YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's bad enough that NYT can be pretty biased on its own, but the comment sections are always full of low-tier thinking that just push whatever narrative is currently in the Overton window.
What I find distressing is how people remark that a telecom and advertising giant acting as a de facto government over the public square isn't a violation of free speech principles because they're a "private business", as if that's an original thought that's profound. Funny how people say "it's a private business" when it suits their own political interests.
We wouldn't blindly allow company-owned cities or states to pass laws, especially vague or undefined ones, that potentially violate our rights, so why do we allow "states" in cyberspace to be run in such a way?
Ban people promoting violence? Sure, why not. I'm as against hate and violence as the next person. But not only is censoring "hate speech" becoming a slippery slope at the company level, it's bad for the public in general because it sets a greater precedent for what the big corporations that run our everyday lives can tell us what we can or cannot do, and with no forgiveness. I don't find it hard to imagine a world where individuals can be instantly and permanently banned from doing everyday things, just like they are on YouTube, because they said or did something off the platform.
They worked so hard to research and create a 2000 word article that accurately reflects the world (in accordance to their editorial guidelines) using their good name - and then let fReEtHiNkErChAd and 2020BloodInTheStreets chime in at the end.
It would be OK if they strictly moderated the comments, but few sites seem to do that.
I'm not sure which news sites you read but most of the ones I've seen count only as journalism in a very vague and abstract sense. The information is thin, the writing poor, and major important questions go unanswered and ignored. If there is indeed any point to following the news on a daily basis (and there is good evidence to suggest there is not), the quality of most new sources is atrocious enough that none of it is worth my time.
(The exception here is the occasional piece of very well done investigative journalism.)
But, in regard to comments, they do it for the same reason that Hacker News or any other site has a comments section: community engagement. This is not necessary a bad thing but it comes with the responsibility to _moderate_ the resulting community and almost every site drops the ball on this.
Sometimes, to some degree, and sometimes not. The level and consistency of accuracy varies per organization, per individual reporter, per story, and per person doing the judgement of "accuracy".
I find this laughable. Many recent articles I've seen are designed to get clicks and have nothing to do with good journalism or research beyond what someone can get from behind a keyboard.
It's a place the public visit not a piece of public infrastructure. Repeating "public square" over and over again does not make it so.
Which of these cases is Youtube more like? It's already hard to tell, and it's continuing to change. I expect the legal status of online forums to evolve over the next several decades, just like the legal status of brick-and-mortar spaces has evolved over time.
We need an Internet Bill of Rights to ensure free speech on any platform of this scale. Yes, that means speech you don't like; may I suggest not watching it?
If your cell company prevented you from calling your crazy uncle on Christmas eve because he believed aliens built the pyramids, that would be considered a violation of your right to free speech AND free association, and it would be very creepy.
The public square argument at this point isn't deniable, it's more about what the company that maintains that public square gets to define as trash.
I think a key insight in discussions like this is realising that “public square” is as more of a function rather than a state of ownership.
IMO if your company becomes big enough to obtain the function as a public square, you should be prepared to be required to act as one.
Legislation isn’t there yet, but just like privacy and data-ownership is getting more legislative attention these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if things like this are subject to regulation within 5-10 years.
As this infinitely repeated discussion shows, it’s clearly a problem which needs to be solved.
* Self-moderating: Such conversations require a certain level of decorum, since these are presumably people you interact with every day. The likelihood of calling your desk mate a Nazi, racist, race traitor, etc. to their face are astronomically smaller than when it's cloaked in anonymity, since there may be consequences to your commentary.
* Self-authenticating: It reduces the efficacy of message amplification, since the real world serves as an out-of-band identity authentication mechanism.
* Self-regulating: It's easier, cheaper, and less risky for the hosting site, since they no longer have any enforcement role to play in the discussion itself (beyond the original slant when presenting the information, e.g. by news organizations).
Of course, this doesn't address the problems of sites which are inherently designed to do one-to-many broadcasting and discussion, such as Youtube or Reddit. How would these sites look without comments at all, or with a very strict attestation/vouching system?
Although HN follows a similar model vis-à-vis discussion and broadcasting, the active HN moderation is pretty good, at least good enough to maintain a relatively high-quality discourse and removing very low-quality discussion. However, this is difficult to scale and relatively expensive.
Well, it turns out I had an over-optimistic view of people.
If a community has a topic and the majority of users are interested in discussing that topic, then when someone veers off-topic to rant about their favorite conspiracy theory, you don't have to be a judge of the validity of his viewpoint. You just gently point out that's not what people are there to talk about and that they're welcome to discuss said conspiracy theory over on yonder conspiracy theory aficionado forum (and ban them if they continue trying to detract from the conversation).
This then removes moderators as judges of what is Right and True (the problem facing moderators on Facebook/YouTube/other anything-goes platforms) and positions them in the much more manageable role of, well, moderating a conversation.
It's hard to admit that dichotomy, because when we realize that the top 1% or .01% can still be so ignorant, we also gradually realize that we are all probably in for a lot of trouble moving forward, particularly if and when resource wars become a bit more widespread than they are now.
Actual states have a monopoly on violence, and can deprive me of life, liberty, and property. So I want them to have as few excuses to do that as possible. These "states" in cyberspace can do none of that, so it's significantly less of a problem if they don't embrace freedom of speech as an ideal.
(I guess it depends somewhat on whether you see free speech as an inherent virtue or as a safety valve against government oppression. I've been leaning towards the latter personally.)
I have no idea how it is in other countries but in Germany the comment sections in every single newspaper is _horrible_, especially when it is articles about refugees, climate change and similar topics.
I do disagree with your private business comment though. It is a private business and they can do what they want to an extent. You don't tell a news paper who they have to let write articles. But I think the problem is that youtube is so large and the service so imporant that it might as well be a government deciding rights. It's not just youtube there are a lot of tech giants that powerful. I think when it's obvious they are that powerful and important it's time to break them up. I mean hell the bread company my step dad works at even had to go through a process to see if they would be too big with a recent purchase. But yet tech companies have been getting away with this sort of unchecked growth. They are global powers with dwindling competition. Break them up. Reintroduce competition.
I don't know if breaking up these massive "tech" companies is a good approach, but something has to be done at some point, and there needs to be rules over how YouTube can regulate its platform. At the very least, YouTube needs to be forced to make all of its rules explicit and to not insta-ban entire channels while deleting all their data.
Foregoing vaccination imposes an as-yet-unaccounted externality on the community; you put everyone at risk by not vaccinating yourself or your kids, and there's no way for the vulnerable (those relying on herd immunity) to know who around them will put them at risk.
It goes way beyond an individual choice, to vaccinate or not. That decision has impacts far beyond the individual's life.
TY for reading my comment
Now you could argue that Donald Trump expertly exploited exceptions to the "equal-time rule" in order to get much more coverage than his competition, but that's more to do with the structure of the law than the spirit of what it's trying to accomplish.
YouTube is just asking to be regulated in such a way as the phone companies. And it should be regulated to follow the First Amendment as a mass communication platform, even though it is a private company.
FWIIW this censorious crap cost them $70b in market cap last quarter. Looking forward to next quarter.
No comments, likes, dislikes, and no recommendations on the sidebar. It can still be viewed if you accept the risk, and can be found using the search bar or by scrolling through the channel.
--
2. There's not going to be a fair judge of what counts as "censorable content" when two opposite sites of the debate are each arguing in favor of their side. It's like why referees exist in sports. Of course Team A will say "No way! That wasn't a foul, I didn't touch them!", while Team B says "It was definitely a foul, I got hit!". To anyone who's heard "boos or cheers" from the crowd at a sports game, it's not a shocker the response centers around which calls benefits their team.
--
3. With regards to the "freedom of speech" rights and personal liberties - how much of a shit does a monopoly-level, multi-national corporation give about strictly adhering to government-defined "rights"? What is the business cost of vehemently adhering to potentially-gray-area covenants vs. saying "Yeahh.. fuck that shit it's too much effort". Finagling laws to suit business needs is what huge companies pay teams of people to do already.
--
4. YouTube is like a factory farm. The more users are bunched into YouTube, the more money Google makes from advertising. It's all a numbers game. Google has no incentive to change the setup of the farm, so to speak, when what they have has been paying off to keep the service free and hold market share. Unless someone has a particularly large audience, the main solution to complaints from random, non-paying users is: "Deal with it".
--
5. Ban specific items that are violent, devious, or dangerous? Sure. Banning "DIY drinking bleach cures autism" is not the same as banning something more nuanced like "trailer trash ride dirt bikes on the interstate" on the grounds a specific subgroup has a problem. As customer service will show you, people will always find something to complain about. If Google came out with, "We will ban whatever we feel like based on what disagrees with our superior, self-selected ideology", that would be a very different story. That's not much better than a dictatorship banning anything that disagrees with the State.
>The thing about an online comment section is that the guy who really likes pedophilia is going to start posting on every thread about sexual minorities “I’m glad those sexual minorities have their rights! Now it’s time to start arguing for pedophile rights!” followed by a ten thousand word manifesto. This person won’t use any racial slurs, won’t be a bot, and can probably reach the same standards of politeness and reasonable-soundingness as anyone else. Any fair moderation policy won’t provide the moderator with any excuse to delete him. But it will be very embarrassing for to New York Times to have anybody who visits their website see pro-pedophilia manifestos a bunch of the time.
“So they should deal with it! That’s the bargain they made when deciding to host the national conversation!”
No, you don’t understand. It’s not just the predictable and natural reputational consequences of having some embarrassing material in a branded space. It’s enemy action.
Every Twitter influencer who wants to profit off of outrage culture is going to be posting 24-7 about how the New York Times endorses pedophilia. Breitbart or some other group that doesn’t like the Times for some reason will publish article after article on New York Times‘ secret pro-pedophile agenda. Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you, people who hate everybody and will take whatever targets of opportunity present themselves, and a thousand self-appointed moral crusaders and protectors of the public virtue. It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section. Finally, it will make up 100% of what people associate with you and your brand. The Chinese Robber Fallacy is a harsh master; all you need is a tiny number of cringeworthy comments, and your political enemies, power-hungry opportunists, and 4channers just in it for the lulz can convince everyone that your entire brand is about being pro-pedophile, catering to the pedophilia demographic, and providing a platform for pedophile supporters. And if you ban the pedophiles, they’ll do the same thing for the next-most-offensive opinion in your comments, and then the next-most-offensive, until you’ve censored everything except “Our benevolent leadership really is doing a great job today, aren’t they?” and the comment section becomes a mockery of its original goal.
[...]
>Fourth, I want anybody else trying to host “the national conversation” to have a clear idea of the risks. If you plan to be anything less than maximally censorious, consider keeping your identity anonymous, and think about potential weak links in your chain (ie hosts, advertisers, payment processors, etc). I’m not saying you necessarily need to go full darknet arms merchant. Just keep in mind that lots of people will try to stop you, and they’ve had a really high success rate so far.
The right of free speech is that you can say what you want without violent repercussions, such as fines, prison time, or capital punishment. Corporations and individuals already aren't allowed to do any of that, so no additional protection is needed. Governments are singled out specifically because they do not follow the same rules as everyone else—asserting that violence is a "legitimate" means of achieving arbitrary goals.
But corporations' ability to decide what to host is guaranteed by freedom of speech. Remember, freedom of speech is not just freedom to say what you want it's also freedom from compelled speech. It's the freedom from the government telling you to make or host speech. Mandating that corporations host speech they don't want is not protecting freedom of speech, it is violating freedom of speech.
We would say, these private companies have a duty not to radicalise our children. That our children are being led away from god and into sinful lifestyles like homosexuality.
Some of us would welcome our views being censored by a few execs in silicon valley because we would see them defending the moral values of the status-quo...
Surely I'm not the only one who feels it might be a little short sighted to give a handful of billionaires like Zuckerberg control over what we can and can't express in the 21st century?
If we're so concerned and don't want to see content we morally disagree with, why can't we have family friendly modes?
I for one am glad we were all radicalised to support the "homosexual agenda". I'm glad we were radicalised by people like MLK to resist racism. And sure, there were some extremists along the way who took it upon themselves to commit acts of terrorism for the "greater good", but we understood these people were rare and this was the unfortunate, but necessary cost of liberty.
So before we continue too far down this road, are we certain we have all the answers now? If someone can be banned from social media sites for stating biological (but perhaps unfortunate) facts such as, "trans women aren't women" are we completely sure we'll get mass censorship right this time?
It might be worth remembering vast majority of us hold one or two "extreme views" that others find morally offensive.
Edit: Not that I should have to, but for those who are suspicious of my motives, I'm a left-wing, pro-LGBT, anti-racist type of guy.
Racists are not a protected class of people. They aren't afforded those same rights. And on some grounds their disruption of society actually puts an onus on you as a platform to restrict their access.
"Protected class" basically means politically favored group, and as GP points out, that changes.
I think this is an outdated belief. Many officers earn 6 figure salaries in the US.
By this logic, shouldn't neo-Nazi rallies or protests be "causing violence" as well because they influence people to commit violent acts later the same way neo-Nazi videos influence people? Yet that is the very thing the officers in GP's comment are protecting.
YouTube has already decided that academic software vulnerability exploitation proof-of-concept videos are "dangerous content", which results in video removal and a strike on your account.
This seems like another example of containment, but it's scary because what's normal today might be an extreme view tomorrow... and what's extreme today could be normal tomorrow. As much as I detest the idea of ideas like white supremecy spreading, I'm not sure I like the idea of fighting it by hiding it from view.
Yesterday was the anniversary of Tiananmen square. China avoided democracy by hiding all evidence of this terrible event. I think most people can agree the government hiding the truth is wrong, but if social media is the new public square (which the supreme court in a way ruled to be true when it ruled Trump can't block his tweets), I think these ideals of not hiding information still applies. The 1st amendment, and what it stands for is truely in jeopody with these actions.
The platform should shoulder as much or more blame than the content in this case. Free speech man. This is not ok.
"In addition to tightening its hate speech rules, YouTube announced it would also tweak its recommendation algorithm, the automated software that shows users videos based on their interests and past viewing habits. This algorithm is responsible for more than 70 percent of overall time spent on YouTube, and has been a major engine for the platform’s growth. But it has also drawn accusations of leading users down rabbit holes filled with extreme and divisive content, in an attempt to keep them watching and drive up the site’s usage numbers."
So you are saying YouTube should actively recommend people stuff they disagree with? Like, if you are religious it should recommend atheist and skeptic videos? And if you are vegetarian it should recommend meat smoking videos?
I'm pretty should people would hate that
YouTube should actively try to prevent people from being drawn into racist rabbit holes. If your rabbit hole ends with "and that's why we should exterminate Jews", probably not a good idea to encourage viewers down that path.
Regarding the censoring of extreme views, what I don't understand is why YouTube gave the likes of Alex Jones such a long run. I suspect that for a while it was working out well for YouTube having people watch his rants as well as the 9/11 conspiracy theory stuff.
This defied common sense, his garbage was being recommended to people that weren't looking for it. I think these Google people get a bit too clever for their own good without taking time out to just ask if things are common sense.
I think we should all have the option to seek out views differing to our own, for instance I do care to find out what the likes of Timothy McVeigh actually thought. It doesn't mean I believe in them or what they have done. I don't want some BBC journalist to interpret that for me, I want to hear it for myself.
Recently the Iran state broadcaster Press TV got banned from YouTube with no explanation given. They did not have many views, however, now they are gone, how is anyone supposed to 'see' what Iran thinks of the world? There was no hate speech on their channel, it was just banished. Press TV is positively benign compared to recent UK/US leaders and I don't believe I am controversial in saying that. Something is deeply wrong with the censorship landscape.
Err, how do you know that the algorithm does this? And also, how do you know that people are not exposed to other views outside of YouTube. And lastly, why do you think its the job of an entertainment platform to "challenge" views?
Youtube optimizes for watch time. Most people don't want to spend their afternoons having their views challenged.
Any algorithm that properly optimizes for watch time of the masses will learn to validate views.
Or, at any rate, if that's the outcome, then it might be time to regulate said platform.
Main points:
>Removing more hateful and supremacist content from YouTube
I think this is great, I see nothing of value being lost from channels whose whole schtick is to marginalize people's of a target group.
>Reducing borderline content and raising up authoritative voices
I do like attempts to curtail outright scams and misinformation, but don't like YouTube choosing "top channels" as voices of authority.
>Continuing to reward trusted creators and enforce our monetization policies
I think this shows what drives YouTube and many other platforms, what is and isn't advertiser friendly. Principles only go as far as the bottomline.
> I think this is great, I see nothing of value being lost from channels whose whole schtick is to marginalize people's of a target group.
Who gets to pick what's 'hateful' and 'supremacist' though? Did you think of that?
Hint: If they go the Facebook route it will be various 'anti-hate' orgs which have openly called people like Trump and Ben Shapiro Nazis.
I wonder if things like the Freedom From Religion Foundation would qualify for a ban. Or a church that preaches that their god is the correct one.
You can't choose your age, gender (mostly), race, caste, sexual orientation, or veteran status, but religion is malleable and public discourse about those topics where one person argues that their view is superior to others is pretty important to society.
It's not clear if YouTube is going to remove anything that asserts some religious beliefs are indeed superior to others.
What this announcement actually means is that YouTube is going to become more politically active in their content curation. This is what a subset of their employees, as well as influential bluechecked Twitterati, have been lobbying for. As a progressive/neo-liberal institution, it will apply exactly the sort of differential policy enforcement that one might expect.
I won't delve into the details of how that applies to your examples because it would quickly become too controversial for HN.
Just imagine how the median Bay Area tech-person would parse out the details and you'll have the answers.
The slippery slope argument works both ways.
A wholesale expunction from one end of the spectrum is hard not to interpret as politically charged censorship. Let's see how many Antifa and BLM videos get taken down.
Not to mention lots of pro-weed and pro-sexworker stuff being banned.
Yes we are.
You are implying equivalence where there is none. Black Lives Matter and Antifa are not equivalent to white supremacists.
Just watch how many radical left videos get removed, irrespective of what group posted them.
I find it interesting that conservatives want to protect genocidal racists, but there isn't an equivalent on the progressive side of things. If there was, progressives would want that noise shut down faster than anyone else.
1) Good. Hateful content spreads hate and causes it to multiply. We should not allow it to proliferate on the internet.
2) This is censorship. It it is the fault of the individuals watching/reading the hateful media who are to blame for number of views the videos/articles get.
So I wonder: is it really an either/or decision? Is there no third option here? It seems like a classic ethical antinomy. Authority influences people but, at the same time, the authority always needs to be recognized as authoritative by the people who are influenced by it.
Imagine that the electricity company providing electricity policed what kind of devices you can use inside your home (you are allowed to connect a Samsung washer but not a Bosh washer). There would be a lot of outcry.
Why do you think a nation of free speaking individuals is patently not entitled to say what they want on a platform specifically created to allow people to say whatever they want?
To be absolutely clear on my position, I am not saying YouTube is acting outside their rights to censor content. But I am very much saying people have a right to be peeved about the bait and switch.
Further to my point. People being concerned about who and what specifically will be caught up in this is well, well within reason to bring into question given their current approach to takedowns which consistently missflag videos inappropriately.
"It's their business they can do what they want" isn't a valid argument against any of these questions, you're just stating a fact that doesn't answer or even acknowledge the potentially problematic situation at hand.
That said, there is nothing stopping people from creating their own sites, or putting taboo / extreme videos on chan sites, forums, etc... and plonk it down behind Cloudflare or Akamai. i.e. 4chan, 8chan, I mean, you won't find more extreme videos that what get posted there every 90 seconds. In this case, I am not linking to the examples.
They’re a private company and are entitled to have a curatorial viewpoint—and for my particular beliefs culling white suprematists and borderline pedophilic content is a Good Thing.
You’re entitled to say whatever you want in this country, but I’m not obligated to broadcast it for you.
They've often claimed in court to be an open / neutral platform, because that comes with legal protections against what your users post - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/02/facebook-...
Publishers (like Forbes when people blog on there) on the other hand are responsible for their user posts. I think Facebook / Youtube is more like the Forbe here, so they should be treated legally as a publisher.
Its because Youtube would rather be legally categorized as a service rather than as a publisher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
Back during the late 90s all of us working on public websites knew that allowing user-contributed content was a great way to build both community and to increase the sheer amount of content, which increased advertising revenues. But there's a catch to user-contributed content... in order to avoid legal responsibility as a site owner for the user content posted on the site you can't moderate that content directly. The reason for this is the "common carrier" rule.
Common carrier essentially states that as a communications platform you are not liable for the legal implications of the communications that occur on your platform as long as you do not choose to engage in editing or moderating that content. AT&T, for example, was not legally liable for a conversation that occurred on their telephone network even if the conversation involved the commission of a crime (we're plotting a terror attack, a bank robbery, etc.) The reason they were not liable was because they did not monitor the communications on their network and did not cut off a phone call if it sounded like you were planning something illegal, evil, whatever.
The minute you, as the carrier, begin actively moderating the content (as opposed to setting up common universal rules such as site karma or user driven moderation), you are responsible for ALL of that content. You managed to remove 99.99% of all illegal communication? Too bad, you're still on the hook for that 0.01% that you missed.
This does not mean that content may never be removed by the company, it's just that they must do it under the order of a court or applicable government entity... in the same way that AT&T could not tap your phones absent a court order.
Many sites opted not to have user-contributed content due to the potential concerns regarding advertisers or their own brand reputation. Others did allow such content and later removed things such as comments and the like due to the conflict between violating common carrier and the problems that arose with advertisers and/or their brand (see Yahoo Finance comments circa 2002 or so).
That should be happening, but isn't - not to the degree it naturally would. Debanking. Payment processors have been very busy weeding out potential competitors to the big names in SV. I almost want to laugh at the fact that the early cryptocurrency proponents experienced the exact same treatment while building the very thing that would protect those presently being targeted by Visa/Mastercard. I'm still banned from two major banks...
This youtube censorship stuff is going to pale in comparison to the coming wave of debanking. There is a very freaked out class of people who have their hands on the wheel at the moment (especially true at Mastercard), so you can't rely on traditional profit motives to predict behavior - anything is possible. My financial adviser suggested, with a straight face, that I consider a portfolio built around some new social equity index... my account has been self directed ever since.
YouTube generates revenue, youtube shares that revenue, contributors with tons of views are making money directly from YT.
This is simply not the same as Twitter, etc. Twitter may make money off of eyeballs. I may somehow make money by becoming twitter famous. But my money is not coming as a share of twitter revenue.
The incentives are all screwed up. YT benefits financially the more 'shocking' my vid can be, and I benefit financially if YT does.
How many ad dollars did Google make off these videos?
And how much damage did hosting those videos do?
People you might like to remove from your experience will tend to congregate on certain instances favorable to that kind of thinking. You have the power to block that instance at an individual level. There isn't the same impetus to deplatform them because you can just break the link.
I have many (but not all) "free speech" instances blocked because they're packed with users who try to force that perspective on me by (for example) removing content warnings when replying. I don't have to appeal to any authority to enforce my boundaries. Only the owners can decide who has the power to make those decisions on centralized social media sites. That seems to be outsourced moderators with little or no understanding of niche or marginalized communities.
All it would take is a law that compels public internet services to behave as if they're public services once they start reaching >33% of citizens.
The problem seems to be that a large percentage of citizens don't grasp that important freedoms often have a high price tag. Anyone can see this with the response to second and fourth amendment issues, and the same is becoming true of the first amendment.
Free societies have an inherent amount of chaos. That chaos is the price you pay. People desiring to live in a fully ordered society are unwittingly asking to live in a prison.
Google isn't in the video business because it wants people to be able to share videos with each other. Google is in the video business to sell ads. Censoring the illiberal is the way to get to get liberals to support censorship. Announcing manual control over the suggestions is a way to justify steering viewers away from any content, starving it of revenue, and getting it off the platform.
During all of that time, driving the cost to persist and broadcast information down has been a good thing. The cheaper the better, because it gives more brains access to useful information. I think because of that, we assumed the ideal cost is zero.
In the past several years, I believe we are slowly, painfully, realizing that we were wrong. The web has driven that cost down to practically zero. Any rando can write anything and it will be served on the web to all and sundry in perpetuity.
The problem with that is that it makes it equally easy to broadcast mis-information. What humans need to prosper is access to good information — true facts and useful ideas. Information that helps us take actions that help people.
When there's a non-zero maintainance cost for info, someone has to periodically choose to pay that cost. The scribe has to decide what book to copy. The printer has to decide which pamphlets to re-print. The public access channel has to decide which shows to schedule.
If someone can't be motivated to care about some piece of information enough to do that, it naturally decays and disappears. Like evolution, there's a natural selection process where some memes die. Now, granted, even with a non-zero cost, bad or misinformed actors may choose to further bad information. But I think that happens way more often when the cost to doing so is nil.
So, when you have a non-zero cost, it encourages a certain amount of selection where useful information tends to last longer. At the same time, you don't want the cost too high. When that happens, only the powerful are able to decide what information persists and they choose only information that furthers their own power. Driving the cost down has been, I think, one of the major engines of democracy.
But I do think we've overshot the mark now. In the next several years, it's going to be up to us as a culture to figure out how to effectively deal with the hurricane of misinformation constantly roaring around us. It is, I think, the biggest threat facing human society today.
(You might argue that climate change is a bigger threat. But note that a primary reason we're failing to take sufficient action on climate change is because of misinformation.)
Mind you this isn't an attempt to defend YouTube at all given what they did yesterday but rather that I've always seen the battles over free speech and the bias on HN as being incredibly lopsided.
Even their own rules written by them is never enough for censors. They have to invent stuff like "brush up" to extend censorship even further, even when recognizing there's no violation of their own policies, that they themselves wrote. Talk about slippery slope...
Nope, we're talking about "videos and channels that advocate for neo-Nazism, white supremacy and other bigoted ideologies".
As much as I don't like censorship, views that advocate for extermination of other people can rightly fuck off.
What I don’t agree with is conflating that with being un-PC. Or having s difference of opinion on contentious social topics, even if they can be personally offensive.
For example, for some, abortion is seen as pro-death. For others denying asylum is tantamount to a death sentence and thus is also death and hate. Or saying “f the police”. Police will say that is calling for hate, etc.
Today it feels like the PMRC was just a few decades too early. Would music be better without misogyny, violence, yes, in many respects but also we would deny a voice to those who feel oppressed and need an outlet to voice against the mainstream understanding.
I think that this will be bad for the platform overall -- an increase in censorship is never good.
From the YouTube blog post:
> We’ve been taking a close look at our approach towards hateful content in consultation with dozens of experts in subjects like violent extremism, supremacism, civil rights, and free speech.
So at the very least they claim to understand that it should not be a random decision.
Consider a discussion forum that never banned any users or removed any spam. It quickly becomes very difficult to have a meaningful discussion when a third of the posts are "CHEEP ROLE X bUY NOW" and another third are racial hatred.
Increases in curation (private censorship of one’s own offering) are very frequently good.
Whether the paying customers are consumers or advertisers, quality of curation is typically on of the main things they are paying for in content platforms. It’s true that there has been some effort to substitute algorithmic recommendation engines providing a consumer-specific view in place of curation, but it's also pretty clear that even the best of those is not viewed as an adequate solution by significant segments of the market.
People against (limited) censorship usually react very quickly once it's their group that's being attacked (as some very famous subreddit does)
That's not specific enough. What about people who want to preserve European culture but don't think its "superior" to any other culture?
> The tension was evident on Tuesday, when YouTube said that a prominent right-wing creator who used racial language and homophobic slurs to harass a journalist in videos on YouTube did not violate its policies. The decision set off a firestorm online, including accusations that YouTube was giving a free pass to some of its popular creators.
For context: https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/4/18653088/youtube-steven-cr...
I'm sure that YouTube would say that they don't play favorites but even if that were true, as we have seen there are organizations all the way up to nation states that are hell-bent on corrupting platforms like YouTube for their own ends. And they don't require much corrupting.
Moderation is key. Sites like Hacker News work only because of strict moderation by humans. Similar sites without such moderation quickly become a haven for trolls and spam. Automatic systems can always be gamed - what is needed is a strong editorial hand.
I don't want YouTube to end - there are thousands of hours of great content. But if it is to survive it needs to make a choice of what kind of site they want to be. Letting itself be anything its users want is turning it into a cesspit.
It's possible their hands are tied here. The copyright strike thing is out of hand, too, but in that case the blame is also on the (often scummy) copyright owners/enforcers. (That isn't to say they don't benefit from keeping advertisers happy, or that their platform/brand won't suffer the consequences of this approach)
However, they SHOULD NOT be able to have it both ways where they censor posts they don't like (like a publisher would do) but enjoy protections afforded to actual open / neutral platforms.
Once you start censoring things that aren't breaking any laws, you're now a PUBLISHER and not an OPEN PLATFORM, so you are responsible for what's posted on your site.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communica...
> The court upheld AOL's immunity from liability for defamation. AOL's agreement with the contractor allowing AOL to modify or remove such content did not make AOL the "information content provider" because the content was created by an independent contractor. The Court noted that Congress made a policy choice by "providing immunity even where the interactive service provider has an active, even aggressive role in making available content prepared by others."
Publishers are responsible for the content that they put out. The New York Times can't publish some of the things that people put on Facebook without legal repercussions. When the government wants to stop some behavior happening on Facebook, Facebook says "we're not a publisher, we're a platform".
But as a platform there are certain consumer protection laws that apply to these companies. In some regard, they are responsible to their users/customers. Except when people try to exercise their rights there, Facebook says "we're not a platform, we're a publisher. We're responsible for the content we publish and we can't publish that."
They really shouldn't be able to have it both ways.
They have so far managed to shirk responsibility for PUBLISHING hateful content while being amazingly on-the-ball when dealing with copyrighted material.
I am sure YouTube wouldn't put it in these terms, but from the outside it looks like every day they make the editorial decision to enforce copyrights while pushing hate speech. I am sure this makes sense financially.
They've demonetized Crowder.
> Update on our continued review–we have suspended this channel’s monetization. We came to this decision because a pattern of egregious actions has harmed the broader community and is against our YouTube Partner Program policies.
Then they've made some additional confusion by talking about how they'll remonetize him when he removes shirts from the shop (they've presented it as the only requirement to reinstate monetization). At the end, they've doubled down on the first thing they've said:
> Again, this channel is demonetized due to continued egregious actions that have harmed the broader community. To be reinstated, he will need to address all of the issues with his channel.
YouTube already tries to transcribe videos to text. Is it within the state of the art to recognize common false statements and superimpose a crawl with counterarguments? One thing you have going for you is that the nuts aren't that original. If you had a classifier that could pick up the 100 best known nutty statements, you could do this.
Is there a startup in this?
Edit: I don't agree that advertisers should be in charge, I just think they will ultimately decide the line between edgy and extreme.
Is this going to include videos that mention "white privilege" (which one could argue alleges superiority of white people) in which white people are asked to "check their privilege" in some way (which one could argue is an attempt to justify exclusion)?
If you can make the case, maybe. I mean, it sounds like a kind of insane case to make to me. Who's being excluded, and from what, merely by having their assumptions challenged in a discussion context?
The groups actually being targetted are ones that tend to advocate for the status of the US as an inherently white nation. Sort of an easier sell to my mind.
Good question, so why are we removing all this content?
I will happily allege that people who aren’t racist are superior, and that racists should be discriminated against, segregated, and excluded wherever possible. Is that video permitted?
YouTube is going too far. This will either be the biggest footgun due to unintended blast radius, or will be selectively enforced so that they have an excuse to editorialize and shut down stuff they or their advertisers personally find icky (entirely subjectively) while ignoring other stuff that breaks these rules.
Pretty sure it'll be the latter. Selective enforcement seems to be the name of the game in SV, and IMO that's going to bite them in the ass eventually. (this isn't to say that selective enforcement is avoidable with the ruleset they've chosen, because it's probably not, but instead that policies that minimize the opportunity for selective enforcement should be used)
What if the group is a political party alleging they are morally superior in order to justify "intolerance of intolerance" and "bigotry of bigotry" as a tactic to decry, discriminate, and exclude political opponents?
That comment was in reference to this story, it looks like I got the quote wrong: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/journalist-sues-twitter-...
I think there's a difference between how we should recognise someone socially and the reality of an individual's biology. What's worrying here is that stating a biological fact can be viewed as too extreme if it goes against a certain political ideology.
But there are plenty of examples like this. I know people have been kick off of social media for suggesting the Prophet Muhammad was a pedophile, or for discussing racial crime stats. And many of the examples I've seen of this don't appear to be in bad faith either, in fact most seem to be in the interest of honest dialogue. They just had the wrong opinions.
If a trans-man is given medicine in doses as a man, and not a woman, they have a much higher risk of overdosing because of differences in how the body metabolizes drugs for each gender [0] [1]. It isn't transphobic to identify them as a woman and give them the proper dosage for their gender. I'd prefer to be given the correct amount of medicine than to pretend there aren't important gender differences and that my actual gender and the gender I would prefer to identify and portray myself as differs [2].
Then you get into the mess of trans-women competing (and usually one-sidingly dominating) in women's sports because lo' and behold there are still gender differences between men and women regardless of how they choose to identify.
I'm becoming accustomed to being told how I should think. Must be my internalized transphobia speaking for me though and not that political correctness is going to cost someone their life one day and that that person could be me.
[0] https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/the-drug-dose-gend...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=lindsey%20w%2C%20se...
This isn't an issue with easy, clearcut answers.
Of course, we should treat them as humans in any case.
If you don't like this outcome, argue for more humanities and social science classes in primary and secondary education to educate society in evaluating claims and the other aspects of information and media literacy.
To all the people here who are decrying this as “censorship”, remember that during the early 2010s, Islamic radicals were getting radicalized on YouTube by pretty benign sermons (Ex: Awlaki and his “tour of Paradise” lectures that inspired Boston 2013, fort hood and a bunch of other international attacks). YouTube removed all that out and I think Muslims getting radicalized on YouTube plummeted.
White supremacy is a much bigger deal with a worse tail risk than Islamic extremism. Don’t see why anyone would object to removal of Neo nazi content yet go along with the removal of wahabi sermons.
What a wretched, demoralizing 118-comment subthread. A white supremacy vs. Islamic extremism cage match was the last thing we needed, and of course it hopped via WWII and Nazis to capitalism vs. communism—the mother of generic ideological flamewars, whither all return. None of this is good discussion for Hacker News; it's predictable, nasty, and the essence of what we're trying to avoid. To the extent it proliferates like this here, we might as well just shut the damn place down.
Everyone: please don't.
Wait... you're saying that white supremacy is worse than islamic extremism? Is you opinion perhaps a manifestation of your perspective? I'm sure there are some people in Syria, Afghanistan, etc... that would disagree with you.
BTW, I'm not saying one is worse than the other, just that they are both bad, both a problem, and both should be removed from social media.
But do be aware that white supremacist have committed more acts of violence in the US than Muslim extremist. And this not counting lynching which is a systematic form of terrorism that lasted more than a century.
The same people who cheer blocking Al Qaeda now claim that blocking neo-nazis is suppressing conservative views, so right-wing extremism has been and is far more tolerated and prevalent than other violent extremism.
Do you have anything to support that assertion?
Go ahead and read that article on Paul Manafort. That's just one, mundane article—you could pick any. Understand that, true or false, it doesn't matter anymore—this is a narrative and a set of facts that around 100 million people in the United States now subscribe to.
We are way, way, way, way past removing a few thousand YouTube videos. That might have been marginally effective ten years ago. But there's been a decade of rhetoric now about how "they" control the media and will try and censor it. Sometimes it's "they" and sometimes it's (((they))).
Jews control the media, shadow governments, deep state, extreme hate against muslims, gays, etc.. This stuff is mainstream. Patrick Little ran for Senate in California, of all places, as an actual nazi and got 1.2% of the vote. That's 50,000+ people who went out of their way to vote for someone who was relatively unknown, all because his platform was based on removing Jews from the United States.
I don't know what the solution is, I really don't. But I DO know that removing videos from YouTube won't make it better. It may make it worse.
I think you're right, and I have some first-hand knowledge on the matter. I've debated QAnon types and flat earthers alike. In both cases, they often see an absence of information as some overarching conspiracy. I'm not really sure who is worse (the flat earthers are a subset of a broader "government-is-hiding-things" conspiracy), but they both follow a cult-like structure in that if you disagree with them, you're not "one of us" and are either not smart enough to understand the implications of their beliefs or are willfully blind to their "truth." I doubt YT would ever remove QAnon or flat earth videos, but if they did, I suspect the fallout would be far worse than just leaving them alone. In some cases, it's helpful to cite their own predictions (and have something to cite) to dismantle their argument! Admittedly, this isn't useful in direct debate, because they're forever moving the goalpost, but it can be helpful for illustrating deficiencies to third parties that might be sympathetic to their views but are still open to the idea that there are problems with the opposition's argument[1].
Now, I say this as a conservative with some libertarian leanings. I don't like censorship, and I think it's harmful to shield people from ideas they don't like. However, I think moderation within a community is incredibly important to its survival provided it is applied equally. Nothing is worse for reasonable discourse than having someone jump in and start slinging pejoratives, insults, and abuse for no other reason than they don't like what you've said. As an example, I've personally had someone stalk my admittedly limited social media presence across various sites in order to post screenshots "proving" some inane belief they had about me supporting some ridiculous conspiracy. They then repeatedly posted insults and diatribes across numerous unrelated comments until I blocked them. That type of behavior should be an immediate--and permanent--ban.
[1] We might be passed this point, because the number of undecided people with regards to any particular conspiracy (for or against) is diminishing. I used to think the flat earth groups were largely trolling, but I've spoken with some people who have encountered them in real life or have friends who have been duped into believing the conspiracy. I also know a small handful of people who believe QAnon. No amount of evidence is going to sway either party. And no, I don't know what the best solution is other than to continue engaging where appropriate and banning where there's abuse.
Which is it? You're contradicting yourself here.
Would be for or against YouTube removing videos that encouraged suicide in depressed individuals?
Regardless of the effects, this was also wrong, IMHO.
If you are a supporter of radically free expression, sometimes you have to allow radicals to express themselves too.
Edit: I know there will be a contingent that disagrees with this. For many people, the ends justify the means, regardless of the corrosive effect to civil liberties. In my opinion this is a myopic view.
Setting aside the fact that this culling has nothing to do with Neo nazi content... maybe islamic extremism is a greater threat because we've had decades to implement countermeasures to a resurgence of white supremacy, whereas islamic terrorists exploit existing gaps in our society's trust model? I'm confident that had the KKK employed trucks of peace in the 50s, civil engineers wouldn't have assumed that nobody would be insane enough to drive down a pedestrian thoroughfare at full speed.
Now back to the issue at hand. This is a purge of alternative media at the behest of Vox Media, of which Comcast is the majority shareholder. This has been going on for well over a year now, the old media making demands for Youtube deplatformings and policy changes. I started listing them, but the list of crybullies is effectively a list of all media companies founded before Youtube. It is really amazing how stupid Google has been in all this, because it seems that they don't understand who their competitors are in the attention market, and how those competitors have effectively transformed them from a relatively low maintenance and legally protected platform - into a legally exposed publisher full of upset content providers. Youtube has been a loss leader for a long time, which might explain the leadership selection and the lack of corrective action for laughably stupid executive decisions... but it is well beyond the point of just being a money hole - it is in the precedent setting legal liability zone at this point. They aren't even subtle about being a publisher anymore, selectively editorializing user generated content with editor's notes under the guise of fighting disinformation.
"The term Radical (from the Latin radix meaning root), during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, identified proponents of democratic reform, in what subsequently became the parliamentary Radical Movement."
"The term political radicalism (in political science known as radicalism) denotes political principles focused on altering social structures through revolutionary or other means and changing value systems in fundamental ways. "
And of course the classic Rules for Radicals book about community organizing and starting grassroots movements.
Let's not label all radical things bad, it can become a way to suppress dissent and societal change.
And I switched the "latter" and "former" but it's too late to edit... Duh.
I think we should keep politics out of HN at this point, I don't want it to become reddit.
I have no doubt that there are some terrible awful racist videos in that lot but you have to wonder how many times this is ALSO used as a mean to censor pretty much any video that the youtube execs don't like. Censorship is getting worse
Edit: Replacing "Censorship is coming back" with "Censorship is getting worse"
The fact is that YouTube has become one of the primary places (along with Facebook and Twitter) where people not rich enough to own a newspaper or television station engage in political speech. Preventing people from meaningful participation in the public political debate is a precursor to real world violence, because you leave people with little other choice to advocate for what they view as their interests.
YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and all other corporate entities attempting to regulate political discourse are driving us toward a civil war. There is no good reason for us to allow them to do that.
YouTube has always been free to remove any content they'd like for any reason. When they more specifically define the content that they will be removing, it somehow now becomes controversial? This surrounds the argument with uncomfortable undertones. The idea that your message deserves equal treatment despite the content seems to be a value promoted by racists.
Also, Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, etc, don't owe anyone a platform. If this were not true, I don't quite understand how corporations could reasonably comply.
Censorship never left. What's changing is who controls the Censorship and those few people are wielding very very powerful weapons of mass surveillance that will ultimately "disrupt" civilization as we know it.
Censorship is bad for the platform as a whole.
The only reason there is a press release for this particular event is for the inevitable positive press and media attention it will garner.
Might be something newer, of course, in which case I didn't see it and can't comment on it.
Conspiracy theorists and/or political extremists (on both sides) should have to seek out their extreme content with prejudice. No more marketing birther theories alongside CSPAN videos on YouTube, or click-bait "TOP 10 UNEXPLAINED PHENOMENON" when someone looks for academic material. It shouldn't be possible to "stumble" onto a video that promotes falsehoods like vaccines causing autism or holistic medicine alongside legitimate medical content. It's damaging our society because not everyone has the acumen to know when they're being gaslit.
If these content creators were doing this as satire and advertised as such it wouldn't be an issue. What we have are content creators creating deliberately misleading content and then pushing it deliberately to the most gullible audience they can.
The first amendment shouldn't be used as a weapon to trick stupid people. It's diluting real political discourse and creating factions of people who don't have substantial opinions, just a bunch of inaccurate facts and unscrupulous sources for information.
Also note: YouTube is already a heavily moderated platform, see pornography.
The fact of the matter is that places like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are where a substantial amount of the public political debate takes place. Users banned from there are significantly less able to participate in the political debate, and so significantly less able to peacefully advocate for what they see as their interests.
If you find those people so deplorable that you don't want them to be able to advocate for their own interests, don't be surprised when they return the sentiment with fast moving lead.
Is this supposed to threaten me?
I don't know where you're from but here in Germany there is a difference between public spaces and private spaces. You can suppress free speech in private spaces. You don't even have to allow access to private spaces while it's the other way around in public spaces. There are laws for that.
The amount of people does not matter. You can't display swastikas in a Bundesliga stadium just because there are plenty people there. The owner would throw you out and probably even report you to the police.
Censorship is something the state forces upon you. It restricts things in public spaces. There is no place left you can go in a state with censorship present to challenge that.
Misusing "censorship" for moderation of private spaces plays down the word. It wears it out and it ridicules people who really suffer under true censorship.
And please...spare me the drama. I grew up in a state with true censorship and I've been online long enough to see this ridiculous whining as what it is...
I'm not sure what that would mean in this context.
>You can suppress free speech in private spaces. You don't even have to allow access to private spaces while it's the other way around in public spaces. There are laws for that.
The point I'm making is that it's probably not a good idea to allow certain private spaces to suppress free speech.
>You can't display swastikas in a Bundesliga stadium just because there are plenty people there.
As I understand, you can't display them anywhere in your country, because your country has more restrictions on political speech than some other parts of the world, e.g. the US. Regardless, I am not suggesting that stadium owners should be forced to allow political demonstrations on their private property. I'm suggesting that certain key internet websites where a significant portion of the public political debate takes place should not be given carte blanche to reduce the ability of people to spread political ideas which the owners of those sites do not like.
>The amount of people does not matter.
What matters is whether people feel as though they have lost their ability to peacefully and meaningfully advocate for their interests.
>Censorship is something the state forces upon you. It restricts things in public spaces. There is no place left you can go in a state with censorship present to challenge that.
I'm not interested in debating your strange and highly restricted meaning of the word. I'm interested in the real world consequences of the actions that these mega-corporations are taking.
>It wears it out and it ridicules people who really suffer under true censorship.
The people you mean to refer to are not my concern.
And it's a good idea to force private spaces to allow everything on their spaces or declaring it public spaces even if they are not? What about the implications? If your private space becomes a public space, does it make you some kind of government?
> As I understand, you can't display them anywhere in your country
Sure you can. You can have as many swastikas in your living room as you wish. You can also have them on public spaces or on TV if they are part of some artistic performance for example. But that's derailing the actual argument. The amount of people present on a private property do not take away the owners rights.
> What matters is whether people feel as though they have lost their ability to peacefully and meaningfully advocate for their interests.
Nobody takes that away from them. They can still express themselves elsewhere. Those places exist.
> I'm not interested in debating your strange and highly restricted meaning of the word.
And I guess this is the core of the problem. You just chose to blindly ignore that in favor of the use of the phrase to advertise your point which is based upon a misunderstanding of private vs. public.
> The people you mean to refer to are not my concern.
But they should. Especially if you want concern for your own position. This is how a healthy society works.
You become "some kind of government" by being more powerful than a single citizen should have. A kind of undemocratic, illegitimate government.
It's a good idea to force some of them to allow some things. You don't believe private property rights are somehow absolute, do you? You understand that there can be competing concerns that are more important than property rights is some cases, surely.
>If your private space becomes a public space, does it make you some kind of government?
I'm not sure what that means. Plenty of private companies are heavily regulated, such as utilities. They're not governments.
>The amount of people present on a private property do not take away the owners rights.
Tell that to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
>Nobody takes that away from them. They can still express themselves elsewhere. Those places exist.
Anyone can express himself in his own living room. But that doesn't do him any good. Telling certain people that they can't express themselves somewhere that it matters, while letting other people express other political viewpoints in that same place, and justifying that by telling them they are free to express themselves in a dark room, is not going to be particularly satisfying to them. Sure, anyone can go put his videos on a website of his own creation, but if no one is on that website, it's not going to do any good. And people know that. Your alternatives are not real alternatives, because they don't solve the problem those people are trying to solve.
>And I guess this is the core of the problem.
Your problem, perhaps. Not mine.
>based upon a misunderstanding of private vs. public.
What do you think I'm misunderstanding? I know what you mean by censorship, and I don't care to make you feel otherwise about the meaning of that word. I don't care if what YouTube is doing meets your definition of censorship. I care if people think YouTube should be stopped from doing what it is doing, regardless of what word is used to describe it.
>But they should. Especially if you want concern for your own position. This is how a healthy society works.
You're referring to people in different countries, where there is what you call real censorship. I don't live in a place that qualifies under your definition, so I'm not part of their society. And I'm not looking for sympathy from them.
Nevertheless, there is big difference between the way violence is advocated for between moderates and extremists in terms of severity, frequency, and justification.
I didn't ask you who advocates for violence, I asked you why you thought the unrestricted public speech of extremists leads to peace.
I've already explained why I think restricting political speech results in increased real world violence. People are going to advocate for what they perceive as their interests, and if they can't do it peacefully, they're going to do it violently.
It is a private company doing the censorship but this is 100% in the definition of censorship.
censor verb censored; censoring\ ˈsen(t)- sə- riŋ , ˈsen(t)s- riŋ \
Definition of censor (Entry 2 of 2)
transitive verb : to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable censor the news also : to suppress or delete as objectionable censor out indecent passages
A free society has costs, including tolerating speech you find deplorable. To support censorship because it aligns with your current political leanings makes you no different than the politics you take issue with.
Will you complain if Google mass fires left leaning employees? It's entirely within their right to do. You could even start a competitor to hire those people!
I also think it’s grotesque to quote an anti nazi poem in defense of nazis.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance#Tolerance...
Then you should understand that when "threatening speech" is used to censor people on false pretexts, then this dilutes reasonable concerns about threatening speech. If one is really concerned about truly threatening speech, one should be actively calling out such abuses from one's own side. Also, what naturally goes with that, is the calling out of actual violence from one's own side.
This is also why civility is useful for the public discourse. It acts as a sort of "DMZ" wherein actual hostility is more readily visible. (And certain people on all sides of the public discourse should be called out in this regard.)
Sounds circular but you do you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijection,_injection_and_surje...
It's funny how right-wing people, who argue so hard for capitalism, fundamentally don't understand capitalism.
No. It's funny how people refuse to acknowledge the fact that Free Speech in the Public Square is held as more important than property rights.
With that line of argument, there is no possibility for censorship anywhere, ever. You can always create your own country someplace else.
Tolerating extreme views is okay as the price for freedom of speech. It does not mean large platforms are obligated to give them megaphones. Some kinds of speech do cause harm far beyond someone getting angry at someone else's views.
FTA: "... and videos denying that violent incidents occurred"
This one seems perfectly tailored to match with the Chinese Govt. negationism about Tiananmen Square events, so that would be generally A-OK for us, but what about videos or comments by police officers denying violent behaviour of their colleagues? Would their videos/comments be axed the same way? Then what about governments lying about civil deaths figures or use of banned weapons in military attacks?
100 Euros and a beer that the rule will be heavily bent case by case.
Yes I am concerned that these dragnets will delete a lot of content that doesn't even match the stated criteria. In my experience Google/YouTube's evaluation of content for compliance is not very deep or well considered. It's generally performed by underpaid overworked folks that lack any domain expertise.
This is part of why I am a data packrat. If something is really interesting I snarf it and store it on my personal NAS. Easy to do and means I'll have backups of things that get "disappeared" and can share them with others if needed. If more people did this I think we'd have less of an issue with this.
Are there any public online social platforms? There literally isn't the equivalent of a "public space" online so many view it as a de facto public space.
I'm sure those policies will shift stealthily until everything except Baby Shark videos is banned.
Left, right or center politically? But a little too spicy for your average 8-year-old? Banned. Gotta keep the Coca-Cola ad execs happy.
It's a curious hyper-puritanical yet simultaneously secular social order we find ourselves in today. I'm sure this won't lead to any social unrest or civilization-wrecking upheaval.