I would rather be in touch with and exposed to this rather than try to pretend it doesn’t exist. It won’t ever go away, it will just be hidden.
Consider someone growing up on the internet. The more they're exposed to this sort of content, the more it will be normalized in their mind. The more they're exposed to this sort of content, the more likely susceptible people are to be radicalized by it, and to grow into the same sort of troll. Hiding or suppressing low-quality content creates a herd immunity effect. It prevents a shift of the Overton Window to where "generally allowable discourse" suddenly includes timestamping the most "salacious" parts of a child's video, or telling people to actually kill themselves, or sharing their purely racist, hate-filled viewpoints.
While you may rather be exposed to it because you have the strength and capability to view it as a curiosity and a sociological study, the impressionable among us maybe deserve to not be bombarded with garbage, and we may have a moral duty to at least make some effort to minimize indoctrination and radicalization on these platforms.
One factor is that once one person begins attack another person, both using real names, both people have a hard time backing down, especially if they know each in real life or if they are semi-public figures. For a lot of people, admitting that they are wrong is a huge hurdle - and these tend to be the people who engage in toxicity in the first place.
However there would be quite a bit of backpressure against certain kinds of Internet toxicity if people were less anonymous.
EDIT I guess flagging indicates part of the problem. Society is so busy screaming at ourselves that the only thing reasonable people think they can do is check out of controversial topics.
EDIT Would any downvoters care to engage about why they disagree?
Facebook comments aren't much better than YouTube, especially non-English ones that Facebook doesn't bother moderating at all. With about 97% of social market share in my country and a real name policy, it should be a brease to use it. It's absolutely not.
As for the prosecution, only if your country decides to give a fuck. There's a case in which a soldier called for a journalist to be raped and killed in a public Facebook post using his real name. He didn't face any consequences despite the story being picked up and screenshots of his public Facebook status shared all over the news.
Death threats, hate crimes, separatist movements, fake news... Real name policy stops absolutely nothing.
As another commenter pointed out, facebook (and facebook-based commenting) has plenty of trolls in public comment sections. Anonymity is not what makes people jerks. More real reasons why internet forums enable trolls include:
- the asynchronicity of negative feedback: our primitive brains don't get to closely associate the negative feedback with the moment we expressed something in a socially unacceptable manner
- the lower bandwidth of negative feedback: IRL involves awkward silences, dirty looks, snickering, people turning up their nose at you, telling their children not to be like you within earshot, etc. All of this is suppressed over the internet, at most summarised by a downvote (which some trolls feed off of as positive feedback, knowing they ticked someone off, but don't face immediate social consequence). The trolls don't get conditioned to avoid doing things that hurt other people or are socially unacceptable.
[0] https://kotaku.com/blizzards-real-name-forum-policy-has-fans... [1] https://kotaku.com/blizzard-scraps-plans-to-display-real-nam...
RL involves ...
If I'm a jerk in public, outside of racist/prejudiced violence or a mentally unstable antagonist, I'm not at serious risk of being physically attacked unless I start breaking laws or pose a notable threat to someone else. Because about 90% of the less edgy side of trolling (just being annoying or verbally mean, mostly) won't really draw physical violence in meatspace, you'll just be treated like a jerk or risk being politely asked to shut up or leave by an authority figure. Yes there's a risk of physical violence, but it's overplayed as a reason why people aren't trolls in real life as much as they are online, and I think it's significantly superseded by the things I mentioned, and probably other things too, which stop people from being jerks far before physical violence needs to be brought to the scene.
A real name policy also wouldn't actually address the actual problem. Toxic behavior is possible because on the internet you can write angry comments to a person on the other side of the globe and then forget about that person tomorrow. If that person does come back tomorrow then it doesn't matter if they are called "hahaurmom" or "Jonathan Willis".
In contemporary times a good example of this is Iraq. Our invasion was precipitated based on fabricated evidence and appeals to authority of the sort 'x intelligence agencies have proven beyond any doubt that Iraq has or is pursuing nuclear weapons of mass destruction.' After the fact when an individual [2] tasked with investigating whether Iraq was or was not trying to purchase uranium (he found they absolutely were not and reported as such - the government would go on to claim they were trying to purchase uranium), a government official outed his wife as a covert CIA operative (which the Washington Post would go on to publish) not only potentially endangering her, but terminating her career.
In the case of eugenics it wasn't so much a conspiracy rather than that authority and academia were simply collectively wrong, as has also often occurred. Censorship benefits those in power and only those in power. Those in power choosing to try to inhibit censorship, as happened with the first amendment, was quite the revolution! The point of free speech is to ensure that not only with the good comes the bad, but also that with the bad comes the good. When you begin to tolerate censorship by one side - you very much risk that the side doing the censoring is the bad. And in efforts to obtain only the good, you end up with only the bad.
In today's world, free speech and corporations are becoming a major new issue. An ever larger percent of all human communication is digital, and digital communication is extremely monopolized. This means, for instance, that the US government could effectively circumvent the first amendment by simply pressuring a single company rather than passing a law against the dissemination of any given viewpoint. It also means that a very small handful of people could end censoring or otherwise manipulating public discourse for billions. That is exactly what the first amendment sought to prevent; only the founding fathers could never have imagined a corporation (under which two people have majority control) having more power over speech than any government in the world.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
The kids will flee the garden eventually anyway and "allowable discourse" is quite subjective.
You will never create a child-proof youtube. Those kids will eclipse your abilities and understanding at some point.
It would be better to create a separate platform
From usenet to reddit, many communities that tolerate abusive conduct degenerate, as the "bad behaviour" is normalized and becomes accepted.
The fact that you can't create a child-proof YT doesn't mean you shouldn't strive to keep negative behaviour at bay.
In my experience the community changes as a whole, but not the individual actors. Once a community tips the member base changes. People displeased with the behavior leave and people attracted to it join.
Which part? If we are talking about this part:
>> I think that there's an element of validation and indoctrination that is a serious concern here.
Then I think there is evidence of that being true.
Take for example “incels”. They gather in online forums where they construct a worldview built entirely on misogyny, entitlement and hate. The ideas they are spreading among themselves are much worse than probably most of those people would come up with on their own. In their echo chambers they validate these ideas to one-another and make them seem acceptable.
https://www.ft.com/content/d71f3156-f94d-11e8-af46-2022a0b02...
The people I am talking about here are outright promoting rape, violence and child abuse. Not indirectly. Not between the lines. Just straight up stating those kinds of things.
People dont change you just filter them from your view of reality. And its no surprise people who bothered to look knew rather well that they existed.
disillusioned is taking the position of The Internet. If we allow these things, things will just continue to get worse and worse. Standards exist for a reason, Gresham's Law, and the rest of it. (Including some wonderful pleas for civility and kindness that I completely agree with)
raxxorrax is taking the position of The Human Species. We have survived and evolved because we are a wild, aggressive, curious species. Whatever boundaries there are, we will push them as hard as we can. Life will find a way.
Both of you folks are correct. This is the crux of the problem with technologies like YouTube (or books, for that matter). If YouTube is a publisher, then it has an opinion, a political position, standards for what it thinks is civil, and so forth. That's great, but there's no freaking way in hell I'm going to agree to having a handful of companies decide that kind of thing for the entire planet. The idea alone is insane. I just read yesterday about people getting warnings from Twitter from things they posted 5, 6 years ago that somebody in a dictatorship found offensive last week. It's ludicrous.
If, however, they're a public forum, then they should just shut up and stop looking at the things that appear on their site. The public forum -- books -- require chaos, disorder, and evolutionary pressure. Can't fight mother nature. Life will evolve.
But they can't do that, can they? Because they're monetizing all of that content. So they have to keep close track of each little piece of everything.
Now they're stuck.
They want to have it both ways, and we feeble-minded folks watching this spectacle end up choosing one or the other. It's a sucker's game, and no matter which side we choose, it doesn't work. That's because the premise is broken. BigTech wants to be two things at the same time. Picking one of those things and arguing with folks who pick the other one just plays into their schtick and keeps the gravy train rolling along.
Every Internet discussion ever. I'm glad you pointed it out! The world needs more reasonable posters.
That said, it seems you're assuming comments are simply a one-way output of different people's thought patterns, rather than a two-way process that has an effect on others. It's obvious it has a two-way effect - the point of reading and listening is to learn, and we can learn in ways that make us worse off.
The idea that we should have a super low-friction way to be exposed to the internal thought process of anybody who is motivated to post those is an idea worth challenging, and we're starting to wake up to just how negative the repercussions of it are. That level of reach without any filtering steps (such as community standards, social feedback loops, etc) is fuel for extremism, harassment, and triggering/exacerbating mental illness. Lets not give everyone PTSD if we don't have to, cause thats effectively what your argument boils down to.
I have pretty decent karma in HN and there are much better filtering mechanisms in this community to remove bad actors and posts than there are on youtube. That's the context of my post that, while hidden, is nonetheless present in this community. There is no community for many youtube comments - its driveby comments that get free reach.
I dunno, wake up and look outside.
It's a classic question of the world not being black and white. Either people accept this greyness and work within it to produce the most desirable result possible, or fruitlessly wonder why nobody else is able to see what apparently is so patently visible to your eyes only.
We need more idealism, not less. Tempered with pragmatism is one thing, but the problem is then one is encouraged to temper that idealism a bit more, and a bit more, and one more time, until the original ideal is more a memory than anything.
For me this mostly stems from a lack of knowledge or respect for history.
It's not that long ago that the Catholic church had people executed for heresy.
Filtering mechanisms exist in all forums, online and offline. Some suck, like certain sub-communities in youtube. The discussion should be about what filters we employ to best balance the positive value of conversation against the negative.
If that "reach" should not be available to "anybody, regardless of content therein", then the logical and unavoidable conclusion there is some person or organization that has to decide what people and content are allowed access. You can hardly dodge the logical implications of your own statement.
There are vastly different ways in which the flow of communication between people or groups of people can be impacted, and the differences between these ways can be very important. Because of this, sweeping generalizations don't seem very helpful.
Reach is about broadcast. There are plenty of non-authoritarian ways to reduce reach. The most obvious one is to make people pay for it (like they do on Facebook). Community moderation is another, and trust metrics is yet another.
All have tradeoffs, but - since you are nitpicking here - it isn't a logical and unavoidable conclusion that this has to be a decision about allowed access.
While we're at it, if you'd like to protest the White House, let's make it so that you're allowed to do so but your protest must fit within a 9' by 9' space that must be a minimum of 500 feet from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. No carried signs may extend above 8' from the floor and your total volume must remain below 90dB. Make sure you optimize your protest space to have the loudest (but not too loud), boldest (but not too bold) voices, otherwise it will diminish your potential impact.
Lest you go to an argument about public vs private property, in our society, social media _is_ the public forum... Just as when these laws were written, public spaces were.
Everyone in the world has an earpiece which they must wear at all times. Everyone has a microphone which automatically broadcasts everything they say to everyone's earpiece. You can't take your earpiece off, as that would reduce someone else's ability to speak freely to you.
There are downsides to allowing everyone a global platform.
While not so well worded, i do agree with the broad rational, that in order to restrict free speech in public, some sort decision has to be made about what is allowed and what not. Like it is with everything from laws to social norms. The methods for decision making are broad, from authoritarian, to economical, over technical to consensus based decision making. But they are all methods of decision making. Asking who, or better how that decision is made is a sensible concern.
There are two people needed for a conversation in a public place. You have the ability to leave. You are not forced to listen to anyone. In a private context this is another topic altogether. You can kick someone out of your facebook group, unfriend him or block him. If they then show up at your front door we are talking harassment not free speech. Which is why the loophole of anti abortion protestors being allowed in the streets in front of clinics is such a horrible situation.
I know its annoying to be confronted with stuff you dont like, when your private life takes place in alot of public places, but that is your choice. You dont have to have a public facebook profile, you dont have to have a public youtube channel. And facebook and youtube as a whole dont have to be a public place if they decided otherwise.
Thank you for understanding and better expressing my core argument.
Go up two levels if you don't believe me.
We actually already have laws here in the US about signing up people under the age of 13 for online services and have since the 90s. They're very lax and not enforced.
A very large measure that YouTube could take is to hide all comments if you aren't signed in and strictly enforce the over 13 rule in the US (or whatever other rules elsewhere). But they don't do that.
This isn't about children making comments. It's about comments by adults about children.
If all of these services weren't being offered for completely free, you could require a credit card purchase to make an account and solve this problem in an afternoon over a cup of tea. That's how simple it is. The problem is that the economics of these services allows and encourages children into these spaces without restriction.
Part of being an adult is figuring out how to deal with a world where some of your neighbors are horrible monsters. You don't just drive them into dark corners where you pretend they don't exist.
If pedophiles want to self-identify, that's great, because it gives us the option of getting them the treatment that they need AND of keeping our children far away from them.
You don't just drive them into dark corners where you pretend they don't exist.
You don't pretend they don't exist, but you don't let them normalize their conduct either. And that is absolutely what is happening with the previous approach.
As someone who was on the receiving end of attention from pedophiles as a child and who has spoken to many of their victims, you do not want these people isolated in their own communities. You want to know exactly who they are.
Letting them speak, which at least where I live is still their right, is NOT tolerance.
I think it's a better idea to give people the tools to control where they direct their attention.
a) people are more likely to have gumption to be negative in the absence of social cues of another person in their presence (global effect, whether or not user is mentally ill)
b) those motivated and possessing time to post are more likely to be suffering from issues (where those not mentally ill may just not engage because they have other things going on in life)
c) unlike the physical space where filters exist, you're often exposed to these people when navigating to entirely innocuous content (e.g. a kids video).
d) way way easier to find people with same or adjacent point of view on internet, reinforcing beliefs and potentially driving person further to extremes
Problem needs to be addressed from multiple fronts - as you say, more control for end users to tweak their experience (top down), alongside better platform-level filtering (bottom up), along with all the helpful designs therein like good defaults.
so what solution is there, preventing any content with children under a certain age? blocking any comment that features a link? can youtube detect use of vpn? once you leave certain countries I am not sure it can be policed.
I don't think there is a great solution yet.
Lots of middle-class families in developing countries still buy (pirated) DVDs of Barney & Friends and similar family friendly shows for playback on their home theatre systems, for those moments when kids announce they are bored.
deplatforming is an effective strategy to reduce the spread of malicious content for several reasons, in the case of youtube because it reduces the incentive to monetize and spread harmful content.
To say that you'd rather be a exposed to pedophilia in youtube comments than to remove them is a little bit like saying you'd like to stay in contact with the marburg virus.
See the problem? That's basically what you're justifying.
One such stopping point could be "no comments should be allowed on media with certain features that overwhelmingly tend to attract morally reprehensible comments." Another such stopping point could be "all comments should be allowed, except those which the community has decided have no merit."
In fact, (almost?) all worthwhile online communities are somewhere between the two extremes you seem to advocate. They don't always call it "deplatforming," which may be where you're getting hung up, but comment moderation is everywhere, and it does work.
Now, if you want to say that Youtube could handle this particular type of comment moderation in a better way, I think there are plenty of arguments to be made. But the choice isn't "all comments" or "no comments."
Free speech comes with responsibility, and part of that responsibility is to make sure people aren’t legally monetising videos of children for pedofiles.
I know it’s not always a popular opinion, but I think social media has been hiding from its responsibility for far too long, and I’m personally happy the EU is stepping in to regulate it.
Big tech companies shouldn’t be able to get away with things no one else could simply by being big. Especially not when it’s used to undermine the foundation of our society. If someone uses your platform for a network of pedos, or to commit genocide then you are also responsible for enabling it in my opinion.
Readers of NN comments are free to ignore any content they wish to ignore.
I find the trend of individuals demanding organizations and governments protect them from content they may find distasteful or content they don't agree with to very disturbing.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
You also got into some pretty flamey discussions elsewhere, e.g. the religious flamebait in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19275923—not cool on Hacker News.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and refrain from doing those things here, we'd be grateful.
YT comments do more than just represent ideas that are out there. Sometimes they can serve as a means of disseminating harmful ideas.
Just yesterday I was looking at some YT videos about the history of the Balkan peoples and languages, where the speakers were internationally recognized historians and linguists (and who are from outside the region and don’t have a dog in any of the ethnic fights). However, the comment sections had become a place where people could post lengthy crackpot claims about their people’s history in direct contradiction to the authoritative scholar speaking in the video. Furthermore, it appeared that many people, when they came to the video, went straight to the comments section to read the other YT commenters, and thus absorb their crackpot ideas. They didn’t actually watch the video and learn any of the information in it.
I couldn’t help but feel that two decades ago, people similarly believed things that were baseless, but they had less capability to disseminate those ideas to other people.
Which people? Twenty years ago, people (by which I mean schoolteachers) baselessly believed that Columbus proved that the world was round rather than flat and disseminated that idea, and it was hard to disseminate the counter-idea of "no, actually, that's not true, the Ancient Greeks already knew the world was round, Columbus just thought the world was round and also much smaller, and he was wrong".
If you can stop people from disseminating "harmful" ideas, you have the power to decide which ideas are "harmful". You might think it's "harmful" to disseminate the idea that the American Civil War was motivated primarily by the issue of slavery, for instance. If you're just in charge of buying school textbooks for the state of Texas, you won't buy textbooks that disseminate this idea, and that's harmful enough. But if you're in charge of moderating user-generated content on a huge set of platforms like Google and Facebook are, it starts becoming more and more of a problem.
I could not in good conscience say "the kids who die of preventable illness, their lives are worth it so antivax people can spread misinformation without consequence."
I could not in good conscience say "the Tutsi lives lost were worth protecting the Hutu rights to free speech."
Aside from that, both of those examples are examples where the harm comes from a specific action (or inaction), rather than the speech itself. If refusing to vaccinate children was treated as criminal neglect and unvaccinated children were forcibly removed from their families, people could talk and talk all they want and it wouldn't matter.
Like, are you trying to frame this in the sense of, "I can swing my fist toward your face all I want, but so long as I don't actually make contact it's okay"?
I'm trying to understand how you're trying to thread the needle here and am coming up empty-handed.
I mostly agree with you about Rwanda because openly calling for people to commit genocide does cross a threshold that justifies forceful reaction. My point there is that you're appealing to government, which is exactly who in Rwanda was organizing the genocide in the first place. But if you're imagining a UN peacekeeping force being deployed to Rwanda being the censors instead--sure, among many other things they should probably shut down the radio stations. I'm fine with that.
> Do you not see that there is a line drawn from speech to action
The problem is that this argument makes it too easy to misuse the instrument of censorship. You're calling for censorship that's both unnecessary and insufficient to solve the anti-vax problem, using a standard that could be just as easily abused to call for censorship that even you would disagree with.
Hiding the insanity of YouTube comments won't change anything it will just hide it ever so slightly. Like strategies to _hide_ homelessness in cities.
But I strongly disagree when it comes to pedophiles sharing suggestive timestamps in comments and making vile sexual remarks targeted at children. That's where I nope out. That shit shouldn't be allowed in the comments section - even reddit doesn't allow this kind of commentary.
It wouldn't be a huge issue if these kind of comments would stay constrained in the digital realm.
But as people see that the tone and hardline position is shared by a lot of other people, they feel empowered and validated, so that that behavior starts rippling in the "real" world.
and that's where you might be mislead by machine-learning optimized comment sorting, recommendations that drive more people that'll agree with any given videos point and vocal minorities in general.
Among other things. Don't forget the duality.
I'm not sure if the bright side is justification for the rest, but regardless, we are what we are.
They're the solution to a hard engineering problem: how to generate stupid statements on a given topic? Not grammatically incoherent statements, but the products of true stupidity. Pretty hard to automate that kind of thing.
But with YouTube, it's easy. Just search for videos that match the topic, and pull random comments from them. A large fraction are guaranteed to be examples of genuine stupidity.
Everything else is one's or another's ideas for "right" dialog imposed.
Democracy would allow the majority’s idea for “right” dialogue and would censor minority ideas. Which is what moderation does.
Democratic. The people ("demos") control the dialogue and have equal voice.
As in this dictionary definition: (3): relating to, appealing to, or available to the broad masses of the people - democratic art - democratic education (4): favoring social equality - not snobbish
I'm also referring to the original meaning of the word and practice in ancient Athens when it came to deciding, where every participating citizen could be heard [1].
What you describe (suppressing the minority etc) is about lawmaking and decisions (e.g. the democratic , which is not part of the YouTube dialogue. Users don't decide what's to be done. Nobody is surpassed in YouTube comments, minority or not -- they just get downvotes and negative counter-comments, but they can still write and have their comments shown.
[1] The innovation was that it was not a king, tyrant, or group of rulers, but the whole citizen community (even if restricted to slaves/women which was the baseline at the time -- not to mention also for 2.5 millennia later) themselves openly debating and voting.
Unless I'm mistake, may I ask why you'd be interested in comments specifically for children videos?