Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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I was about to post that. Those groups have very specific agendas. They shouldn't be allowed to block articles which disagree with their agenda.

Here's Dabiq, ISIS's propaganda magazine.[1] It's well-produced and in English. See what the other side wants. There are the usual rants: "We ask Allah to support the mujāhidīn of the Islamic State against the agents of the tawāghīt and the crusaders until the banner of the Khilāfah is raised high above Istanbul and Vatican City". Their strongest ire is raised against Arabs who oppose ISIS. The West is just the enemy, but Islamists who oppose them are committing apostasy. They're opposed to democracy on principle. Allah must rule, and that means autocratic rule by religious leaders. "Legislation is not but for Allah".

There's a concern that some people will be taken in by this stuff. That's only a problem for people who haven't seen enough extremist material to be able to evaluate it. There's a certain similarity to all that stuff, along the lines of "We're good, because God is on our side, and we have to kill the other guys because they're evil." This message is available in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic flavors. Kids should see all of those in school, to immunize them against such messages.

Will "trusted flaggers" be allowed to make Dabiq inaccessable?

("Maybe they is not evil. Maybe they is just enemies." - Poul Anderson)

[1] https://clarionproject.org/islamic-state-isis-isil-propagand...

> Kids should see all of those in school, to immunize them against such messages.

You'd have to go about that very carefully not to accidentally re-inforce a message that has already been planted and ending up making things worse rather than better.

> Those groups have very specific agendas.

I'm not sure what that means; doesn't every group have an agenda? I think the implication is that these groups' agendas are no better than any other groups' agendas. I think that's clearly wrong; we can't take politically correct relativism and openness to a logical extreme - we must make distinctions between good and bad (though carefully reasoned ones). Though I agree we should be careful, and no group or agenda is perfect, the agendas of hate groups are not just as good as the ADL's, for example.

> They shouldn't be allowed to block articles which disagree with their agenda.

Is that the standard used by Google?

The question isn't whether one group can be assumed better than the other (obviously, the ADL is less bad than ISIS). It's whether any group is "correct" enough to be trusted with controlling the spectrum of the conversation.

Beyond that basic observation, I can't speak to the other groups, but to me, the degree of anti-Arab bias that the ADL exhibits is really appalling, and I have no confidence whatsoever in their ability to fairly filter the news for the masses.

The ADL appears to be picked because they're a very powerful political lobby in Washington. This move is a fairly blatant attempt to curry political favor.

I wouldn't say that there's a moral equivalence between the ADL's agenda (promoting Israel) and, say, Amnesty's agenda (ending torture & political imprisonment).

Amnesty got hit by the latest "fake news" google update:

https://mronline.org/2017/07/28/new-google-algorithm-restric...

I had no idea that was happening. Thank you for making this important point.

>Will "trusted flaggers" be allowed to make Dabiq inaccessable?

The answer is no. This post is about YouTube. Presumably a magazine won't be impacted. Also, new content is not being removed, but rather:

"If we find that these videos don’t violate our policies but contain controversial religious or supremacist content, they will be placed in a limited state. The videos will remain on YouTube behind an interstitial, won’t be recommended, won’t be monetized, and won’t have key features including comments, suggested videos, and likes."

Which is ironically not dissimilar from your suggestion that hateful and ignorant views be taught in context to school children.

You comment reminds me of those news stories where the headline is a question. When you read the article, the answer is always, "No."

Right. The content won't be banned, it just won't be allowed to have any significant audience. Much like protests weren't banned - you can still protest, but 20 miles away from the venue, where there are no cameras or reporters.

It's already pretty difficult for magazines and pdf files to gain a significant audience on YouTube.

People are taken in by this stuff. You don't have the Manchester suicide bombing without it.

It's not an abstract issue, it actually happens.

Well. People got taken by lots of stuff over the centuries. Take the Bible for example. How many people got killed because of that book.

Should we ban it?

Funny, the event that triggered the most brutal war in European history was actually the unbanning of the Bible.

Could you please elaborate? I did not get the reference.

I think it refers to the 30 years war:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War

Yep!

Can you elaborate on "the unbanning of the Bible"? Thank you.

Under the Catholic Church the Bible was number one on the list of banned books ('The Index') and it was only written in Latin (vernacular translations were a capital offence) and the only people allowed to interpret it were the clergy. One of the core elements of the Reformation was the translation into vernacular of the Bible and the propagation of the idea that anyone could interpret it. The explosion of interpretations and beliefs during that period is often cited as one of the driving forces behind the viciousness of the wars of religions. (Apologies for not having citations on hand, this was mostly pulled from memory)

The bible is written in Hebrew and Greek. Latin was the only officially accepted translation.

People in Manchester died more recently.

Bibles don't kill people. People kill people.

To be blunt, many of those people were either mentally unstable or mentally deficient before they started reading ISIS...

Social psychiatric help and better public education are also necessary tools in this battle.

I want to believe that, but I'm not sure that's as commonly the case as we'd imagine. There are plenty of stories of regular people, raised in liberal western democracies, being taken in by the isis propaganda.

"Liberal western democracy" says little about education or psychiatric health funding. Look at the US, laughable and utterly embarrassing education standards and virtually non-existent social mental health treatment.

Just last night I was watching a 1990s music video on YT of a Serbian soldier actually promoting the genocide against the Muslim Bosniaks. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq_J2C6Hrz0 . The lyrics actually say "let's bomb all the mosques". As far as I can tell this video was filmed before the Srebrenica massacre. So we've got a video promoting genocide (which I regard as worse than terrorism) of which no Google employee has anything to say.

Did you flag it?

> See what the other side wants.

It's a shame (but understandable) that we're only doing that once they start raping, torturing and killing...

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