A better solution might be to unlist the video from these related lists and perhaps escalate things if a certain volume of flags are hit. I also don't see why reputation seems to have no bearing on this. How old and large is Cody's Lab's library, and how many strikes has it received (that were not later removed)? Seems like a good litmus test for false positives to me.
No, there is certain content that is forbidden by law in some countries, for example Holocaust denial, Nazi propaganda and other racist or otherwise discriminatory content. I do wonder why Youtube and Twitter don't disallow that kind of stuff by default, there's no reason for giving this kind of content any platform even if it's legal by law in the US.
Also, fringe stuff like antivaxxers, "freemen/Reichsbürger movements", flat-earthers, chemtrail believers, other conspiracy theories or Russian fake news would be by far smaller if Youtube had decided that this content is not wanted on their platform. Instead Youtube willingly provides a platform for this content and therefore is directly responsible for the resulting problems.
Homosexuality is morally and legally wrong in many countries in the world, and sensitive topic, why not ban it by default because it's the joy of a fringe group of Americans?
As soon as a minority is discriminated, no matter what minority it is (be it PoC, Latinos, Asians, gays, lesbians, transsexuals, or even social groups as poor people) it's wrong.
Dead easy definition, and for racial and gender based discrimination it's a worldwide agreed-upon international law anyway: racism => ICERD, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationales_%C3%9Cbereinko..., gender-based discrimination => CEDAW, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN-Konvention_zur_Beseitigung_.... And for the other forms of discrimination, a judicial base may be extracted from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Disgusting as it may be, none of that content should be banned by the state. It places too much power in the hands of administrations which are frequently abhorrent.
The right of Youtube/Twitter/Facebook to forbid content on their own servers should be exactly the same as their right to burn copies of books that they own.
I think you are confusing things. Simply because you desire forbidding others the choice of whether or not to view the content does not in any way mean that the act of suspending a channel doesn't accomplish this. The reason it is a horrendously dangerous, terrible, horrible idea to acede to a desire to hide 'dangerous' information would, I would hope, be easily seen by now, but it's obvious that this isn't the case. People seem to have forgotten that the Nazi newspaper was banned by the government of Germany after the Beer Hall Putsch. They seem to have forgotten that prior to that, the Nazi party was some guys hanging out in a pub being angry, and once the disliked establishment banned their paper it became the thing every German 'had to read'. They seem to have forgotten that it was the exact kind of censorship they seek to enact today that catapulted Hitler and his party into the forebrain of every downtrodden German.
The only legitimate and adequate response to a bad idea is a better idea. Full stop. You can not ban an idea. You can, however, drive it into hiding where it will see no opposition, no correction, no competing evidence. At that point, you guarantee for yourself the creation of an insular subculture who will draw the disaffected and opposition to the establishment. It is a Bad Idea. It has always been a Bad Idea. There has never been a happy state with heavy censorship.
Had we had such censorship in the 1960s, interracial marriage would still be illegal. Had we had it in the 1800s, slavery would still be legal. Every progress of mankind begins with spitting in the face of the established order. And that Nazi morons are clearly not a part of such progress is of no great import. You (generally, in the 'your society' sense of you) will be incapable of judging the next step of progress and this is guaranteed. In the United States, there is a legal concept called Prior Restraint on free speech and it is very aggressively avoided by the courts, as well it should be.
You are incorrect that various fringe groups would be smaller if YouTube became a bastion of censorship, and also that the platform owner is responsible for problems that you believe resulted from ideas being available. The existence of the fringe groups, their sizes, and the problems are all a result of widespread anti-intellectualism and a rejection of critical thinking and reason as an acceptable means of determining ones beliefs. Things like the anti-vaccine movement in particular grow far more through word-of-mouth than they do online resources. Zero of the anti-vaxxers went online to seek information about vaccines and found anti-vaccine ranting and then made a decision to not vaccinate their children. Instead, they heard about it from mothers who "just knew" that vaccines gave their kids autism. Or they listened to their president talking about how there are "just too many" with no basis. The idea that vaccines are harmful, that letting strangers, intellectual strangers who don't care, stick steel needles into their children and inject them full of chemicals and dead viruses was dangerous felt right and that is literally the only thing in the world that could convince them of any position.
> At that point, you guarantee for yourself the creation of an insular subculture who will draw the disaffected and opposition to the establishment.
Yes, and this is exactly what I want. Loads of Nazis and trolls flocked to Voat after the banning of r/fatpeoplehate and friends, and more after the recent banwave. As a result the amount of hatespeech on Reddit has massively declined and Voat is not a place that's relevant outside of Gamergate and Nazis. The casual Internet user won't ever see a tiny bit of it. Same is also true for Twitter / gab.ai, where lots of Nazis in Germany fled.
It's the same way in politics: in Germany, we have had the NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschland), which was a really vile cesspool of literal and neo-Nazis and it was mainly left to fend for itself - and it kept most of the ultra-right-wing stuff out of mainstream politics. True, it changed with the rise of the AfD, but it worked for decades.
> Every progress of mankind begins with spitting in the face of the established order.
Point is, we already had the Nazis in power in history (Hitler of course, but also his friends Mussolini and Franco). They're not progress, and they cannot be.
> You are incorrect that various fringe groups would be smaller if YouTube became a bastion of censorship
As said above: look at what happened to fatpeoplehate and friends. Or into the history of our Reichsbürgers ("freemen" in US terms, IIRC): they rose with the ability to spread their "ideas" for free across the Internet, and when taken away from mainstream, they will shrink again.
> Instead, they heard about it from mothers who "just knew" that vaccines gave their kids autism.
And where do they find these mothers? On Youtube and on various Facebook groups, mostly (at least this is what a children's doctor told me, when I asked him about the problem, but well the "anecdata" principle does apply here).
> Zero of the anti-vaxxers went online to seek information about vaccines and found anti-vaccine ranting and then made a decision to not vaccinate their children
Nope. When I type into Google "vaccines", the third autocomplete suggestion is "vaccines cause autism". Not "do vaccines cause autism". When I type into Google "Ist Deutschland" (Is Germany ...), I get "ist deutschland eine gmbh" (is Germany a company), "ist deutschland souverän" / "ist deutschland ein souveräner staat" (is Germany a sovereign state) and "ist deutschland ein staat" (is germany a state). And for each of the Reichsbürger stuff I get 8/10 results being the Reichsbürger propaganda. That can and will lead people into believing this stuff.
Google keyword suggestions are dangerous, and they do influence society.
Right. Did they shrink? No. As I said, they grew. They are out of your sight, out of the sight of more reasonable people who might argue with them, who might give them a sense that their views are not accepted or correct. And they're getting more numerous because of this. And they're drawing people who don't even agree with their primary objectives but simply feel disaffected by the other places that will smack their hand and call them names just because they asked a question. They're so big that we get Pizzagate. They draw so many that we get Trump. For years they were just tiny subreddits you didn't have to go to unless you wanted to. People act like Reddit is some place where people get shunted into subreddits unawares. That is not how it works. You have to search or seek them out. And they remain as 'contained' there as they do at Voat. The difference is the barrier to entry of people who oppose them is lower.
>And where do they find these mothers? On Youtube and on various Facebook groups, mostly
No, we're not talking about tech savvy people. Facebook maybe, but more likely they see daytime talk shows or read celebrity news magazines or they actually talk to the other mothers in their kids day care and such. They do not trust things like 'online resources' and the more authority the site has, the more they distrust it. They are seeking to be emotionally swayed, not to research a topic. Intuition is their guide.
>Google keyword suggestions are dangerous, and they do influence society.
I don't know enough about how those suggestions even work to say much about them, honestly. Given how weird they often are, it can't be a popularity thing. (Or are they often gamed to insert weird searches?) I don't think many parents would actually be searching Google. They'll ask their coworkers, their friends, their family, but they're not going to ask Google. Then all they'll get is "garbage" from doctors and other disconnected ivory-tower reason fetishists like the ones who said thalidomide was safe.
I will say that granted, some content is definitely too grotesque or offensive that it should be left off the platform (e.g. beheadings, murder, porn, etc), however I suspect this kind of content is much more "black and white" and can be detected and removed with much less controversy.
Not true, you see suggested videos all the time.
What about really bad stuff? Like ISIS execution videos? Should they not be blocked?
If you think there exists some class of video that should be removed from YouTube, then it is just a matter of degree. You would still need some mechanism for people to flag a video and have it be removed for everyone.
If you think NOTHING should be removed from YouTube, including the most horrific execution videos, then you need to never do suggested videos, which takes a way a big feature from YouTube.
As for newsworthy videos like ISIS executions, I don't see much trouble with them. They are factual, and help people to see why ISIS should be opposed. It makes it impossible for anyone to pop up that wishes to claim that their means are peaceable or compatible with peace or reason. Banning the videos puts those who would argue against ISIS in the position of having no evidence and asking those they are arguing with to trust them - a thing intellectually repugnant for anyone to do.
Given the way suggested videos works, the only people who would be recommended things like ISIS execution videos would be people who were interested in ISIS execution videos for one reason or another. It's not like they would be recommended to me who mostly watches tech talks and science stuff.
And of course there are certain things which should be removed from YouTube. Not because they are "offensive" (which is a free choice on the part of the audience, not the creator of the video who has no control over how their unknown future audience will have trained themselves or been trained to respond) but because they are harmful. Things like blatant copyright infringement, child pornography, revenge porn, etc are illegal not because they are gross or shocking or upsetting but because they are harmful. They cause harm.