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Comment by jlmorton | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of bad content on the Internet, and a lot of people wanted to ban it. And the free speech absolutists said, that's a slippery slope. Once you start restricting speech beyond whatever is illegal, there will be no end to the demands to ban certain content.

And a lot of us said, slippery slopes are silly arguments. All we're asking is to ban overt racism and calls to violence. We can evaluate these things individually on their own terms.

It may turn out the absolutists had a point.

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I don't think this changes the idea that the slippery slope is a silly argument.

Aren't we evaluating these things on their own terms now? It's definitely possible to have a YouTube that is harsh on calls to violence but allows cyber-security instructionals.

We're not sliding down the slope just yet. We took a step too low and need to climb back up.

edit:

I should not have used "we" above, since only Alphabet controls the platform.

To clarify, I don't think this is the natural end of a "slippery slope" from removing hateful/violent videos from YouTube.

This was not an inevitability of moderation. It is possible to have a "YouTube" that takes down violent content and leaves educational material up.

If it makes them money and no one in power objects, it stays up (see harassment of Carlos Maza). If it jeopardizes those in power or YouTube's bottom line, it comes down.

Moderation is not to blame. Profit motive is.

> We took a step too low and need to climb back up

This is not going to happen; we will keep sliding. We are not the ones doing the stepping, because we do not control the platform. What we can do is persuade people to use distributed and/or federated alternatives.

Using "we" was a bad choice by me.

I was trying to say that this is not the natural end of a "slippery slope" of removing hateful/violent videos from YouTube.

I don't think this was an inevitability of moderation. It is possible to have a "YouTube" that left educational material up. It was a choice by a powerful corporation acting in the interest of other powerful forces. If they had a real competitor they might be under pressure to leave useful videos like this up.

YouTube is definitely in the wrong, distributed alternatives are a good way of providing access to this important information.

People have a natural tendency to project their opinions on their own side.

I think part of it is rose-tinted glasses and part of it is people with divergent goals keeping quiet until the time is ripe.

A slippery slope is only a fallacy if you can't demonstrate a downward slide. Once you can demonstrate that slide, the issue needs to be taken more seriously. I believe that over the last two years, we have seen a dramatic increase in censorship from the most powerful companies in the world. I'm not even sure that our governments have the will or power to stop them at this point.

A big problem with critics of "slippery slope absolutists" is that often when someone says "Youtube just banned porn, you don't care now but one day they'll come for something you love" the response is "dude that's such a slippery slope, that won't happen." In other words: we just classified the end-state as a correct slippery slope, and now we're thinking that the end-state will never happen because that one argument was wrong.

A correct slippery slope identification is when someone says "A happened, thus Z will happen." That's a stretch. But "A happened, then B, C, D, E, F, and G... Z is looking more likely", its no longer a slippery slope. Its a valid concern. The slope is slippery and we're falling down it. The first case can still be right, even if we only had one data point at the time. Its incorrect to assert it is absolutely right, but its also incorrect to dismiss it just because there's only one data point.

Slippery Slopes are, absolutely, among the weakest logical fallacies to be proven wrong by internet armchair warriors with the Fallacies wikipedia page open in another tab. We can make the easy jump all the way to Goodwin's Law and assert that it is a known historical fact that people in 1930s Germany felt the same thing as these armchair warriors when the Socialists were drug away. And then the trade unionists. And then the Gypsies. And the Jewish population. And tens of millions of good people were killed. Slippery Slopes are absolutely a real thing. Having a fallacy named after them doesn't mean they don't exist.

Thank you. Listing to people intone about how dumb slippery slopes are makes one wonder if they think the world is 100% stochastic without a trend in sight.

Every other HN discussion I've seen about YouTube banning content lately has been full of people insisting that because Google moderates their content at all, they are morally obliged to use their powers to police the politics of the nation. That's not so much a slippery slope as it is a slippery cliff face. Probably the only reason this one is different is because they're going after something HN regulars care about.

> I don't think this changes the idea that the slippery slope is a silly argument.

Why? "slippery slope" holds when each change makes it easier to enact further change in the same direction, and that seems to be the case here. "censor CP" + "censor porn" is an easier sell than the original "censor CP" step was, thanks to infrastructure already being in place. Adding copyright on top of that was easier still. And then violent content, and then aid to terrorism, and then politics we don't like, and gun repair videos, and ammo reloading, and...

Now we're at "hacking instructions", which is a hell of a way down that slope.

> We're not sliding down the slope just yet. We took a step too low and need to climb back up.

Perhaps we're running down the slope and not sliding, but that doesn't increase the chance we're about to turn around.

It is possible to have a Youtube like this. Its also possible to have a Youtube that allows porn, or a Youtube that exclusively hosts videos from large media companies because its too risky to allow random people to upload any of these things.

All of these are possibilities. Some of them are more likely than others. But you want to know the least likely possibility? The one with chances so unrealistically impossible that it practically will not happen? Its the possibility that Moderation will land on the point in the Gray Area that you believe is Fair.

Why is that? Its because everyone's point is different, and its insanely difficult to even define that point during day-to-day enforcement. So, Youtube, serving millions of users, having thousands of humans and millions of lines of code running enforcement, will continually become more conservative. Someone is outraged? Ban it. An advertiser is outraged? Oh damn, make a policy. Making a policy is easy. Reverting is is very difficult. At its very foundations this is why the world gets more and more conservative over time.

This is why freedom of speech is such an important thing. The first, best option is to find a gray area that is perfect for everyone... which is impossible. The second best option is to allow anything. Anything is better than nothing, and its also probably better than the conservative, whitewashed world that we're headed toward.

But, then again; they can run their platform however they want. And most people think they should ban violence... and self-harm... and suicide... and directions for making explosives... and hacking? Well, maybe there is somewhere they should stop. No one ever said it was easy. Or that allowing everything is the right move for them. But, the reality is, if they keep changing the rules, then the rules will eventually slide toward gross conservatism. That's the future of the platform. And next decade, a new platform will replace them, and the same thing will happen to them. Freedom of speech isn't necessary in private platforms like this; generally speaking, given enough time, the markets will take care of it.

> " given enough time, the markets will take care of it. "

And death finds all murderers in the end, but why wait for that? I prefer we actively hunt them down, to limit the damage they can do.

See also: Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

That's why I'm fine with the government staying out of it(free speech) and letting the rest of us squabble over and it figure it out ourselves. Users will pressure Youtube, Youtube will pressure users, platforms will come and go, and the pendulum will continue to swing.

Instead of "doomsdaying" over Youtube policy I need to change the strings on the world's smallest violent. It got quite the workout playing for Daily Stormer and Alex Jones..

> All we're asking is to ban overt racism and calls to violence

I agree that it's reasonable to ban "calls to violence", but the "overt racism " part is extremely subjective. Why is racism worse than hacking? I, based on my own principles, think racism is 'worse' than hacking, but most people's principles are completely different from mine, and I think a considerable part of the population thinks that hacking is morally "worse" than racism, even if they don't realize that they think that.

If we let other people's principles guide ourselves, we will end up as the absolute worst of society in no time.

Different people might have different views about whether "racism is worse than hacking," but that doesn't mean we just throw our hands up and concede that everyone is entitled to their own views. Explicitly racist policy still exists, and racism became socially unacceptable in the first world only very recently (in historical terms). But the fight against racist policy has partially succeeded in changing the world, and racism no longer falls within the Overton window.

Almost everyone agrees that there should be some room for objectionable and offensive content, but 'the worst' content must be censored and criminalised. There is very little consensus on where to draw the line. Banning hacking videos (if that's an accurate description of what occurs in practice) crosses the line for me, but at the same time, hackers don't need YouTube to share videos.

Behaviour that is racist or illegal in one place is very often acceptable in another. YouTube as a global website has to remain fair.

For example, Cape Town puts on a minstrel festival every year[1]. Should YouTube ban videos of it? It is surely intensely racist and offensive from an American perspective, yet it is also a culturally significant event in Cape Town and it seems unreasonable to apply American/Anglo definitions of racism to South Africans thousands of miles away who see the world from a different perspective.

I don't think YouTube could exist without banning certain kinds of content. But at the same time, I wish they do so lightly. Because homogeneity of thought is far more dangerous to a society than any video.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaapse_Klopse

> It may turn out the absolutists had a point.

It is almost as if the founding fathers gave a lot of thought and consideration to the first amendment. Maybe we shouldn't willy nilly stomp all over it.

>It may turn out the absolutists had a point.

Of course they have a point. It just takes getting burned a few times before people learn why “you do you even when I don’t like you” is an important philosophy.

We become accustomed to restrictions when they’re not against us. The MPAA is a censorship cartel. But most people couldn’t be bothered to give a shit and those that do are happy for it. Who cares if movies forcefeed sexual negativity as long as it means little Timmy will never see tits?

Eh, I think there is a difference, and it should be obvious, which is why it should be discernible. There is something to learn from hacking videos. The people tend to put them up "in good faith", a critical component of my argument.

Hate speech, calls for racial violence and other overtly harmful speech with no redeeming value, lesson, or skillset are discernible from videos about skills that could be used for good or bad.

A video about how to shoot accurately under pressure isn't bad. A video about how to take cover and kill as many people as you can in a church when the revolution begins is harmful.

Showing unpatched vulns that have been reported in IoT devices, or teaching about discovering web vulnerabilities, is good. Publishing a specific zero-day with no warning to the vendor in a way that would compromise many peoples' PII or banking data should be banned.

I’m in that boat. I thought the slippery slope argument was just fear mongering. How embarrassing. Last I heard anti GMO content is to be banned. Bizarre.

At this point I don’t know why “slippery slope” is called a logical fallacy when so much experience has proved otherwise.

Scott Adams. Scott Adams single handedly promotes the “slippery slope fallacy.”

He’s just wrong

> calls to violence

Would you then agree that any communist leaning YouTube channel is by definition a "call to violence", since communist movements have resulted in deaths of 110 million people in 20th century? And therefore the channel must be shut down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...

No? Don't agree? Well now you see why slippery slope is not a silly argument.

Rejecting that 'definition' does not imply the truth of any slippery slope argument. I think it's easy to distinguish between communist leaning YouTube channels, and communist leaning YouTube channels that contain explicit calls to violence. A 'slippery slope' argument assumes the opposite: that once we accept that some content is prohibited, we cannot avoid the conclusion that all content is prohibitable by an arbitrary censor.

Youtube is banning racist videos with no explicit calls to violence. Communism has killed more people than racism. Maybe the truth does not matter though, people are just doing what they can to not get sued...

these seem fairly unrelated, honestly. They could have just as easily left the bad content in and still moved on removing videos on circumventing device/computer security. The bad content removal isn't a precedent that allowed for the removal of videos that affect their (and their peers') bottom line: they had that capacity from the onset.

As terrible as it may be (I haven't seen what is being removed to say), it is their site and their rules. So it then falls upon the users to decide if another site that will provide security bypassing videos is worth it to go to.

There's no such thing as a free speech absolutist and YouTube was never a free speech platform.

Right. Most "free speech absolutists" are only absolutists when it comes to viewpoint neutrality, not when it comes to issues like incitement, false advertising, or defamation.

And frankly, a lot of people who loudly proclaim their love of free speech aren't even close to being absolutists in that sense; they'll talk up the marketplace of ideas and the importance of rational discourse as long as they're under threat, then suddenly lose interest in the issue when restrictions are applied to the outgroup.

Except YouTube hasn't even banned overt racism and calls to violence. You can still find plenty of it on the platform. Once a channel is large enough, there's effectively nothing you can do short of copyright infringement to get banned.

The slippery slope is still silly, we are still evaluating things on their own terms right now in this thread.

'Slippery slope' is an illogical way to argue things. There are better arguments against censorship, most notably: There is no cogent argument in favor of censorship. It's that simple. People don't like simple truth, but really, that's their problem. The fact of the matter is, there is exactly 1 person who can control the impact of any expression - the audience. No one else can do it. When the audience wishes to abdicate their responsibility to determine their response, and wish to pawn it off on the creator or anyone else, they have abandoned civilization.

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