YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

The problem is you’ve just said you won’t address the primary, most compelling reason to take these actions.

Assuming that “sunshine is the best disinfectant” presupposes a lot of things about society that are, in my observation, no longer true. We do not have the time, through our own actions or not, for quiet contemplation and retrospection into deep topics. We have polarized ourselves into camps of right and wrong. We are exposed to a staggering volume of information that all seems mostly the same with some slight differences but widely varying outcomes.

Your theory of how the world should work is very, almost simplistically, seductive. Woe but for the world to be like that, like the “perfectly rational actor” assumed in economic textbooks or the “perfectly smooth sphere on a frictionless plane” in physics.

Some misinformation is just unambiguously harmful and so profoundly incorrect that no reasonable person could see stopping it as a slippery slope of free speech. For example, the misinformation being proliferated by Icke, that 5G spreads coronavirus and that people should destroy 5G towers. People actually went out and set 5G towers alight in response to Icke's posts [2]. It's quite reasonable that Youtube or any other social media platform would not want to be responsible for disseminating information to leads to real-life crimes.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-ba...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/4/21207927/5g-towers-burning...

Ok, except that you 1) just made this up from whole cloth and 2) have missed the point of deplatforming entirely. Deplatforming trashbags reduces their reach. It doesn't need to change their minds. The trashbag is one person. The gullible are many.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-ba...

> I believe in shining a light on them. Let the truth fight for itself.

It's very convenient that you then handwave away the very reason why this is wishful thinking.

Big friendly looking corporations like Google shouldn't be used as proxies for the government to bypass the rights of Americans(or anyone for that matter). For whatever reason, people see corporations as being different from governments. What is a government but a corporation that owns land? What is a corporation but a form of government? They're quick to should about the importance of dissent, telling the government what it cannot do to our rights, yet corporations get a free pass when they are on the right side and hand out free goodies.

Beyond the likeness of corporations to governments, big corporate censorship should be opposed on the grounds of principle. America and other countries are founded on the principle of freedom of speech, among other things such as the concept that all "men" are created equal. We don't allow businesses to discriminate people by their race, color, sex, or religion because of that principle. Why then can we not apply the principle of freedom of speech to Silicon Valley and Big Media?

It's pretty frightening that the same people who told me how brilliant Nineteen Eighty-Four is(I found it the least convincing of dystopian warnings I've read), easily fall into the trap of believing that we desperately need a centralized Ministry of Truth. In the last year I've been realizing that Nineteen Eighty-Four is more realistic than I had believed.

> What to Submit

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

> In Comments

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data.

These guidelines seem like a private corporation censoring content. Are platform guidelines like these also an example of censorship?

To me, these guidelines shape the content and quality of discussions of the community, but also it's one of the reasons why it's a highly effective community. I don't see why YouTube cannot do the same.

Some people, after being exposed to misinformation, chose to believe them.

I don't believe in fighting "bad ideas" by suppressing them, I believe in shining a light on them. Let the truth fight for itself. (And of course now comes the classic counter-argument: that the evils of disinformation possess a virality that makes them spread far more easily than the truth, being that truth is nuanced and difficult to acquire whereas bad information is seductively simple. I won't address that argument here but personally I think it's a very dangerous way of thinking)

Do you have evidence that the truth more often than not win over lies?

It is possible that platforms, being designed the way they are to maximize corporations' interest naturally lead to unintended consequences.

There are billion of youtube video, nobody will be able to watch them all. So the youtube algorithm can recommend videos that are necessarily harmful based on what the person watched before.

This argument reminds me of when the WWW first appeared. Everyone thought that at last Truth and Reason would be available to all and "win out" naturally.

And all that happened is that you can now find supporting arguments for any perverse or dangerous theory you are already predisposed towards online. They propagate and multiply because we are primarily emotional creatures, no matter how rational or educated we think we are.

So "shining light" on disinformation only has an effect on people if they are already predisposed to rejecting that disinformation, which makes it redundant.

There's a powerful argument about substantially improving educational equality, which I would wholeheartedly support, but in the intervening generation(s), removing disinformation from platforms that has been shown to be dangerous (ie endangered lives, which David Icke's videos have) is an acceptable compromise IMHO.

We tend to think of humans as very rational beings, that they should have the ability to make the best decisions for themselves, and that we should not take actions to influence those decisions. Unfortunately, this is not always true, which is why deplatforming works.

Deplatfoming is controversial because it is a "negative action", that involves censorship, but we tend to ignore "positive actions" that can change toughts in exactly the same way, like recommendation algorithms, or simply default choices (because default matters and humans rarely deviate from default choices).

The existence of something like The illusory truth effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect) says a lot about human beliefs and how familiarity can overpower rationality.

I hear this a lot. Light is the best disinfectant. What evidence do you have for this? I've never seen a bad or immoral or harmful idea die out when more people learn about it and scrutinize it. However, I have repeatedly seen the opposite: Sharing bad ideas increases their audience, increases ignorance, hate, fear, and human suffering. You're looking at an article describing this phenomena right now.

More importantly, I've also seen the opposite: Private platforms actively suppressing people trying to harm humanity does work. Deplatforming these people and, importantly, showing social pressure that these are bad ideas and shouldn't even be entertained as valid debate, has shown to work repeatedly. In fact, social pressure is one of the most effective tools against hate and ignorance like this.

I don't think you're basing your "shine the light" argument in evidence, which I suspect is ironic because I suspect you believe you're objective and use evidence to judge things.

Which is actually extremely funny, since Youtube directly links to all WHO content as it were the Word of God, and WHO just a month and a half ago was crying on all rooftops that masks were useless and should not be used before completely reversing their stance. So by their own standards WHO is propagating disinformation/negligence and harming society as well.

The truth often doesn't get the chance to fight for itself on platforms like YouTube and Facebook. They are designed to keep showing you more of what they think you want to see because that drives engagement and engagement is what's profitable. You simply won't see opposing views. You go further down the rabbit hole and your existing ideas are reinforced, no matter how faulty they are.

Sometimes the truth doesn't have the resources to fight for itself. For example, this woman has been falsely accused of starting the coronavirus pandemic:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/27/tech/coronavirus-conspira...

It's a lie concocted by one of her fellow Americans. It's a lie that's now been spread all over the world resulting in death threats to her and her family. She simply doesn't have the resources to stop it. The police haven't helped her. YouTube hasn't helped her. She doesn't have the money to pursue a civil lawsuit. The best she can do is get in the media and hope that somehow helps.

Once a lie is spread far enough it will eventually find someone who believes it and is unstable enough to act on it. We've seen that before as well:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/us/pizzagate-attack-sente...

A contest of ideas presupposes a level playing field, a balanced presentation, equal voices, and a basic agreement of the facts. That is, unfortunately, not the practical reality.

Your argument is flawed on many counts.

(1) You’re forgetting that the people subscribing these 5G conspiracy channels on YouTube by definition already have access to YouTube and likely the rest of the web. A plethora of true information is already available to them.

(2) Stop anthropomorphizing truth: people fight to promote what they think is true.

(3) Even if the first amendment applied here, recall that it has been established that the first amendment does not protect shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater.

(4) How can you claim that the truth will fight for itself when you’re unwilling to even address the very convincing counter argument you so helpfully included at the end of your comment?

It does not "merely" do that. It also prevents their message from reaching others.

This is such a knockdown argument that I can't believe you just refused to address it!

The mirror image of David Icke is the genuine experts that are trying to get good, nuanced information out there, often fresh out of research papers. Most of these people have single digit reach, i.e. so little that they could spend their whole lives getting less reach that Icke gets in 5 minutes.

The asymmetry in potency between good and bad information is far higher today than at any time in the past, and I applaud Youtube for doing a tiny bit to stop the bleeding.

This is just not true. Or rather, it may be true, but it is entirely irrelevant.

We as a society don't care who radicalised David Icke is. It just doesn't matter. What matters is that letting him spread his misinformation causes harm and death. Actual people die because of this. And that can be stopped by denying him a platform. If it makes him more angry, that is absolutely irrelevant.

1. Government passes law that websites that get a million eyeballs a day and display user-generated content are forbidden from curating the content on their site.

2. Government produces propaganda, or through some legal indirections, arranges the production of propaganda.

3. Producers of above propaganda publishes or arranges astroturfing of the propaganda onto every large platform.

So this is a situation where the government has the power to dictate speech of private parties. Is that seen as a positive outcome by free speech advocates?

And what happens when the government lowers the bar? With precedent set that the government has the right to halt censorship by private parties, will they stop at a million views per day? Will they expand to things such as messaging services?

And what will happen to spam content? After a website crosses the million views threshold, must its genuine content be diluted into oblivion?

A newspaper had no obligation to publish some crazy letter to the editor. Nor does YouTube have an obligation to publish some crazy video.

freedom of speech gives adversaries a way of saturating the information channel to capacity with at best noise, at worst actively incorrect but otherwise coherent data (see conspiracy theories). end result is people either believing the misinformation (because truth is impossible to discern) or stopping the use of the channel at all (same cause, different rationale). it's a losing proposition in the age of information. it was a great idea before while technology didn't allow capture of the channel at such a low cost.

freedom of speech is now a tool used against democracy with great success. yes, i'm super pissed about it and no, i don't have a solution. i believe we're witness to a crawling fall of rome scenario which is carefully helped by nation states outside of the west.

- booting people off platforms is a "bad idea" which you wish to "suppress".

- booting people off platforms shines a light on their "bad ideas"

I'm sympathetic to the spirit of your comment, but I think Mr Icke has plenty of other ways to publish his ideas, and I don't believe youtube is suppressing them in a way that necessitates suppression of theirs.

You can bring megawatt lasers to bear on a bad idea from all angles and fools will not budge. Many people are not rational, it's impossible that you've not realised that yet you push this POV.

Saying we can deal with idiot ideas with rationality is itself disinformation because for some groups it clearly doesn't work.

> ...whereas bad information is seductively simple. I won't address that argument here

Odd that you won't, because this is the exact forum to address that argument. Please address it.

Someone I know has repeatedly told me that "they[0] added HIV to covid to make it so dangerous" and telling them for the Nth time there's no evidence of that has not changed anything, nor will it ever I suspect.

[0] Unstated who 'they' are but implication is the chinese.

-- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html

I used to think this too, but I think the decentralised nature of the internet has broken this notion. There is no universal “light” shining on disinformation because there’s no universal anything. You can spend your entire online life in a very strict filter bubble that means the disinformation you consume never gets corrected (Facebook and YouTube have implemented algorithms that opt people into these bubbles without them even being aware). The only way it gets fixed is if people actively try to find information that disagrees with their preconceived notions, and very, very few people are interested in doing that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism#/media...

https://news.gallup.com/poll/210956/belief-creationist-view-...

I think the troubling thing is that binding corporations to the first amendment would have all kinds of troubling consequences, including eliminating the ability of moderators to ban people for misbehavior.

I mean flat Earth is an actual thing. That proves to me that there are no limits.

What I don't know is whether this is new or an eternal part of the human condition that was just masked in the past. I know there have always been gullible fools, but have there always been this many?

I personally wonder if there might be more today due to too many people being too insulated from the "real world" beyond the easy cushy paths of school -> college -> office job. There are too many people who have never deviated from these paths and thus have never seen the "real world."

I don't think it's stupidity. A lot of these people seem relatively intelligent. They just seem shockingly naive.

I used to have a very similar opinion to yours until I found out the truth rarely fights for itself if there's an alternative, much more convenient lie — preferably one that plays into peoples' confirmation bias or makes someone richer.

We've got an aysmmetry here that never existed before in human history. Any kind of large scale public addressing: newspapers, TV, books, had some kind of controlling mechanism and instances who stood in for the quality with their reputation: Editors, printers, TV stations.

All legislation, including the First Amendment (which, just picking nits here, is probably too simple to slap onto YouTube as a global content platform as a US-only law) was written regarding these conventions.

YouTube goes out there and hands everyone a big fat mike who wants to be heard, and then amplifies this voice to believers via recommendations.

I used to think the Internet would be a net benefit to the world. After witnessing Cambridge Analytica, the "Internet Research Agency", large scale online harrassment and Anti-Vaxxers, I'm not so sure anymore.

I don't claim to know what the answer is.

I just claim I'm pretty sure it's not the unbounded freedom to anonymous and partly highly maliciously motivated actors to spread their message without oversight.

I do believe strongly that people should be held responsible for any act caused by them spreading lies.

I mean, this is testable. Look at websites where "bad ideas" aren't suppressed, and instead anyone can chime in with their reasoned or unreasoned opinion and duke it out without any real-life consequences.

...and you end up with 8chan, the site where people discuss the best ways to murder Jews.

Science, facts, truth, those don't matter on chan boards, what does is virality, fear, anger, emotion. Or since it's Star Wars day, The Dark Side wins unless people are willing to stop it.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.“

Could be argued that this is a covenant of sorts the federal government is making with the people and/or states. In a sense, could be argued individual states wouldn’t need to honor it to individuals provided they don’t include such language in their own constitutions (I’d assume there is said language, but don’t know).

The only issue I see with the “bad ideas” thing is that it requires a lot of effort on the part of the person doing the debunking. They have to provide data points, citations, etc. to counter whatever was put out and in a lot of cases, it is just ignored in favor of the bogus bit that started the whole thing (which in some cases requires some degree of effort on the part of the originator, in other cases spitballing gets them there).

I’m somewhere in the middle. I worry about cases where seemingly the only wrong committed is to hold an opposing view, but in cases where someone willfully put forth bogus information, I’m not terribly opposed. Would rather that the sources for where the conclusions were drawn were similarly provided, at least then I could assume some degree of good faith. But if you and I are looking at two pieces of data and come to differing conclusions, that in and of itself should not lead to either of us being “silenced.”

There is no right conferred by the constitution that guarantees you a public platform in a private forum, it is simply an exemption from persecution by the government for statements made on any platform. That does not mean that the private owner of a forum must provide a platform of statements it does not endorse or condone for content that would be contrary to the forum owner or administrator's intended audience. That would be like forcing a restaurant that has been vandalized with graffiti from washing the exterior because the vandal has the right to have his work displayed regardless of the content, audience, or message.

> COVID-19 has added the additional element of this new concept of "disinformation".

This is not in any way a new concept. Furthermore this kind of disinformation can destroy the lives on innocent bystanders. Don't believe me? Ask all the people that have been effected by Sandy Hook truthers, Pizza Gate, and if you want to go back to the 80s, the daycare satanic moral panics.

i'm not sure suppression is the answer either but i have sure not seen shining light winning this war.

In David Icke's case, he directly threatens telecommunications carriers' ability to sell 5G services. That's directly counter to said carriers' marketing goals.

Not to anthropomorphize YouTube too much here, services like them derive their morality from profit. If something threatens profitability, they'll do what's required to correct that problem. Moreover, there are a number of feedback loops in place that reinforce this behavior. This isn't a matter of YouTube judging a bad idea on its merit; this is a matter of them judging a bad idea on how it affects advertising revenue.

Put in a somewhat more uncouth manner: Money talks, bullshit walks.

Corporations are just people. You are suggesting that when people speak in groups (e.g. enforcing the Youtube EULA) that is not protected free speech but when an individual speaks it is.

Good luck translating this half-baked idea into a legal framework that is consistent and sensical.

That is not to say that all ideas are valid forms of scientific inquiry. But suppressing all but the "blessed" opinions of the WHO goes against the scientific process.

What is a "bad idea" is also hard to know sometimes. If I was there in the time of Galileo I would probably be fighting his "the earth goes round the sun" argument as well.

Many times great ideas first appear seemingly as "bad ideas". Which then are the good "bad ideas" and the bad "bad ideas"? It is unclear if corporates can answer that better than the world as a whole.

Maybe they should just explicitly mark the content with "this may be a bad idea" and leave it online - trusting the users?

People literally are using the mis-information about covid-19/5G and setting 5G towers on fire. Mis-information is dangerous. It's a tool used by governments and terrorist organizations alike, information can be propagandized to create upheavals that benefit specific groups.

Suppression doesn't really sit well with me either, but "disinformation" is nothing new. There are plenty of ideas that are similar to David Icke's nonsense and most of them predate 2020. Things like "the moon landing was faked", "the Earth is flat", and "the government is controlling us through chemtrails". The difference is, someone else believing the Earth is flat doesn't affect me the same way a measles outbreak does.

This isn't a conversation to have in the abstract. The idea that David Icke is spreading is that the COVID-19 pandemic is linked to 5g cellphone service. 5g being deployed in Wuhan is somehow evidence of the link between the two.

What light can you shine on that idea, to get people to stop shooting telecommunications workers and burning cellphone towers down?

On HN bad comments get very light. Still readable but everybody knows they were downvoted.

YouTube could add labels over the videos like "this content contains false and dangerous information". Then the content can still be discussed but everybody will be alerted to be very sceptical about the information.

I guess the expense would make that an unrealistic option, but it would be much more effective than chasing folks away to their own uncensorable corner of the web.

If you are an engineer at a tech company you really don't have a grasp of how unfathomably dumb most people are because you only associate with smart people all the time.

Not to mention the "first amendment" is a US thing.

We need better global laws imposed upon them, because those private corporations operate globally, and have influence (as social media platforms, etc) in all countries, not just the US.

umm, that's a very nice thought, but we've seen it doesn't work, and it actually causes more harm than good. i.e Fox News

'Bullshit Asymmetry Principle' states the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than that needed to produce it. Bullshit can be propagated quickly, but can be more difficult to disprove.

see https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-askhistorians-subre...

YouTube is a public platform because it is viewable without an account or membership.

If you had to log in to view a video or read an article, then it would truly be private.

I think we’ve gotten to the point where we need to define a clearer set of rules with stronger protections of speech on these open platforms. (Closed platforms can do whatever the they want, as always.)

The difference is, if you think that WalMart's practices are bad for small businesses, you can stop going to WalMart and only shop at small businesses, and pretty much get the exact same products. You can vote with your wallet.

But on YouTube, you have no power as a consumer. You are the product. And boycotting YouTube traps you in a world of YouTube rejects, forced to construct their own platforms, who more often than not are right-wing extremists pushing violence, intolerance, and misinformation.

YouTube is a town where WalMart is the only grocer. You can give in to the large corporation to get what you need, or you can eat out at fast food joints for every meal.

So really, you have only three choices:

1. Get the laws changed so that the First Amendment applies to private companies, stripping them of their own freedom to cull what they publish, and making misinformation and violent speech much more difficult to address.

2. Accept that there is nothing you can do to compel Google to do or not to do things that they aren't legally compelled to, especially when the decisions they are making revolve around selling as many ads as they can to their customers (the advertisers) not making the product the sell (you, the viewer) happy.

3. Accept that Capitalism is why you have no power here, and work towards a future in which large corporations don't have the power to control and suppress you without recourse. Or sell your data and attention as a product as they act as the largest VoD platform in existence.

Not all people are rational animals that objectively acquire and then review all the information in front of them to weigh the merits of "5g versus virus." Sometimes, when you see a guy gaining a following by telling others that vaccines have secret microchips in them and that humanity has to fight 5g in order to survive, you tell him to go to hell and host his vile videos somewhere else.

Since then, antisemitism has risen, and prominent antisemites still fills up theatres, garners millions of views of their videos, always speaking in transparent allusions to keep barely out of the reach of law (Don't say "Jews rule finance worldwide", say "'The organised community' rules the world's finance"). In retrospect, that looks like an utter failure to me.

Democracy is necessarily a battleground of ideas. The alternative is battlegrounds between groups with competing ideas.

For this reason, the by-any-means-necessary aspect of modern wokeism is terribly dangerous. What if these fuckers are wrong? Whenever we are urged to discard debate and the free exchange of ideas so that truth may prevail - watch the hell out.

Look at all the experts trying to fighting the lies Trump has been spreading. All that effort, and yet almost 50% of this country believes him. Every moment they have to spend debunking yet another lie is time they can't spend on something useful.

Look at all the people blaming 5g for COVID19. Every person that acts on that rumor and damages property or makes terrorist threats is drawing police attention away from something more useful.

Sometimes, you can't fight bad ideas by debunking them.

Become a semi-monopoly of public discourse and obey the rule of free speech!

I would prefer to add an amendment to allow to censor extreme views contradicting modern science knowledge.

It is, indirect, what happens and to be honest, i do believe that people doing the youtube videos about aliens and flatearth have often enough some agenda.

It hurts our society and we need to find a proper solution.

It looks specious right now ... but in reality, they and everyone else have been doing it from the start.

It's really easy to garner attention, and even easier to buy it.

Foreign agents, like governments, can use this as a tool to nudge populations, and in many cases, that's all that's needed to change outcomes, particularly in things like elections.

As just one example.

I do however believe that platforms of sufficient scale also become a platform of public, like 'papers of record' have a special status, maybe some sites should as well.

What we need for the 'big platforms' is some kind of smart, modern regulation that maximizes freedom of expression, maybe flags the rubbish as rubbish and very rarely moves stuff off-platform.

1. Global air travel does not need to be stopped.

2. There is no evidence of human-to-human transmission.

3. There is still a "window of opportunity".

4. Masks don't work (but health workers need them!).

5. The CFR is like 4%.

Questioning the validity of WHO's changing mask guidelines I can't imagine would get anyone banned.

Telling business owners to defy state orders and re-open nightclubs on vacuous constitutional grounds absolutely should get you booted.

If that's how YouTube is enforcing things, I don't see a problem with it. Icke's suspension isn't exactly the opportunity to call YouTube out, because this wasn't a questionable suspension. Until I see a questionable suspension, I don't feel compelled to complain much about YouTube's strategy here.

The internet has proven to be way too powerful.

A simple demonstration to this: even the reverse of these (e.g. "I believe gay marriage is morally wrong") can't reasonably be argued against with "that is factually incorrect".

It's fair to believe that private companies like YouTube shouldn't be censoring speech like this. But these comparisons are bogus and only weaken your point.

Half is a good starting point, but obviously I think YouTube wants to push that higher. This article is from two months ago, also.

Specifically re Icke, I've talked to otherwise reasonable people who will watch him _despite knowing_ who he is because he comes across as reasonable (and much of what he says fits a certain worldview -- note this isn't left or right specific). He is a good speaker, which you would expect given he was a presenter before he decided to demonstrate he was absolutely batshit crazy live on TV. For people unaware of this, this demonstration was why he was well known in the UK - he went on the biggest talkshow on TV to proclaim that he was the son of god and that the world is controlled by a cabal of lizard people (and was going to be consumed by tidal waves etc etc). The lizard people cabal idea may seem at first glance to be a fairly obvious crude antisemitic trope, but he seems to be absolutely serious about everything, he literally means lizards.

Well yes, at least partially. Studies of bans on hate communities on reddit have shown effectiveness not only in reducing the total hate, but also, and this is important, changing the behaviour of individual users who were active in the hate communities as they moved towards more moderate, diverse communities.

[...] "What they found was encouraging for this strategy of reducing unwanted activity on a site like Reddit:

Post-ban, hate speech by the same users was reduced by as much as 80-90 percent. Members of banned communities left Reddit at significantly higher rates than control groups. Migration was common, both to similar subreddits (i.e. overtly racist ones) and tangentially related ones (r/The_Donald). However, within those communities, hate speech did not reliably increase, although there were slight bumps as the invaders encountered and tested new rules and moderators. All in all, the researchers conclude, the ban was quite effective at what it set out to do:

For the definition of “work” framed by our research questions, the ban worked for Reddit. It succeeded at both a user level and a community level. Through the banning of subreddits which engaged in racism and fat-shaming, Reddit was able to reduce the prevalence of such behavior on the site." [...]

https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits-contro...

I genuinely don't think universal free speech is the answer, because people aren't confronted with the counterargument until they seek it out. If you could guarantee that argument, it would be much safer. But I don't think it's possible with today's media; people exist in a bubble of both their own choosing and algorithmic choosing, and aren't challenged.

This is taking away their access to a platform that has global reach. They already had platforms where they didn't engage in debate, btw; they're called youtube channels with heavily-moderated chat sections. Except there they can reach millions of people.

The way these Youtubers work is to cast as wide of a net as possible as quickly as possible to hook a small percentage of followers who they exploit consistently with newer and wilder beliefs.

By pushing them "under ground" you effectively take away their means of spreading and protect the masses in the process.

We already have this. It's called 4chan and 8chan.

And you know what? It's absolutely better to keep this shit to their echo chamber, where they have limited exposure, than Youtube, where they have a potential audience of billions.

Good. YouTube doesn’t need to be promoting every flavor of garbage known to man. That’s why the rest of the internet exists.

Google shares data with intelligence services, they have close contacts in the administration, they are a near-monopoly in multiple areas, they have a tremendous number of government contracts, they spend more on lobbying in DC than any other organization.

If we abdicate our rights to these organizations, the government can simply use them as a mechanism of enforcement that obviates the entire Bill of Rights.

> They can do what they want with their platform.

Of course they can, but they can't then say they believe in free speech. Similarly to "you don't make peace with your friends" : you can't say you're free speech if you only allow information you agree with.

What annoys me is when people think that free speech isn't a principle, but just a law in the US which applies to the government only. It's usually: "Hurr duur, it's a private company so it can practice full communism and we should be okay with that."

(That said, personally I have mixed feelings about this because I feel like it might be causing harm... Same with the antivaxxer crap.)

It’s a core tenet of American racists and fascists (and, I suspect, conspiracy theorists), because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to convert others to their cause without being silenced by their platforms.

It's pretty simple. Many people rely on youtube's platform to reach viewers. This is the case for youtube recommendations, but also for subscriptions. When youtube bans someone, that person will reach a vastly smaller audience, in effect censoring them. Questions?

>I can say no.

That is a free speech issue as well. We might decide that you chose correctly, usually on the balance that the dead kittens advertiser has an equivalent platform available to them, but that doesn't rend it out of the arms of free speech

>If the government bashed down Icke’s door and smashed his computer then sure, we should worry about free speech.

Free speech is not only a concept in law. Freedom refers to the ability to do something, not only the legal right to do something. Free speech refers to the ability to reach an (non-captive) audience, not a legal right to say things in an empty room.

Wasn't it a meme not long ago that young people didn't even use Facebook anymore, that it was turning into the "old people's social network?" How does that happen if Facebook is Standard Oil and no competition is possible? I guess all of those other sites and apps simply aren't operating "at scale?"

The discussion of whether and how social media affects political and cultural discourse, and especially how the gamification and incentives of social media do, is worth having. But the tendency of arguments to depend on slippery slope fallacies which assume the entire web beyond three or four popular sites simply doesn't exist or doesn't matter is incorrect.

You can say what you want, but I don't have to print what you say if I own a newspaper.

That being said, if Youtube and such are now going to start curating content (by pushing "recommended" content and by removing content), we may need to revisit those particular platforms' classification under Section 230 of the DCMA.

This is a "loophole" that is exploited over and over again by climate change denialists, cigarette companies, nazis...

I don't know who David Icke was or what he was saying (according to comments here he's a 5G conspiracy theorist), but deplatforming him won't have the intended effect.

I don't know what the answer is, but I do know people who believe some of this crap and will not listen to reason. At least for them, it would have been better if they never heard this stuff.

Does not mean they have the right to a media platform.

I doubt Voltaire or whoever smarter than you said that meant to imply that their intellectual adversary had any /right/ to be published.

Same as “it sure sucks that Facebook has to abuse low-paid workers with gore porn but what else can we do?” I mean. We could not? Allow sites that require doing that to exist? Just a thought.

[edit] my point is that we look at these problems through a very narrow lens that excludes solutions that serious harm the profits of Internet giants. I think that’s silly. If their business model causes awful things maybe it shouldn’t be possible to have that business model.

have youtube put on a warning saying that this content is misinformation/wrong. But not censored because censoring "wrong" content just gives those who blindly believe it to feel that they're being targeted - it doesn't change their mind.

Censoring it is just promoting it to other underground channels that are more difficult to censor.

I thought the same thing about flat earth a while ago.

This argument would be stronger if it mentioned all the people chased off these platforms by the virulent toxic supporters of Icke and Jones.

But wait, you say: in the year 2000, Icke wouldn't have been able to get a following of millions on print or radio! They wouldn't have let him on! Indeed, so what this actually proves is that in 2020, there is far more free speech than there was in 2000. We are at historically high levels of free speech. Freaking out over this is like thinking we've gone back to the Bronze Age every time the stock market goes down 1%.

That is their job. That is literally their job and business model. They have never been neutral, they have always used moderation, demonetization and algorithmic sorting to tell you what you should be looking at. And they've always banned accounts at their discretion, often opaquely and without apparent rationale. It's always been their platform and their rules.

>Then what? We end up like China where we can only browse government propaganda?

No, because, despite the popular FUD narrative that HN spins in every single one of these threads, Youtube isn't a government. It doesn't have the power of a government, nor is it more powerful than a government. It doesn't have monopoly control over the internet, over video, over social media, or over the dissemination of information.

The worst I've seen so far is that their video promotion algorithm can be used to "shadow ban".. but I personally believe they have every right to decide how their internal advertisements work.

There is also still the free and open internet as a general platform. Torrents and direct downloads are available as a distribution method if there is truly no other platform willing to host your media.

Where are all the free speech advocates complaining about YouTube not hosting porn, or demonetizing videos with swear words in them? Why do you only come out of the woodwork en masse when it's the right wingers being censored?

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...

YouTube has been break-even since 2014-2015[1]. The myth that YouTube is still somehow unprofitable needs to die.

1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-f...