Having one company be the sole gatekeeper for the overwhelming majority of the web's video content is not a solution.
Just like people got what they wished for when Voat was spawned from Reddit?
I don't know how to square these two thoughts.
Granted, it's aspirational.
I have no idea who you are, so just a question about where you’re at in thinking about this.
And do I understand correctly your proposal? That we should all aspire to be unaffected by the words of others. And if someone is negatively affected by words it is their failure, not the failure of the speaker or the failure of the group they are in together.
The idea that the language was constructed is pretty silly. It's such a twisted hodge-podge of borrowed ideas. Besides, other languages with far different heritages will hold very similar words and terms as ours. As for the idea of having more ammunition, You'd have to actually provide some evidence for the idea that there's more plentiful / harsh language available to 'people like me'. Particularly when I've seen both of the words you cite used plentifully towards a broad swathe of people.
|That we should all aspire to be unaffected by the words of others.
Yes.
|And if someone is negatively affected by words it is their failure, not the failure of the speaker or the failure of the group they are in together.
Not exactly, no. A person being an asshole is an asshole. Your reaction to it doesn't absolve them of that behavior, even if you responded positively for some reason. However, letting some random asshole ruin your day by saying something you don't like is just setting you up for constant failure, as you are so easily driven into a negative emotional state. I'm suggesting a coping strategy, one among many, to guide a person in navigating a world full of adversity.
There's nothing wrong with boxing matches. There's also nothing wrong with people wanting to walk city streets without having to fight.
The solution is to provide places for boxing, and places where boxing people is forbidden.
Every site draws a line somewhere.
You start by courting people with an actual real, personal, counterculture message that doesn't get played in the mainstream media, and start with THAT community.
The Dave Rubin's of the world don't care about free speech. You can tell because they don't care about women's voices that are suppressed in workplaces. They don't care about Muslim or even atheist voices that are suppressed in political campaigns. They only care about white male voices and the occasional woman or person of color who happens to also care about guns or the scourge of feminism or some other primarily white male topic.
If you really want to create a bastion for free speech you would need to care about women's voices and black lesbian voices and disabled voices and fat voices and all of that.
But the Dave Rubin's of the world don't believe those voices are suppressed. You can tell because he doesn't invite anyone like that on his show. And as long as they keep thinking that white men are somehow uniquely suppressed due to "political correct culture" and that women and fat people and trans people ar just universally adulated and celebrated and welcome to speak at every occasion... As long as they keep believing that, the Voats of the world will continue to be cesspools.
I fear the reason they can't do that is they'd realize that the Dave Rubin's and Ben Shapiro's of the world are already well enfranchised and their speech is suppressed far far less than literally every other demographic.
And to be totally clear: I am talking about, for example white women at tech companies in San Francisco who are fired for honestly taking about their work, because the men around them interpret any assertiveness from them as an attack. Just to set the terms of the debate: women literally fired for taking about the work they were hired to do in a way any man could talk and receive only praise.
As an example.
Personally, I question how many people would support authoritarianism if we didn't have the regulatory capture environment we currently have. There is such a powerful system of indoctrination in the US.
But then I think of experiments that deal with human nature. Of how 65%~ of people in the milgram experiment gave the dangerous shocks even while hearing people plea... It paints a picture of human nature I guess I want to blame on something 'out there' and not 'in here'.
"Such unlawful videos." So basically, the government should be able to declare content "unlawful" and it's okay so long as public sentiment goes along with it?
Basically, you've simply thrown out Free Speech. I can understand why someone would find the video of the shooting shocking. Personally, I've chosen not to view it. However, if Free Speech isn't an absolute right, then it's simply broken.
Habeas corpus, the Presumption of Innocence, and due process -- what if the government could just suspend those things when it felt like it? Those human rights would simply be broken.
The difference between a just society and an unjust one, is that the just society extends the same rights and protections to all its citizens, no infringements, no exceptions. A society with Free Speech extends the right of speech and the right to read/hear that speech to everyone without infringement as well.
The interesting thing about the Weimar Republic, is that almost all of the laws covering human rights had an "out" for the government, allowing them to suspend the right, "for the common good" in emergency situations. As a result, the subsequent regime didn't have to change many laws to operate as a totalitarian regime.
In 2019, governments and big tech have essentially been tricked into replacing societal backlash against nonsense with societal backlash against suppression. What governments and big tech should be doing is protecting the integrity of speech. On a level playing field, Bad Actors will reveal themselves. It's on a tilted playing field where things dysfunction, and the crowd cries foul and declares the game invalid.
In short, in 2019, for governments and big tech to have the Bad Actors fail, they need to stop doing end-runs around the law and principles of Human Rights. They need to stop giving ammunition to Bad Actors by being bad actors themselves.
Most quantitative reviews on deplatforming and and other social moderation efforts have shown the opposite.
Maybe in the long-term social view of the issue you're right but on a platform by platform basis this doesn't seem to be the case.
I don't think we have the data to make a conclusion on this point, but why is the lack of success in respect of the second point sufficient to make us want to stop the first point?
Okay, so that's the downside of curating your platform. You need to contrast that downside with the upside of taking action.
Reasonable limits on Free Speech are plentiful, and there's an easy false dichotomy in believing that you can either censor everything or censor nothing. Is there a middle ground where we establish a solid rule set where we get most of the beneficial effects are retained, but a plurality of voices remain?
Also a note: >It's not going to change their beliefs one bit.
This isn't supported by research and it's antithetical to your first line. If platforming isn't going to change beliefs, then why care about it? Just move over to Gab, Voat or any of the other offshoots created for deplatformed groups. Have you visited them? They're cesspools.
Overt changes in social acceptability and norms cause populations to reconsider their views, which is why people are upset by being deplatformed in the first place.
If certain vile people were still on YouTube, then they could be demolished by argument. By deplatforming people off YouTube, you actually manage to give the bad people moral ammunition (the people you'd think the least likely to achieve that) and reduce the legitimacy of the platform. What's been accomplished is merely to create even viler, even more insular groupthink.
If arguments actually demolished positions, we'd see a lot fewer fools, and their adherents.
People broadcasting outright lies don't care about arguments. They care about exposure. When they are deplatformed, they quantitatively lose exposure.
They get moral outrage, but it's hard to turn moral outrage into viewers... Especially when your views are unsympathetic.
We've seen precisely this happen on YouTube. "Unfortunately," from their point of view, the way it worked out went against the political narratives of the people who run YouTube.
People broadcasting outright lies don't care about arguments.
But onlookers who are normal, sensible people do.
They care about exposure. When they are deplatformed, they quantitatively lose exposure.
This is the POV of people who don't believe in objective truth or meritocracy. They think everything is a rigged game, and they think to win, it's just that they have to rig the game their own way.
What you call "exposure" is actually discovery. Biasing discovery by refusing it to certain people is tantamount to censorship in this day and age.
They get moral outrage, but it's hard to turn moral outrage into viewers... Especially when your views are unsympathetic.
Actually, it's very easy to turn Moral Outrage into viewers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
It's funny, but here you are actually precisely describing some of the groups who were discredited and saw their engagement drop on YouTube -- in exactly the opposite situation to people like Sargon of Akkad. His opponents in the "SJW skeptic" circles dropped off, while people like him prospered. Then, instead of arguing, the SJW crowd resorted to namecalling, mis-characterizing what was actually said, and de-platforming.
YouTube is losing credibility to the people who are paying attention, precisely by deplatforming people who are popular (whose political views they don't like, even though they are not extreme and fairly mainstream) and by trying to pick and promote their own "winners" that people do not like.
In the end, it just amounts to dishonesty. In the end, people will be able to see this, and I hope YouTube eventually pays the price for it.
Does it though? You don't have to look at social media to get a sense of this to know what has happened in the world. You can look at the Soviet Union and GDR instead. Did censorship there end up killing ideas of capitalism and democracy? Because I can assure you that the Soviet Union's censorship was much more thorough than Twitter or YouTube will ever be.
In fact, you could even move away from censorship and ask yourself how effective banning things that people want to do is in general. Bans on alcohol, drugs, books, movies, porn etc have all failed to get rid of them. In cases such as alcohol, it seems that it only increased the consumption of it.
You couldn't publish the extreme content you see on the internet today in traditional newspapers and television. Mass radicalization didn't occur for all those decades.
The freedom to publish anything you want over a mass medium is something that is only as old as the internet has been generally available to the public, and the tools to amplify and target its reach are only as old as social media.
Whatever right to publish on mass social media that you think is threatened today is only a few decades old at best, but really only since lay people figured out how to use the technological tools of amplification.
You can still shout whatever you want in the town square, but you aren't entitled to the audience of any particular publisher. If those who want to see your content are displeased with that publisher's editorial decisions, they can move to a publisher that has content they want. If there are enough of them to matter, the publisher will either have to change its tactics or lose relevance.
False, False, False! This is not how it works in US jurisprudence. Freedom of speech has to do with fundamental human rights and society. Government, being an important part of this, therefore must abide by Free Speech. However, private parties are also subject to it as well. Free Speech is fundamental, and even supersedes other rights, like property rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
You can still shout whatever you want in the town square,
This is such a dishonest conceit. It's like some dictatorship declaring they have freedom of speech, because while they control the radio, TV, and newspapers, the opposition can still post pamphlets. No, I'm sorry, but the scales of relative power just don't work in a practical sense, either in my examples, or in the one you just proposed!
In 2019, it's like a farmer trying to assert property rights against airplanes overhead. Sorry, but laws do have to change in response to new technological realities.
but you aren't entitled to the audience of any particular publisher.
This is a conceit. The audience relationship is not with people and YouTube. It's with people and a particular creator. It's not the publisher refusing access to its audience. It's the publisher throwing up barriers to the audience.
If there were a monopoly on printing presses, the printing press company wouldn't be allowed to say, "It's my audience, you have no right to it. No Pro Democrat words get printed!" There was a monopoly on telephone wires. It's not as if they would have been allowed to say, "The people connected to my network are my audience! You are not entitled! No Democrat communications over my network!"
What you're defending is just a technological end-run around freedom of speech, which you support because it's your side that would hold all the power.
The holding in that case is quite narrow: "Constitutional protections of free speech under First and Fourteenth Amendments still applicable within the confines of a town owned by a private entity."
You would have to stretch the definition of "town" to include "website" to have it apply.
>> You can still shout whatever you want in the town square, > This is such a dishonest conceit.
Fine, then you can go on Gab, 4chan, 8chan or any of a number of other platforms or sites that accept hate speech to varying degrees. There are digital platforms available for that kind of speech.
> The audience relationship is not with people and YouTube. It's with people and a particular creator.
The editorial aspects of Youtube (including recommendations) are certainly within Youtube's rights to control. Youtube is a brand, not an ISP. Creators must establish a relationship with Youtube in order to publish content on it. There are terms for any such relationship, in the case of Youtube, they are described at https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/policies/#community-guideli...
> If there were a monopoly on printing presses,
There is no monopoly on the technical mechanisms of distributing video online. There are plenty of websites that self-host video content today, and there is no reason that a new provider couldn't attract the creators and audience that Youtube doesn't want.
There are many of them. We're conversing on one right now, in fact. I enjoy civil conversations here with people with whom I disagree deeply about many issues.
However, if mine or anyone else's comments veer to the hateful or inciteful, you can be sure that the moderators will address it by banning our comments or accounts.
> YouTube isn't held liable for copyright infringement
The existence of Youtube Content ID [1] directly contradicts this statement. The whole point of developing Content ID was to enforce copyright on the behalf of, and under pressure from copyright owners.
You can tease apart the right to say something with the right to have it signal-boosted along the way, and if you want to save Free Speech you're going to have to in case we throw the baby out with the bathwater here.
Broadcast stations aren't refusing to show that content because of a law, but because they are making a business decision.
The marketplace of ideas no more leads to good content choices than the marketplace of food leads to healthy eating.
The mistake I see made time and time again is when we believe we are more rational than we really are! It's an evolutionary battle we are fighting, and evolution had a big head start.
I think the problem is exactly the opposite: people are now getting way too much of the content they can’t help but like, and that in way too many cases turns out to be deliberately polarising and extreme content.
In the long run, that works out like the children's story where the young girl gets to decide she'll eat nothing, ever, but peanut butter and jelly. If it's stupid nonsense, then most people eventually figure that out, and you're left with a fringe and ironic onlookers. Hell, if they left Alex Jones alone, he'd just have wound up being the 2019 version of The Weekly World News. Eventually, his viewership would have devolved to sundry weirdo plus college students watching him while playing a drinking game.
As it is now, big tech has fueled his conspiracy narratives by engaging in behavior that looks an awful lot like a cabal of big tech colluding as in a Sci-fi dystopian movie.)
The marketplace of ideas no more leads to good content choices than the marketplace of food leads to healthy eating.
Over time, the marketplace of ideas has lead to wealth, freedom, and public health unprecedented in all of human history.
It's placing two points far apart in history and trying to point at one thing as being responsible for all of it.
If the government now has the right to say, "piece of content X -- not allowed" arbitrarily and with no process and rational standard, then Free Speech is simply broken. An event of that magnitude is now history. A free society should not be rewriting history. People are still free to not-view and not-read. That right can't practically be infringed. What can be infringed is the right to view and the right to read.
You can tease apart the right to say something with the right to have it signal-boosted along the way
As the internet is currently formulated, "signal boost" is equivalent to discovery. Being able to manipulate discovery for 90% of the population is tantamount to the power of censorship.
if you want to save Free Speech you're going to have to in case we throw the baby out with the bathwater here
In a fair system which truly supports Free Speech, in the end, signal boosting a bad message becomes a good thing. If it's really bad and full of nonsense, then there will be a reaction and backlash which will bury the bad message. What we have in the years leading up to 2019, is a small group of activists supported by a cultural minority (academia+media+tech) who signal boosted messages, including those of bad actors who hijacked activist messages. Then, when the backlash came against the bad actors, there was an artificial campaign of suppression, which encouraged more backlash against the suppression.
Now, we are in a vicious cycle of censorship/suppression supported by government and corporate power versus the backlash to that suppression. If we want it to end, then we can let Free Speech do what it's supposed to, so the backlash can go to where it belongs: Against bad actors hijacking good messages and bad actors with really bad messages.
The key part of this is the word arbitrary. You can't take 'anything down for no reason', but you certainly can take things down. Even the most robust version of free speech protections have carve outs.
The government can prevent you from branding your email product 'Gmail', they can censure you for shouting fire in a crowded theater, they can go after you if you issue a tweet which lies about how many cars your car company is going to build in the next quarter, etc.
The government can prevent you from branding your email product 'Gmail', they can censure you for shouting fire in a crowded theater, they can go after you if you issue a tweet which lies about how many cars your car company is going to build in the next quarter, etc.
All of those things have due process and objective standards attached to them. None of those are arbitrary. Those are all following established law. That's a far cry from only saying, "Okay, these messages are 'bad.' We're now de-platforming them."
Or lock you up you for spreading anti-war rhetoric, which is what the actual case this quote came from was about.
We are, however, rightly intolerant of hate speech, especially speech against a segment of the population. (We do have our share of racist fools, and our media let their own standards slide too far.) Almost every country has laws on the books like this, including the USA.
I think the US 2nd Amendment is a great thing. People everywhere should have that absolute degree of freedom. That's certainly not the same thing as "free nuclear weapons."
We are, however, rightly intolerant of hate speech, especially speech against a segment of the population.
The problem we've seen with this, is that rather tame bog-standard Republican positions in the US are being tarred as "hate speech" by bad actors on the Far Left. (Accompanied by Far Leftist mobs chasing bog-standard Republicans in the street and beating them up. There's video of this to be found on YouTube.) I'm fine with direct incitement being illegal. That's pretty much the same thing as prohibiting explicit threats of physical violence. But there should be a wide zone around any kind of political opinion which isn't direct incitement. Otherwise, without objective standards, everything just devolves into namecalling, trying to get everyone else de-platformed.
In 2019, every enforcement mechanism needs to be vetted with the question: Can this be exploited? Because in 2019, you can rest assured that some bad actor will exploit it.
Almost every country has laws on the books like this, including the USA.
There is no such thing as "Hate Speech" in the US. However, we do have laws against things like direct incitement.
Those are often states being naughty and infringing. Those are often backdoor attempts to circumvent the 2nd amendment.
China is also tolerant of free speech when it suits them. I wouldn't consider them a role model though. You can get 10 years in prison for possessing objectionable material, and one criteria for objectionable material basically makes BDSM illegal.
>Almost every country has laws on the books like this, including the USA.
Countries like the USA have specific protected categories of people that you're not allowed to discriminate by in certain activities, but publications in the US don't have to go through an office of censorship. You can release a movie without the government seeing it first.
1. Fail to moderate and engineer your platform, it turns into a complete cesspool
2. Government is forced to step in
3. Easily comply with government regulations because you're massive, now it is impossible for anyone to compete with you
What's happening to Youtube et al right now was inevitable - this was apparent to anyone with half a brain back when AJAX was a novel thing. But "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it", and that VC funded advertising pop culture party was a hell of a time.
Unfortunately this centralized detour has made it so that the move to p2p methods is going to be a lot more violent. Lawlmakers have now been primed to being able to wave their magic wand to implement their whims, and will expect that ability to continue. When reality hits and it stops working again, they'll be hunting for individuals to blame and persecute.
Plus, the people bitching about their content removed from youtube don't want to just be able to upload to youtube they want youtube's audience, they in fact think they're entitled to youtube's audience.
What they're objecting to, is that their audience continues to exist, and YouTube and other tech companies are throwing up barriers between them and their existing audience -- even to the point of refusing to process payments and otherwise doing things which look like possibly illegal collusion between companies.
YouTube has captured the mainstream of all vlog commentary across all society, but they insist that they can continue to act like they're just a niche tech player. It's no different than a company in 1985 that had owned 85% of all the TV stations and Newspapers in the US. At some point, media companies get too big and too dominant over human discourse. At some point, media companies can get big enough to become a threat to Free Speech.
Instead, such protocols can be marginalized through social means and through the media. On top of that, centralized alternatives can be hounded out of business and given the same treatment. YT doesn't have regulatory capture. They have effectively captured the lion's share of mainstream video commentary, with no apparent way for them to ever be replaced.
ex. Lyft + Uber are an example I can think of where violation of existing laws was the only way to create innovation.
Would love to hear more thoughts on how this might work with content/video companies
2) if they make a good faith effort, at whatever level of expertise and resources they have, I belive they will be within the law. I dont think there is any specific legal requirement to do machine learning or any other specific implementation of content ID.
I'd start with checksums, whatever level of flagging by hand I could afford, and go from there.
As you scale you'll attract the attention of rights holders and need to spend more. But I would hope the courts would accept a good faith effort.
If its federated, by being split into such small pieces that the regulations don't really affect any particular one of them, since they're either unaffected or can remove content easily while washing their hands of what other people/communities say.
If it's decentralised, by being literally impossible to shut down, block or go after users for using. That's always been the end goal for many of these systems.
I struggle with this line of thinking because it's not specific enough. YouTube doesn't act as a gatekeeper for most video content. You can upload almost anything you want as long as its not grotesque or copyrighted. What most people mean when they say YouTube acts as a gatekeeper is "will YouTube pay me for the content I upload". And the problem with that is the advertisers, not YouTube - a handful of large advertisers decided they didn't like a lot of the content on YouTube and refused to pay for it. The beef is with the advertisers, not YouTube.
I do have a problem with the videos YouTube decides to promote and surface, but when it becomes to the topic and censorship and deplatforming, the argument almost always boils down to "Proctor and Gamble need to pay me to upload content whether they want to or not", which I find asinine. YouTube is obligated to provide you with a sales team.
No, the beef is with YouTube. They could offer advertisers the option to pay more and only advertise on “high-quality” content, or pay less and advertise everywhere.
Make it a slider with example videos and let them select what they’re comfortable with.
Instead, they went with no choice and arbitrary demonetization cutoffs.
If P&G doesn’t like my shaky repair videos on niche products that nobody else has made, fine. But P&G shouldn’t dictate what’s worthy of advertising or not for every other advertiser AND publisher.
The advertisers on YouTube bargain as a collective. Sure 3-4 multinationals have a larger voice than the others, but they all took collective action to force YouTube to change their ways. It wasn't just P&G. It's no different than if a group of people staged a boycott - sure there might be some people who don't agree with the boycott, but the point of the boycott is to make a big enough voice to force another entity's hand.
If you don't like it, do your own sales. If you don't want to do that, then start publishing the sterile, family friendly, broad content that the advertiser-class is willing to pay for.
An additional concern, at least in US tradition, is when once-again-centralized monopoly venues are being mandated (or given permission?) by politicians to censor or "curate" everyone's speech. I'm pretty sure I was taught in school that we consider that a bad idea here.
I generally favor a healthy amount of decentralization, that the remaining big guys be more common carrier (and stop claiming rights to people's communications), and a renewed individual sense of responsibility towards society (not gaming social media, playing to metrics, manipulating our lesser selves, etc.).
Anecdotal experience: Most people discover most videos they watch through hyperlinks/word of mouth, not YT recommendations, and nothing is stopping you from self-hosting a video.
YT is not like a social network (which become quadratically more valuable, and exclusive, with their number of users). There's no walled garden, its consumed passively, and its competition is, in fact, a click away.
Who is liable? The original uploader? All the peers who are hosting it? The viewers?
And how quickly can the content be removed?
[]If we don't count the likes of Facebook, Microsoft, etc as competitors, since they would manage the site in the same way Google does.
And what about Twitch? Plenty of "personality" driven content there.
But if you focus attention to political commentary specifically, then YouTube is clearly the dominant giant. In that context, they are a defacto monopoly.
A giant chunk of uploaded content is never even watched.
We know that YouTube has trouble making money with this type of criteria. What do you think is the chance that another company with far less economies of scale will somehow make it work better?
I don't see how YouTube is not giving away half of their ad revenue. Note that even when a video is "unsuitable for advertisers" the creators still get paid by YouTube Red.
A part of YouTube has been captured by activists, and a lot of that policy is warped to their ends. Often, this is political. Often, it's arbitrary abuse of power in service of this or that "Internet slap fight." Either way, it's looks bad to someone who can see the big picture.
Yeah, and this meme is absurd. In what other ad business are advertisers obligated to pay you? Normally when you are trying to sell ads, you have to have a sales team to try to get advertisers to pay you, and it's a constant effort. Creators do not have a right to monetization. If they want monetization, nothing is stopping them from finding their own advertisers and striking their own deals (many creators do exactly this).