YouTube has the right to censor anything it likes. It's their platform. If you don't like it, don't use YouTube.
YouTube is owned by a Google, a massive, publicly-traded corporation with near-monopoly power.
Are the best interests of society served by allowing it to be governed in an authoritarian, totalitarian fashion, or would it make sense, considering it is one of the most powerful mediums of speech ever created, to let it be governed by rules somewhat approximating the much-lauded, traditional, western liberal values of free speech?
Yes.
Free speech does not grant the right for anyone to say whatever they want. The US Surpreme court has, as a matter of case law, ruled in specific areas to restrict free speech.
These two doctors, under the pretense of medical expertise, provided false information, and used Youtube to do it.
Google being a large massive publicly traded entity does not have any bearing as to it's responsibility to guard against violations on it's platform.
Not according to the article. The local TV station interviewed them and the local TV station put the video on YouTube.
Presumably as they are licensed to practice medicine in the State of California they do have some expertise greater than those of us without MDs so it's hardly 'pretense'. Is wearing scrubs on camera a ridiculous rhetorical device? Yes. Were these guys wrong on some facts? Absolutely. Were they wrong on policy recommendations? Much, much harder to say.
What's astonishing though is the ease with which people seem to be willing to turn over their civil liberties and place themselves under house arrest.
We have to sit through three years of the echo chamber telling us Donald Trump is a fascist, and then finally when our freedom to assemble is literally stripped from us by the police power of the state, people are complaining that he's not fascist enough. Geez.
As noted in another comment, the article does not touch on the veracity of the claims of these two doctors.
"In a rare statement late today, the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine declared they “emphatically condemn the recent opinions released by Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Messihi. These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical societies and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19. As owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.”"
Source: https://www.dailynews.com/2020/04/28/california-doctors-with...
> We have to sit through three years of the echo chamber telling us Donald Trump is a fascist, and then finally when our freedom to assemble is literally stripped from us by the police power of the state, people are complaining that he's not fascist enough. Geez.
You're making a false analogy; US Government in times of emergency has used it's authority to curtail civil liberties; I'm sure you are well aware of the gist of the War Times Power Act. And perhaps most famously (and more controversialy) when Habeas Corpus was suspended.
That said, I think it's our responsibility (duty) as citizens to continually challenge attacks on the 1st Amendment, and other curtails of constitutional protected freedoms, but it's also on us to hold accountable those who seek to use the rights granted by the Bill of Rights in ways that harm the public.
It is my pov that the opinions, presented as medical facts by these two doctors, were harmful to the public, and should be censored.
Are they though? I can think of all kinds of limitations of the freedom of speech in both the US and in Europe. Copyright, gag orders, company and military secrets, illegal numbers, etc.
False statement of Fact is absolutely an Exception to Free Speech.
Exactly. Youtube isn't the government.
YouTube is not a public service.
"Free speech" does not mean you also are entitled to a platform and an audience.
"Free speech" is a right but also an ideal. When speech is being silenced (de-platformed) or people (the audience) are forbidden from hearing it even when they want to, it violates those principles.
> YouTube is not a public service.
Youtube is a powerful and unique resource without meaningful competition which I think does give them a certain level of responsibility to uphold the ideals of free speech.
Personally, I think that education is always better than suppression. Rather than remove these videos, a better option would simply be to inform users that the video contains false information and where they can find the truth.
This is a ludicrous equivalency; by this standard YouTube is also “silencing (deplatforming)” people who don’t have computers because it’s not giving them resources to help them make and post videos.
Deplatforming is not silencing. The default state of an individual in society is no platform. People who want platforms should build them.
> Personally, I think that education is always better than suppression.
You do not need to give people bad information to educate them. You only need to give them good information.
I can teach you that 2+2=4 without spending hours belaboring all the numbers that 2+2 does not equal.
unlike directly removing videos from their platform youtube is not responsible for preventing people from having a computer. We should all however strive to make computers and internet access as accessible to people as possible.
> Deplatforming is not silencing.
I disagree. It is suppression and obstruction of information
> The default state of an individual in society is no platform.
The default state is a very limited platform (those immediately around you at any given time perhaps), but when you explicitly provide a platform for the public to use and then censor voices because you don't like what they have to say you're violating free speech principles.
> People who want platforms should build them.
All people or just the ones you want to silence? Should that also apply to people like the WHO or any of the doctors who are spreading truths on youtube? Should they all get off youtube and just use their own platforms?
I actually agree that people should build their own platforms where it's possible because we shouldn't be entire reliant on any one place, but it's unreasonable to expect people to replicate anything on the scale of youtube. Youtube has no meaningful competition for a reason.
> You do not need to give people bad information to educate them.
It is often far more effective to show people something that is wrong, explain why\how\where it is wrong and how to spot similar wrong things than to give only explicit facts. In fact I'd argue that without that kind of instruction or understanding you're unlikely to fully understand whatever you're supposed to be learning in the first place.
route memorization is inferior to actual understanding. In addition not even YouTube controls the narrative everywhere. The same misinformation they silently censor and fail to correct often being spread elsewhere unchecked. Youtube, being so popular, has a great opportunity to raise awareness of truth by addressing misinformation at the very place people hearing it (and vulnerable to believing it) will actually see it. That's something that isn't done in email chains or facebook group etc.
If the You I highlighted was the state, you would be correct. But it isnt.
The problem with the ideal is that most people have it wrong. "Free speech" is not speech without consequences.
Nobody here thinks that speech should be criminalized but that doesn't mean you have the right to be heard. If nobody wants to associate with you because of your speech, that's their right. You are not entitled to a soapbox.
YouTube took their soapbox away.
You can either have companies that make decisions for their platforms or you can have monopoly/oligopoly platforms, but not both.
Nobody says you have to build your own YouTube as that is certainly not the only way you can get your message out. You're just being cheap. You want free stuff without consequences and that's not how the world works or how it should work.
The thing YouTube has that isn't available to the average Joe isn't web servers, it's all the glue that comes from being a part of Google which causes YouTube videos to show up in search results and recommendations when the exact same video posted on Joe's Self-Hosted Blog does not. This makes YouTube and Facebook and similarly massive corporations in not the same position as the corner store who should be able to refuse to sell you things for any reason they want, because there you could always buy it from a thousand other places. In this case the thousand other places don't exist.
Moreover, having people pay for something doesn't constrain speech when everybody who wants to speak pays the same amount. But when you start changing the amount based on what they want to say, you're imposing a penalty on expressing certain opinions.
Until they kick you out. The only solution would be to use tor but then you would get even less views.
This generation is obsessed with prospect of “getting lots of views” to the point where it becomes the only metric of success.
You might not be cheap anymore, now you're just lazy. It used to be that if you had something important to say you might actually have to climb out of the basement, walk to the church, and post your words to the door.
The expectation that others should both host and promote your crazy ideas for free is the problem.
It's not 1950. Church attendance has been on the decline for decades. It's an audience of maybe a thousand in a country of over three hundred million. There is no lack of laziness that can scale in-person communication to compete with the internet.
But it's even more ridiculous to suggest going to meatspace meeting places to discuss a pandemic which is keeping everybody out of places like that.
> The expectation that others should both host and promote your crazy ideas for free is the problem.
The expectation exists because it's what they do for other ideas. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
If they want to charge money to all YouTube creators equally or shut down YouTube entirely and let it all drain out into other platforms then nobody's stopping them, but a duty of impartiality has to come with being that big.
I was referring to 1517, actually.
> There is no lack of laziness that can scale in-person communication to compete with the internet.
That's the problem. Ideas used to require effort to spread. You'd have to be the President of the United States to get an audience big enough to drink bleach but now you can get kids to eat Tide pods without any effort at all. All ideas are not equal and free has distorted the entirety of human discourse.
> Duty of impartiality
There is no way to be impartial. YouTube censors probably millions of videos every day for outright illegal content, for copyright infringement, for inappropiateness. It's what they have to do to keep the site alive. It may appear to be mostly uncurated but that's not true -- any uncurated site eventually falls apart.
Anyway, most people seem to making the other argument lately -- that sites like Facebook, and Twitter, and YouTube are so big that they have duty to stop the spread of propaganda, fake news, libel, and harmful material. What would you say to that?
If someone offers a platform for the public to use but censors people who say things they don't like, that is a clear violation of free speech principals. I don't have to listen to anything, but if someone chooses to speak and I choose to listen no one should try to prevent us from doing so.
There are consequences for speech, but they shouldn't involve include gatekeepers silencing specific voices on the basis of what they have to say. In fact, if you want to take a punitive approach to speech then censoring people so we never get a chance to hear what they're saying actually denies us the ability to make a judgement and hold speakers accountable for those words.
I'd sure like to know if my own doctor was spreading misinformation and making illogical errors when talking about a global pandemic that's impacting me. If she was, but I wasn't allowed to know about that I might easily think she was trustworthy when I shouldn't.
This is literally what free speech is. "You can speak your mind or I will kill you" or "You can speak your mind but if I disagree with you I will make sure that nobody can hear you again (by de-platforming you)" is not very free speech-y.
> but that doesn't mean you have the right to be heard
You should certainly have the right to be heard by these that want to hear you.
Its reasonable to have different rules for a local newspaper vs a worldwide monopolist.
You just described every single business in the whole world except those funded by taxpayer money (which is generally what is meant by "funded by the public"). Actually, YouTube isn't even funded by the public -- they're funded by advertisers.
> Its reasonable to have different rules for a local newspaper vs a worldwide monopolist.
All local newspapers are owned by large companies. As for monopolist, you can't just throw that around without argument. YouTube is far far from the only provider of online video.
Any other video provider on the Internet is just as accessible. If YouTube went away tomorrow, videos would still exist on the Internet. Most videos posted to YouTube of any value would immediately show up elsewhere.
Have you considered YouTube is popular because it's at least a little bit curated? Heck, YouTube wouldn't even exist without ContentID.
The rules for it should be carefully considered, since it is a unicorn.
You actually have to make the argument that an overwhelming market leader in an otherwise niche market requires them to give up their free speech, marketing ability, hosting limits, income, etc.
Even having a monopoly isn't illegal; a company actually has to be convicted of abusing a monopoly position for anything to be required of them.
And no, I don't have to prove anything. Just that a reasonable congress should have oversight over the single most watched communications channel on the planet.
This is just dead obvious. I can't believe there's any good faith in this discussion any more. Signing off.
What do you mean by that?
Should phone companies decide who gets to make phone calls? Should they cut you off if you say things that are unpopular?
Telecommunications companies in the past have been treated as "public functions," legally speaking, because they were explicitly designated so by the state and given limited regional monopolies. The limits on liability afforded to YouTube and similar services do not magically transform them to state actors; they remain private corporations with their own First Amendment rights not to publish and host what they choose not to. This principle has been tested repeatedly in many cases.
The effective position of YouTube is that they have responsibility over nothing you or I say but discretion over everything. How does that make sense? I believe that asymmetry is wrong.
We are arguing that we should change the law to ensure that the principle of free speech applies to them as well. If they want to editorialize content then they should review content before it is posted rather than after. The only reason they should take something down is for legal reasons, like not having kids watch porn so no porn.
Such as stopping people from saying bad words on radio/tv or stopping women from even accidentally showing a specific small part of their chest? We have a long history of direct censorship by liberal western governments for far worse reasons than saving lives.
I don't see all these "free speech" advocates stepping up to stop the ongoing suppression of comparatively harmless expression like showing the female nipple. Yet, somehow the suppression of this actively harmful content is the rallying cry that pulls in so much attention.
I am a free speech advocate, and I don't personally support the removal of this video, as I think the aims would be better served by alternate means, such as placing a strong disclaimer of inaccuracy alongside links to accurate rebuttals. However, I don't see how you stop Google from removing whatever content they want without creating laws that curtail other important aspects of free speech (e.g. creating a regulatory body that decides which groups do and do not have the right to control the content they publish).
... feel free to discuss about it on hacker news.
Regardless, would you say the same if someone was banned from a super market over being gay?
But the question is not if it is legal or not, but if it is moral.
There is not a “everyone likes your software platform so you’re not allowed to have an opinion” exception to the traditional western liberal values of free speech.
Anyway, they may be able to legally do what they want but this is not a free "get out of jail" card against any criticism.
The 2nd player to YouTube, however, is a very distant second. YouTube has the power to decide if billions see a message. That's.... a power most governments would salivate to have.
Personally I feel like the perspective that "they're privately owned so they can do what they want" while technically true, intentionally and dishonestly misses the point.
But the real question is at what level of censorship to the cease to be a platform and become a publisher?
That argument is public interest.