mike Pence into refusing to count the ballots from contested states.
Your feelings aside, many people do genuinely disagree with you.
>The only hope the pro-Trump faction had (and a slim hope at that) was to peacefully pressure Mike Pence into refusing to count the ballots from contested states.
Which would potentially or eventually lead to the team they supported (Team Trump) capturing control of the government.
If Pence refusing to count those ballots wouldn't potentially lead to them capturing control of the government, why would they do it?
Yes, it would lead to Trump being in control, but that's entirely different from a bunch of yokels playing king-of-the-hill with the capitol building.
Again, there's no way that the protestors themselves would be able to take control. And if anything the breaching of the capitol building rather prevented Pence from throwing out votes.
If they killed the speaker and a bunch of representatives Trump would declare martial law and lock down congress. In that event no handover of power to Biden ever took place and it is very unclear what would happen next.
The electoral count act is now out the window entirely and Trump has a bunch of the GOP claiming the election is fraudulent based on no evidence but that doesn't matter. Eventually after Trump has it all set up the house reconvenes and picks Trump as president because GOP has the most delegations and the vote was "fraudulent".
You see, all that really needed to happen is for them to create enough disruption for Trump and his allies to find a way to set aside the vote and let the house pick based on number of delegations.
The brooks brothers riot basically did something similar. Created enough disruption to stop a recount.
>Yes, it would lead to Trump being in control, but that's entirely different from a bunch of yokels playing king-of-the-hill with the capitol building.
That's not 'entirely different' from 'a bunch of yokels playing king-of-the-hill with the capitol building,' that's the intended result of 'a bunch of yokels playing king-of-the-hill with the capitol building.'
I really don't understand the point you're making here.
Wasn't their goal to stop the handover of power to Biden? Weren't they using force to achieve that goal by attacking the capitol building to stop congress from being able to proceed?
How is that not an attempt to end democracy. An insurrection.
The ringleaders seemed to be well aware that the objective was to invalidate the election and keep trump president. How is that not an insurrection?
Leaving aside the fact that these people believe democracy had already ended, and that they saw themselves as attempting to save democracy, how does this plan actually work? Do they just sit in the capitol and declare Trump king? Maybe hold congress members hostage? Who in the federal government or military is going to go along with that?
I just don't see it as a realistic threat to our system of government.
It's pretty wild to see the mass denial of hyperbole... Like folks, do you have any idea what would happen if people really wanted to overthrow the government? You'd be kidnapped before you know what happened.
If they killed the speaker and a bunch of representatives Trump would declare martial law and lock down congress. No handover ever took place and it is very unclear what would happen next. The electoral count act is now out the window entirely and Trump has a bunch of the GOP claiming the election is fraudulent based on no evidence but that doesn't matter. Eventually after Trump has it all set up the house reconvenes and picks Trump as president because GOP has the most delegations and the vote was "fraudulent".
All that really needs to happen is to create enough disruption for Trump and his allies to find a way to set aside the vote and let the house pick based on number of delegations.
The brooks brothers riot basically did something similar. Created enough disruption to stop a recount.
Martial law was effectively declared in DC for months after January 6th anyway. No assumption of power by Trump.
Killing members of congress doesn't really change the fact that Pence was responsible for counting the votes, and the process would likely have resumed as quickly as possible.
This explanation is just so hand-wavy and doesn't really to capture what would likely happen in the case that a bunch of random Trump voters killed members of congress.
Now matter which way you slice it, any attempt by Trump or Pence to overturning official election results (even if they were fraudulent) was made impossible by the breach of the capitol.
They wanted to kill Pence, and the speaker of the house, and most of the democrats. If those goals had been achieved it is very unclear what would've happened.
Martial law was not declared after Jan 6th and the legal handover of power had already successfully occurred.
How is it an attempted insurrection by any stretch of the imagination...?
You choose not to see how hyperbolic MSM's coverage of the whole thing has been.
I weep for how many of you have been blinded by your own flavor of propaganda, while you coyly act as though "only the _other side_ could fall for that!"
You've said nothing but diversionary conservative talking points. You can't refute anyone's point, you're only able to muddy the water with willful ignorance.
EDIT: downvotes are fine, I just think it's funny that there's this narrative that conservative voices are being silenced, when they're the top performing content on every social network.
(that's just out of the top 50)
If the democrats are preventing contrarian ideas from being spoken, they're doing a terrible job of it.
> Only Republicans lie about elections — when we do it, it’s “fortifying” and “election integrity”.
Bingo, it will be couched in those terms as well as "voting rights". To them, if you aren't picked up and given a free ride by an Uber to a polling place, then fed and given free water while waiting in line, then given a free ride back to your house, the election is being interf- I mean, "voting rights" are being trampled.
When republicans systemically and intentionally close polling places[1, 2] to concentrate the same amount of people into fewer places in order to deter people from voting by causing long lines and crowding. An then on top of that, preventing people in line from, you know, drinking water.
This stuff isn't an accident, it's intentional voter suppression by one party.
When I was a student in Atlanta - no car, miserable public transit, before Uber and Lyft - my polling place was a small government office in a suburb halfway across the county, which is a narrow strip from one edge of the ATL metropolitan area to the other, neatly bisecting the most densely populated parts of the city. It took me nearly three hours to get out there from campus in the middle of midtown, I waited in line for another hour, they took another half-hour to find my registration, and it took me four hours to get back to my dorm. I had to skip several lectures and I'm lucky that none of my professors scheduled actual exams that day.
Why wouldn't we want to make it as easy as possible to vote? For everybody? I don't know that we have to uber everyone there and back, but why not make it super easy to vote by mail?
It's not even a partisan issue, per se, lots of elderly conservative people vote by mail, especially during covid.
It seems they could have put a sentence on the bottom of the screen "There is no credible evidence for Trump's claim of a stolen election." Takes approximately zero effort to solve the problem.
Yeah. The Hill is claiming they were just reporting what Trump said. They have a moral duty to report that Trump is saying lies that are very dangerous to the very fabric of society.
The self-serving, inconsistent, intellectually-dishonest take that some have when they can't parrot provably false nonsense that is a mere Google search away from being debunked is really obnoxious.
I imagine many of these same people championed the rights of private businesses to decide who they did and didn't serve when it came to the infamous cakeshop [1] yet when Youtube or Twitter or Facebook makes exactly the same choice not to be a vehicle for disinformation, those same people lose their minds.
The point here is that the majority of people complaining about this aren't standing up for principle. They just want to get their way.
I imagine many of the same people who championed the rights of Youtube or Twitter or Facebook to censor whomever they want were the same people who lost their mind when it came to the infamous cakeshop. That sword cuts both ways. They would also lose their mind if the laws changed and companies could discriminate against whomever they want in hiring. But when those same companies want to censor a viewpoint, they're a private company, they can do whatever they want.
> YouTube has taken the position that merely acknowledging an utterance of the false claim is the same thing as making the claim yourself unless you correct and disavow it elsewhere in the video. It is also sufficient to post a warning label in the video's description that a false election claim makes an appearance.
Not saying it’s a smart policy, but just to be clear, YouTube does allow you to play a video of Trump saying the election was rigged, provided you warn viewers about it.
Is there a reason to think one way or the other? I would think having something contradicting it in the same time that it is said would affect at least a portion of people.
I sense the goal isn’t to change anyone’s mind from “the election was stolen” to “the election was fair”. Rather, it serves to enforce the notion that believing the former is considered unacceptable.
Pragmatically, you can persuade indirectly by means of not allowing the opposing side to express itself. I’m not talking about persuading partisans, but rather the people who aren’t invested and aren’t engaged on the topic.
The dominant message they will see is the notion that the election was fully legitimate and had nothing substantial occur that would question its legitimacy. Any compelling or specific counter arguments are simply not visible. So that unengaged person is learning the accepted stance is correct, the unacceptable stance must have a disclaimer because it is so wrong/dangerous, and that if they take that stance they also risk being labeled as crazy or expelled from the platform.
No it's more about the importance of challenging bad ideas with good ones. All the justifications for spreading what we agree are lies are under the assumption that the value is in debunking them.
It definitely would have an affect on someone who otherwise has no opinion. Or someone on the fence. It adds to the cost of deciding to believe Trump's big lie.
They can have whatever policy they want. The problem though is that what they are doing is unethical and antithesis to their own stated beliefs. Less than 6 months ago their CEO said free speech was a "core value." The thing is it shouldn't ever even need to be said that something on the internet could be a lie but apparently that is not taught in schools and YouTube feels everyone is too stupid to decide for themselves. Frankly it should be included in their terms of service or on every single video on their platform that what is said might not be true, manipulated, or omitting facts. Maybe we need nutrition labels of the internet so that before you visit YouTube it states clearly how much banning of information they are doing. We don't need a platform to be the judge, jury, and executioner for misinformation but if they want to be I want to see big bold text at the top of their website saying "We ban channels and information we deem to be false. Videos with a checkmark are deemed to contain 100% true facts and if a video is found to reference untrue facts, it will be banned upon review." Everyone needs to know this before people are tricked into thinking it is a neutral platform where judgement of information and misinformation is the responsibility of the individual.
The CDA ensures that any operator of an interactive computer service is not liable for user uploaded content, even if the operator curates user content.
But the capricousness and arrogance with which these platforms treat their users (both content creators and viewers) is not a good long term strategy. I mean, was the Hill supposed to know the content was prohibited? And how are people going to be able to actually access the news of the day? Certainly seems to me like YouTube wants users to go elsewhere.
Whose fault is this? Are you all still using YouTube? Propping up the U.S. Corpocracy by watching kittens and puppies? Or are you a blogger and making bank yourself by talking about technology or cooking?
This authoritarianism is powered by the people, not by direct Government action.
What should you be fighting for? Making these platforms public utilities so using them would confirm protection of the 1st amendment.
The avg. American reads at a middle school level. Many read at an elementary school level, meaning ~1/4 of America will take this video as fact. Couple this with an algorithm that will only feed you things you like and you have a recipe for disaster. 100% unrestricted freedom of speech only works with a highly educated populate which America does not have.
Educated people are more easy to brainwash actually. They’ll believe anything the establishment tells them because they spend more time in school following directions and going “by the book” - they excel at this.
Less educated people need to learn to trust their instincts, and be skeptical at all times.
Politics is about really simple stuff because you can’t over complicate at such a high level of abstraction.
I think there is no relationship whatsoever between education level and common sense. If anything the correlation is negative. Highly educated people don’t need common sense because they deal with complex things.
> They’ll believe anything the establishment tells them because
> they spend more time in school following directions and going
> “by the book” - they excel at this.
Grade A satire. I, of course, have yet to meet anyone with an advanced degree who trusted "the book," as such naivete is the surest route to frustration. Critically evaluating received wisdom is essential to surviving grad school... As is learning to play politics to satisfy the hidebound whilst pursuing your own goals.
You speak with such authority on these matters. You clearly must have sources and relevant studies to back your claims. Especially given the subject matter; it’d be quite ironic otherwise. So please do share your sources…
Yes only free speech for the 'intelligent.'. I wonder what you might be a bit ignorant about in future that would require restricting your participation...
Amazing how many people support tyranny by thinking they are on the side of righteousness.
Everyone has rights, or no one has rights. Remember that
Totally, but only one of those things is within YouTube’s power. There are all kinds of decisions to make where “what do we do to mitigate this now” looks different from “what’s the ideal place we want to be?”
Politics has been rife with BS and lies forever. This isn't a one-off, they've been doing this for years and only in a certain direction. Not un-coincidentally, it's in the opposite direction of their employees' political views which are 95 D for Microsoft to 99% D at Google. (The whole range of big tech companies' political affiliations is within this range, which is actually more partisan than D voters themselves.)
The practical effect of this, and it may be hard to see this coming from an environment where literally 99% of the people who surround you think the same way, is for people to permanently form strong opinions against you. It's already happened in America because of 2020, which is why monopoly break ups are now a highly likely proposition, but coming from a different end of the spectrum.
It has always amazed me the vitriol that tech companies have for people they do not understand or care to.
Is it not? I'm sure this would be very difficult to get right, but I've often wondered why there isn't more innovation in the direction of not censorship but rather "gating" behind proof of knowledge. What I mean is, what if there were a series of questions presented to the viewer before they could consume this kind of content? This could act as a way to deter folks from mindlessly viewing the video but also as an educational tool. For this kind of political video, you could ask relevant questions from eg the US citizenship test [0].
Or you could just present people with the data and let them make up their own minds. We have to stop thinking we're on the 'right' side and it's ok to silence the 'wrong.'
Think about this, if the controls or restrictions you discuss were available to the opposition tomorrow, would you still support them?
The legislation is based on the principle that everyone has the right to say what they want to say, but they have no right to be heard by others. This phraseology was used by several during the recent committee hearings, including by Facebook employees for example. So it will effectively enshrine in law: shadow banning, delisting from Google search etc.
Also enshrined in the legislation is the principle of banning content which is 'legal but harmful to adults'. 'Harmful', amongst many other terms, is not defined.
Also enshrined in law will be the principle that certain types of 'journalistic' content will be protected from this censorship if it meets criteria to be decided upon by the new regulator, Ofcom.
This will be an enabling act. It is full, from front to back, of opportunity for scope creep through secondary legislation.
As I said, the UK is leading the charge with this, but the EU has been keeping pace [1]. I haven't seen similar in the US as of yet.
[0] - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-online-safe... [1] - https://ec.europa.eu/info/digital-services-act-ensuring-safe...