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Comment by ryankemper | Hacker News Reader

I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), but that's different from saying that we as a society should want our private platforms to engage in such censorship and suppression.

Booting people off of platforms merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them.

COVID-19 has added the additional element of this new concept of "disinformation". The argument is seductively simple: "being exposed to this information could lead you to engage in patterns of behavior that harm society. Therefore we can conceptualize this speech as being an indirect form of violence/negligence and therefore we have a moral obligation to remove such content".

Many may disagree, but I think we need to throw out this concept of "disinformation" entirely. 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)

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> I won't address that argument here but personally I think it's a very dangerous way of thinking

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.

Yes, by not addressing that I put myself in the trap where I was forced to respond to it anyway in a later comment.

So, in order to avoid repeating myself, I believe I addressed that notion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23063309

In short, I am not saying that the truth will necessarily "win out" over the false. Rather I am saying - and this was my fault for not being clear enough - that I reject the notion that we should try to pick a side to suppress. Because the same part of human nature that leads to rampant spread of disinformation is the part of human nature that tries to decide what the capital-T Truth is.

So, my personal belief system - and I know how unpopular this viewpoint is, especially in current times - is just let them have at it. Remove blatant calls for violence, and nothing more. ("nothing more" should include racism and other unpopular beliefs, by the way, in case my viewpoint isn't controversial enough thus far).

So, saying "We should go out and attack $GROUP" should be removed. But saying "I think $GROUP is inferior due to highly discredited scientific-seeming reasons" should not be removed, because however wrong or distasteful it is, it's not directly advocating for violence. Similarly, something like holocaust denial or anti-vax beliefs, etc should similarly not be suppressed.

Again, I know I'm probably in the minority here, but I hope that helps you understand my thoughts on these issues.

OK. I guess we should let anti-vaxers spread disinformation causing a whole bunch of people dying unnecessarily because people believed it.

I agree anti Vaxers are ridiculous. But just to play devils advocate. What if there ever was a dangerous vaccine out there, wouldn’t we want people to be able to speak out?

Honestly I don’t have any solutions. I don’t like either option.

There indeed were a few dangerous vaccines, about three generations ago. That's exactly why we have the elaborate clinical trial system today: they stop potentially unsafe vaccines all the time. A large fraction of the COVID vaccines might go this way. Nobody is against banning unsafe vaccines, but some are for banning people from spreading baseless, conspiratorial anti-vax bullshit.

Exactly. But who are we trusting to tell the difference between bullshit and not? Would you trust youtube employees with that?

No, which is exactly why I'm happy they defer to the WHO. I don't trust the WHO unconditionally either, but I trust it much much more than David Icke.

But will youtube defer to the right group on every issue? Is there always a right group?

This issue will pass but now they have a precedent.

There have been issues more recently with vaccine safety. Or at least, there were enough lawsuits to start frightening off vaccine manufacturers. Since 1986, however, they've been insulated from lawsuits under federal law:[0]

> The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, ..., as amended, created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), a no-fault alternative to the traditional tort system. It provides compensation to people found to be injured by certain vaccines. Even in cases in which such a finding is not made, petitioners may receive compensation through a settlement.

> The VICP was established after lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers and healthcare providers threatened to cause vaccine shortages and reduce vaccination rates. The Program began accepting petitions (also called claims) in 1988.

The current anti-vaccination movement began largely over concern that thiomersal preservative in many childhood vaccines was causing autism. Although multiple epidemiological studies indicated that there was no appreciable risk, "the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) asked vaccine makers to remove thiomersal from vaccines as quickly as possible as a precautionary measure", and it was ~gone by 2001.[1]

0) https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/about/index.html

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_and_vaccines

A business decision to avoid risk of costly litigation is not at all the same as actual harm. If you have any information on actual harm, please share it. Otherwise, please leave your FUD at the door.

So you don't believe that people ought to have the right to sue when injured?

Also, calling stuff "FUD" is a classic strategy to escape responsibility. For example, the tobacco industry claimed that lung cancer risk was FUD for decades. Other examples include groundwater pollution, asbestos, and lead paint.

Not to mention human overpopulation. Which is arguably the root cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with HIV and Ebola, and likely more to come. And of course global climate change, which may well kick serious ass in coming decades.

The irony with your comment is that it's the tobacco industry which started (and is still significantly funding) the whole anti science/evidence campaigns. In fact the whole antivax movement is part of a big FUD campaign. So historically these campaigns have almost always come from a certain direction to discredit established scientific evidence. The current antilockdown campaigns come from the same corner/often the same people so yes people are sceptical about them, I'm sorry that you got banned for your "well reasoned" post.

Maybe the solution is a law that if someone posts/airs clearly wrong facts. Or if someone's theories/facts... Get later disproven they need to post/air a correction at the same time at least as long (maybe better twice as long) and give it as much prominence. Maybe then outlets would be more careful about posting obvious untruths.

Huh. I didn't know that, and I'd appreciate references.

I am aware that the ad agency behind the "tobacco doesn't cause cancer" campaign got into the "lead paint is safe" and other pro-industry campaigns, including the climate change contrarians. And the Tea Party. Funded by folks like the Koch brothers.

> Maybe then outlets would be more careful about posting obvious untruths.

That's a very slippery slope. As I've said before, you may be surprised when you become the pariah.

I would absolutely agree that those who are harmed need adequate remedies under the law. I also know that vaccines provide an immense public benefit. If the specifics of the tort system were causing companies to exit the vaccine business (and they were) , that's certainly something the government ought to step in to fix. However, that doesn't mean there were "issues with safety" as you claim. The implications in your comment are actively harmful to the public health.

If you read the background for that law, you'll find that people were in fact being injured by vaccines. And some still are. Just as virtually all medicines injure some people. Because there's great variability in responses.

The law didn't get enacted just to prevent lawsuits, but also to compensate those who were injured.

> The implications in your comment are actively harmful to the public health.

That way lies totalitarianism.

For example, there's considerable pressure in many countries to outlaw secure end-to-end encryption. To protect against terrorists, child abusers, and other criminals.

So how would we feel if support for secure end-to-end encryption were censored in social media?

Right. In general contradiction arises when we try to prevent people from doing stupid things. It becomes very difficult to maintain a logically consistent view on what's okay to censor and what's not.

Most of us agree anti-vaxxers are ill-informed and that adopting their beliefs causes people to engage in patterns of behavior (avoiding vaccines) that are not in what we think is their best interest.

What about other beliefs? If someone posts a video saying that they don't think seatbelts are effective in preventing injuries during car crashes, should they be suppressed?

What about someone who claims that vaping is safe and popularizes the practice? Do we ban that?

It's easy to pick a few almost-universally hated groups and rally against them: racists, anti-vaxxers, flat earthers. Few things are that cut-and-dry. And watching the widespread rise of "benevolent censorship" wrt COVID-19 has really shown me how far we can take the idea of "protect people from information that could harm them".

For example, I recently submitted a highly controversial 7500+ word blog post that advocated for ending lockdown in the US. I got some matters of scientific fact wrong (and have since addressed or am currently working on addressing those), i.e. things like accounting for the phenomenom of "overshoot". Some sections probably did not give a perfectly fair view of "each side" and could be/were criticized as being cherry-picked. And I think I got a lot of things very right. I've now had 9 people e-mail me in the last 24 hours saying that they tried to share my post on Facebook/Messenger and that the entire domain is now blocked for violating the community guidelines. Is that something worth banning? It advocates for a position that could easily be argued will lead to death, and therefore reading it could kill people. So it's a very easy argument to make, if you take the position that we should suppress "harmful" information.

As I said at the start of this thread, I basically reject the entire concept of "disinformation" for that reason; it inevitably gets used to suppress even the most good-faith and well-researched (or in my case, somewhat-well-researched :P) arguments. Therefore I think the entire concept is inherently dangerous to a free society.

Okay, that's enough rambling for one night. I'll let everyone else duke it out :)

Furthermore, there is zero guarantee that the censors won't eventually develop a taste for antivaxxing themselves, and now any information about potential benefits of vaccines is actively suppressed.

Refusing medical treatment for children on religious grounds is legal to varying degrees in 43 states.

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/parents-beliefs-about...

Anti-vaxing is not an organized religion but I could see organized religions adopting anti-vaxing beliefs.

I completely agree. For the simple fact that no human or organisation can be trusted with the power to silence anyone or any group.

I Think this should apply to functional social monopolys as well. YouTube/facebook/instagram etc shouldn't be allowed to remove content they deem untrue.

HN has a monopoly on discussion between people with (slightly) above-average critical thinking skills. Should we ban their moderation as well?

15 years ago the idea of an internet video monopoly didn't even exist and if it did no one would have cared.

What you are suggesting is impossible to enforce or even reason about.

If HN moderators started censoring posts because they disagreed with them, or thought the ideas were "too dangerous" (rather than just because they were spam) then yeah people would start complaining about it.

I don't think HN has a monopoly on discussion between people with (slightly) above-average critical thinking skills. Many sub-reddits fit that definition as well.

I don't follow how this would be impossible to enforce. The person whose content on youtube is removed for example is going to complain. It's dead simple to slap youtube with a couple million dollar fine for such things.

> Rather I am saying - and this was my fault for not being clear enough - that I reject the notion that we should try to pick a side to suppress. Because the same part of human nature that leads to rampant spread of disinformation is the part of human nature that tries to decide what the capital-T Truth is.

Yes, we really can't have it both ways. Either we have free speech for everyone, or we have censorship. There are exceptions, of course: calls to violence, libel against non-public people, and so on. And yes, also inciting panic by crying "fire" falsely in public places. But I believe that's distinguishable from spreading "fake news".

The problem with censorship is needing to trust censors. And even if we have honest censors, how do we know what the "truth" is? Do we trust "authorities"? That seems iffy, given how often we've learned that they've been dishonest or just plain wrong.

Also, authoritarians always start with the edge cases. And then they widen the scope. By the time your position -- which always seemed so reasonable -- becomes unacceptable, it's too late.

Isn't spreading dangerously false information about a viral pandemic similar to shouting "fire" in a theatre? I'm not sure it's always so easy to distinguish that actively dangerous conduct from fake news.

Not that this difficulty means we shouldn't try.

The "shouting 'fire' in a theatre" meme comes from a case where the Supreme Court used the Espionage Act to restrict speech because the speech in question didn't sufficiently support entering into a World War and advocated against the draft.

Not exactly the best way to convince people that restricting speech is actually good.

The fact that you need to explain that sort of demonstrates that it isn't relevant to the use of the argument. Good arguments can come from poor sources.

Most people agree that shouting fire in a crowded theatre is the sort of speech which should be restricted, wherever the argument came from.

> Good arguments can come from poor sources.

All the more reason to not silence cranks and conspiracy theorists.

From John Stuart Mill's On Liberty:

> But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2

"the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries."

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

That's what I would argue If I had a conspiracy in mind.

By far the most dangerous and most widely spread "information" in this pandemic has come from the same authorities that are being allowed to decide what is so-called correct and what needs to be censored. The only check on their extremism and self-centred attention seeking has come from the grassroots blogging and video making community - those same people YouTube (really I suspect, Wojcicki) is trying to wipe out.

OK, so I admit that Icke's thing about 5G and COVID-19 is batshit insane. I truly can't imagine how someone could argue that in good faith. He must be trolling, doing it for the lulz.

But still, that's arguably distinguishable from creating a panic by shouting "fire" in a crowded theater that's undoubtedly not burning. In that crowded theater, it's the stampede that gets people killed in the moment. I do see the analogy to Internet meme explosions. But connections between actions and consequences are weaker and slower enough.

There are people attacking cell phone towers and threatening workers who work on them. It’s directly connected to the 5G coronavirus garbage.

Icke is one of, if not the, originator of the theories of shapeshifting reptilians controlling society. His own descriptions of himself coincide strongly with paranoid schizophrenia.

Huh. That's pretty wild.[0]

> A poll of Americans in 2013 by Public Policy Polling indicated that 4% of registered voters (±2.8%) believed in David Icke's ideas.

But at least some of them were joking, right?

0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_conspiracy_theory

So, so far I haven't seen anyone on here take the strong free speech absolutist position -- that nothing should be censored ever, including calls to violence. I've seen several comments that basically say "don't censor in general, but do remove calls to violence," so that seems like it's not a controversial opinion at least in this discussion.

Why are calls to violence bad, but spreading misinformation about a pandemic (whether it's that it is a hoax, that it is not transmissible, or that you can cure it by drinking bleach) is okay?

It seems to me that, if you're saying calls to violence can be censored because they will inspire people to act badly, then you've crossed the line into saying people can't be trusted to act appropriately.

Why ban that, but not misinformation about the pandemic?

>Why are calls to violence bad, but spreading misinformation about a pandemic

How do you know what is 'misinformation' ? WHO claimed that face masks were worthless, now you are forced to wear them in lots of places. WHO also claimed that there was no human to human transmission of COVID-19, etc.

The powers that be will not stop spreading misinformation when it suits them, they just want no one to be able to question it. The right to question is something we can't give up just to avoid bad actors.

Why do you assume that the "powers that be will not stop spreading misinformation" like they do it on purpose?

Could it not be that this is a very complex issue and they were simply wrong in the first place? More data came in and they revised their position.

They certainly were spreading it on purpose. What's unknown is whether they knew it was misinformation at the time. Perhaps they thought this was a good way to manage supply shocks and keep masks flowing to medical workers. Or perhaps they truly thought masks were useless. That's hard to believe, but not impossible.

But they wouldn't have backed off as quickly without pushback from others taking the opposite position that masks were critical. And at the time, that was contrary to the officially espoused position by both CDC and WHO. Even now WHO haven't fully reversed course, they have only stopped anti-recommending face masks as hard. Banning spreading this countervailing opinion would have been a grave mistake.

WHO: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

> If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with COVID-19.

CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...

> In light of this new evidence, CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.

And the powers that be want to call for violence (and often do) so why do you want to restrict everyone else from doing it?

I don't know how to define what is "misinformation" but I could surely call out a couple examples. Maybe we can figure out what makes them misinformation.

1) 5G causes COVID-19 2) COVID-19 doesn't exist, i.e. it's all a hoax 3) Aquarium cleaning solution is a cure for COVID

I don't know what makes those different from "masks are worthless" but they seem qualitatively different. Maybe for a couple of reasons.

Maybe for #1, there's no plausible mechanism of action linking 5G and covid. But the people claim there is! Using a nested series of faulty reasoning and unreproduceable evidence to back it up.

Maybe for #2, there's no observable evidence that it's a hoax, i.e. people claiming otherwise are doing so with no supporting evidence, only reasoning that they (subjectively) do not trust government or media, therefore their claim is supportable.

But I don't know. I don't think the answer is that it's unknowable (which you may or may not have been getting at).

For me misinformation as a characteristic is a big umbrella, that the discretion for it depends on the measurer. Which makes it an unreliable characteristic to censor content by.

As an example of things that can follow into the misinformation umbrella parody, humour, good/bad science, good/bad journalism, misinterpretation of intent, paranormal reports, religion. It done for the greater good. People have done surgeries in their garage, I can't believe it's from lack of credible information, and that making a general policy from the exception is a sign of a bad design.

It looks like you've been caught-up in misinformation as well, as the WHO never said that masks were "worthless" nor that there was "no" human-to-human transmission. Those are distortions of more nuanced and qualified statements by the WHO. You can argue that these more nuanced statements were still harmful, but you're pushing misinformation by claiming the WHO said what you merely think they said.

Claim what you want, but on Jan 14 the WHO stated the following "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳."[0]

The nuance is that they were repeating Chinese propaganda.

[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?la...

"no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" is not the same as "no human-to-human transmission"

>Why ban that, but not misinformation about the pandemic?

Wearing Mask a few months ago was misinformation by many. Which most of the world finally revert course later but still not agreed by WHO.

So who is to define what is "misinformation"?

For every single downvote I got on HN for stating Hong Kong got it right with mask in March, do I get a brownie point for every single US citizen that is wearing a mask now?

I dont have an answer, but I am leaning towards the same thinking as OP. Because everything I said right now is considered as misinformation by the Hong Kong government. Personally I think "misinformation" is a pandora box that should never be opened / used.

Calls for violance can be, and are, very subtile. Just removing open calls for violance wouldn't change a bit, propaganda doesn't work that way. Nor does psychology. So in the end, both of your examples about $Group can lead to violance against that group.

EDIT: Typos

Yes, but I think trying to map out indirect violence gets into very dangerous territory. So, that's why I draw the line at "directly" advocating violence.

Of course, the lines as always get blurry. To use a random example that comes to mind, when Kathy Griffin posted the severed head of Trump - was that a direct call to violence? That's a tough one to answer. My first intuition is that it does cross the line, but I could very easily see an argument that it's not.

So unfortunately there will always be that difficulty, unless we committed to an absolutist position of not removing ANY speech. I drink a lot of the kool-aid, and even I don't go that far.

> not removing ANY speech.

That causes genocides to happen though -- are you okay with that or did you not know

Sorry, can you clarify? Are you saying removing speech causes genocides, or not removing speech at all?

No, people with guns and uniforms cause genocide. People with pens and typewriters have never harmed a hair on anyone's head.

To disagree is to argue that human beings are nothing but programmable devices. If that's your position, fine, but we'll have to disagree.

Goebbels might want to have a word.

> Remove blatant calls for violence

So you are in favor of censorship, just with different parameters.

> Remove blatant calls for violence,

Not ok to kill people via violence, but ok to do the same by (contributing to) spreading a pandemic?

So we should expect schools to teach our schools that the earth is flat, and the earth is round, and hope the kids pick the right option? Or where exactly do you draw the line in "we shouldn't suppress speech, just because it's provably false?"

Just saw this comment. Saying "don't censor expression of opinions on online platforms" is not saying "teach creationism" in schools, nor "teach that the earth is flat".

In other words I think that's very much a red herring.

Therefore we should let those with power choose what everyone can say and hear? Sorry, I'm not following.

Here's a question for you: Do you believe HN has an obligation to allow anything to be posted here?

If someone wanted to post about how much they hate a certain race, do you believe the moderators here have an obligation to allow that post to remain?

If a majority of the population was using HN, then we’d be getting closer to an apples to apples comparison. The crux of the issue includes Google’s reach.

Does it matter if the majority is using it or not? The same concept of freedom of speech should matter. And HN is one of the largest tech forums on the internet; making it effectively the 'Youtube' of tech forums.

So given HN's expansive reach, why do you think it deserves to be excluded from the concept of being a provider? Why shouldn't it be forced to house all content?

HN has negligible reach compared to Youtube, Facebook, or Google.

Extremely paraphrasing, ryankemper's original comment was something like "We shouldn't let private companies decide who to boot off. Besides, booting them off doesn't work anyway".

Then techsupporter said something like "actually, booting them off does work".

Finally, paraphrasing your comment, "so you're saying you should let private companies decide?" No, that is clearly not what techsupporter's comment meant.

It's ok to disagree with the second half of that first comment ("booting them off doesn't work") without expressing an opinion on the first half. In fact the way the original comment ties together those two things has has led to the quagmire of crossed arguments you're seeing in these comments, so untying them is quite important.

"presupposes a lot of things about society that are, in my observation, no longer true."

If you're thinking that 'society used to be able to tell what was a lie from the truth' I'm sorry to say but that was never close to being true.

Newspapers were a pretty strong filter of information and therefore could have some kind of 'rough' credibility, biases notwithstanding obviously.

But with 'every Instagram a source of news' ... we have an existential truthiness problem that we're only beginning to learn to deal with.

Believing that shutting down "bad" speech will help things is also simplistic and seductive.

> We do not have the time, through our own actions or not, for quiet contemplation and retrospection into deep topics.

This is a problem, but how does censorship solve it? You would in fact need to solve that problem for all ideas in order to correctly know what to censor, which nobody has time to do, hence the problem.

> We have polarized ourselves into camps of right and wrong.

This is exactly what the censorship makes worse. You say "not here, go somewhere else" to anyone who disagrees and everyone who disagrees is separated, so that each camp has no exposure to the other side's arguments and whoever is wrong will remain so.

> We are exposed to a staggering volume of information that all seems mostly the same with some slight differences but widely varying outcomes.

The world is complicated. Not everybody is going to understand everything. That isn't possible, but it isn't required. What you need are two things.

One is free and open debate, so that the people who choose to allocate their time to a given specific topic enough to come to an accurate conclusion on that topic are free to do so.

And the other is trusted thought leaders who consult a variety of domain experts on a given topic to determine the consensus of the experts and relay it to all of the people who don't have time to look at the specific details on that specific topic. This is what has completely imploded. The news media has lost their credibility by explicitly abandoning even the pretense of impartiality and chasing clickbait nonsense for ratings, so nobody trusts them anymore. As it should be when they're publishing things like that.

But you either do the research yourself (which nobody has time to do for everything) or you trust somebody else to do it for you. So now people need to figure out who they can trust to distill the informed consensus. But you don't do that by censoring the debate, you do it by being so consistently right that people begin to trust you over the lies of the blaring partisans. That doesn't come from force, it comes from hard work, which nobody seems willing to do anymore, which is why everything is messed up.

The biggest issue is that the open debate is vulnerable to astroturfing with corporate influence and financial backing, which can completely drown out others and turn public opinion, through sheer exposure.

And when it comes to subjects like human rights, there is a definite right and wrong, not a "truth in the middle".

> The biggest issue is that the open debate is vulnerable to astroturfing with corporate influence and financial backing, which can completely drown out others and turn public opinion, through sheer exposure.

Meh. Money buys speech has been a thing since day zero. If anything the internet has made this problem smaller because you don't have to buy a TV station to publish video anymore. Then the corporate propaganda isn't the only thing people see, which allows them to see it for what it is, which makes them think this is some kind of novel problem never previously encountered, when it's really a novel solution that makes the old and pervasive problem much more conspicuous through contrast.

You also have to see the irony in suggesting that corporations decide what people can see in order to protect us from corporations influencing the public debate.

> And when it comes to subjects like human rights, there is a definite right and wrong, not a "truth in the middle".

That would be really convenient, but it's still as complicated as anything. There is a truth but it isn't a simple truth and that means getting it right is hard work.

Uncle Google doesn't have a magic wand of righteousness that lets them tell right from wrong over everybody else in the world.

The "marketplace of ideas" clearly doesn't work for the betterment of mankind and the world. Corporate interests throw vast amounts of money into astroturf campaigns, creating propaganda and misinformation, in order to discredit their opponents, who do not have the same access to funds and influence. Google, FB et.al. are part of the problem, with their deep influences in politics. They ban the token nutjob like Icke ever so often, so they can claim they're "doing something", meanwhile their algorithms continue to funnel people from completely ordinary videos to conspiracy theories and virulent content. It's disturbing how quickly this happens on a brand-new profile.

Misinformation spreads like wildfire because it doesn't need fact checks, it doesn't need to be based on research. As long as you can get enough spread, you can get a large number of people to believe anything, simply because they heard it from someone. People are not rational actors.

Witness the demonization of pipeline protestors, people who protest the clear-cutting of forests, people who argue for trans rights. They upset the corporate-run status quo, so they are suppressed by the authorities, who act on the whims of the rich and powerful.

Witness the rise of the alt-right, the so-called "intellectual dark web" and the influence of sites like 4chan and 8chan.

Armed people barging into governmental buildings, and basically being allowed to do so almost unimpeded by police, photo ops for the media, a show of force for their allies. I've seen them ridiculed as yokels, but it didn't matter. What matters is visibility and the "look at what we can do without being stopped" factor.

Imagine what would have happened if BLM, a group of Muslims or any left-wing group had tried to do the same thing. Think Kent State and the National Guard.

The message is clear: Act against capitalism and the powers that be and you will be suppressed, by unlimited force if necessary

It's incredibly unlikely you'll agree with the powers that be on every issue, so you'll find yourself deplatformed, and unable to speak out against injustice. As you mentioned, you feel that the powers that be are suppressing certain ideas. If you want censorship, guess who will be in charge of deciding what to censor.

Sure, astroturfing and other misinformation campaigns can happen if speech is truly free, but the alternative is far worse. With free speech, if your ideas have merit then at least there is a chance they will be recognized and your audience can grow. With complete censorship, you have no chance at all. Free speech is the least bad of these two options.

"The alternative is far worse", with us currently being in a state of world politics where whoever shouts the loudest on social media gets to set the agenda.

Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right. No ifs or buts about that.

In the same breath, it is very important to realize that your freedom of speech does not absolve you from responsibility for what you say. It does not obligate others to facilitate your speech, it does not entitle you to any platform you wish, and it does not obligate anyone to listen to you.

Similarly to the second amendment, which enshrines your right to own weapons (being the foundation of a well-regulated militia and so on) does not obligate anyone to provide you with weapons, nor the facilities to train with and maintain weapons, and it certainly doesn't require anyone to admit your onto their property if you are currently holding any weapons.

I agree with what you say here. Freedom of speech does not obligate YouTube to give anyone a platform, as they are a private entity. It does not obligate anyone to listen to you. What the top level comment is saying though, is that just because there is no legal requirement, doesn't mean we can't "ask nicely" or otherwise strive towards the idea that the predominant video platform refrain from censorship.

There is no legal obligation for YouTube to listen to us, but there is no reason we can't ask for less censorship. If they say no, then they are well within their rights, but we don't have to be happy about it either. Just because we can't legally force change doesn't mean we must abandon the cause. The most optimistic scenario would be if public sentiment changes enough such that YouTube feels they are being seen as unfair and it is damaging to their reputation/bottom line, perhaps we may see a change in their censorship policies. This is an ideal to strive for, and uses social/economic pressure as opposed to legal pressure. It is like your obligation to be a helpful neighbor or to be a caring friend. It's not by force of law, but people are expected to do it because it's "the right thing to do." In the same way, when you're the predominant video platform on the internet, the right thing to do is not to censor opinions you disagree with.

I think sponsored posts and conflicts of interest on social media or blogs are meant to be disclosed based on some law by the FTC, at least in the USA?

Does that apply to astroturfed reddit comments etc? I don't see why it shouldn't. Of course it's a bit harder to prove, but it's not always impossible.

> And the other is trusted thought leaders who consult a variety of domain experts on a given topic to determine the consensus of the experts and relay it to all of the people who don't have time to look at the specific details on that specific topic. This is what has completely imploded. The news media has lost their credibility by explicitly abandoning even the pretense of impartiality and chasing clickbait nonsense for ratings, so nobody trusts them anymore. As it should be when they're publishing things like that.

I would argue that this assessment quite strongly examplifies the whole issue. I think that we have seen an unprecedented campaign to propagate the belief that the "mainstream media" is untrustworthy. And that campaign is very clearly politically motivated (funnily enough the most partisan of the big news networks portraits itself as the the upholder of truth, a misinformation campaign itself), and is very strongly based on misinformation and providing easy answers... Largely financed by an ideological opposition to government intervention and fueled by propaganda against global warming action

Your comment comes across as partisan, rather than factual.

As an example, major news networks blatantly lied about the Covington kid because it fit their ideology.

Major news networks are untrustworthy, you just happen to support the narrative some of them are selling.

> I think that we have seen an unprecedented campaign to propagate the belief that the "mainstream media" is untrustworthy.

Both can be true. The large national news outlets can be faltering AND someone could find a partisan advantage by making hay out of that fact.

Deplatforming has proven highly effective at preventing bad actors from continuing to spread misinformation on Reddit and other social media sites [1]. I support free speech in principle, but internet platforms are such a powerful megaphone for spreading misinformation, the likes of which history has never seen, that platform owners may feel ethically obligated to act against those who would misuse their systems to cause global societal harm.

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...

"Deplatforming" is some pretty great doublespeak for "censoring".

We already have a solution to idiots vandalizing 5G towers: arrest them.

This board regularly ‘censors’ people who break the rules. It’s the price of having a reasonably nice board to post on. There’s a difference between censorship and punishing bad behavior.

See this comment which makes this point already, and the subthread discussing the differences between YouTube and Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23064505

If I'm interested in content not on HN, I'll find it elsewhere. Why is it any different for YouTube? Now, if you'd said to me that Google doesn't prioritize other content, I'd argue that those wanting to talk about other content always have smaller forums to do it in, they just might be more local or viral in other ways. To me it's the difference between national broadcast TV "I'll know it's wrong when I see it," and the ability to post flyers or posters in a community. One is local and the other is wide-reaching.

There is, I suppose, another alternative. If we want to promote fringe ideas, we should make it easier to organize and elect local candidates, abolish "first-past-the-post" voting systems that encourage a two-party system, and so on.

But currently scientific reasoning is an accepted system of analysis for evidence-based decisions, and most politicians rely on it in addition to emotional intelligence to alter and guide their behaviour and decisions, even as they generally do whatever the person with the deepest pockets says to do, whether because that person sponsors scientific research or conducts surveys and campaigns to sway public opinion.

The issue I have is that fringe opinion, like this, would reject cause-and-effect reasoning and evidence to rely almost entirely on emotions instead. And because it's controversial, people click on it and watch it and wonder about it. When there's no actual evidence to it.

We used to and probably still do, have courses in grade/high school on media literacy, or not believing everything you see on TV. We routinely, as an HN community, encourage reading source materials and deciding for ourselves. But we're a small community, and for YouTube, it's easier to say "it's not our problem any longer" than it is to try and provide counterpoints to the material.

There's a serious risk to YouTube to not pull this down, because of how the feedback loop of their algorithms will encourage folks who like this to watch other fringe videos, until eventually they think all of YouTube, or the world, thinks the same way as these commentators. It's easier in the short term to pull down the content than to change how the algorithms work to make them somehow less relevant. And back to my original point, folks who want this content, they will find it, regardless of what platform it's on.

Have you found any new blogs or websites you visit on a frequent basis in the last 3 months? You can’t discover the voice of the little guy, there’s too much noise.

I’m probably not the best target audience as yes, I have. I use an RSS reader and manually curate a list of blogs to follow and podcasts to listen to, in addition to, yes, YouTube playlists I subscribe to as well. I even support content authors directly on Patreon. But not all good content is on YouTube — I’ve actually purchased content on Vimeo, for example, and have bookmarked a number of non-YouTube content sources, some of which are aggregators but some of which aren’t. How do you find it? Same way you always did... by following links, subscribing to email lists, searching Google with plus signs, err double quotes, and so on. Don’t get me wrong, YouTube is “easy” but sometimes it’s impossible to find that video you were watching the other day (if you have history disabled). As I said before, though, the problem is some folks want a worldwide platform to broadcast their ideas, no audience or community necessary. I think it’s just fine for such an audience to have content moderation strings attached. Nothing’s free, not even the soap box. If you really want an audience, work for it, and if you just want clicks in exchange for ad dollars, it shouldn’t be at the detriment of what’s considered acceptable by society. And yes, that might, indeed, mean censorship, but as pointed out, that’s the compromise we made for broadcast radio, TV and to some degree, newspapers. Any platform with enough viewers seems to inevitably become a cesspool without community reinforcement and guidelines. Not to say there shouldn’t be choices of platform, I don’t think ISPs or AWS should be banning individuals from the Internet, that’s something local police and judicial systems can determine. But if anything I’d say the opposite, the more unknown something is, the less culturally censored it should be, the more famous, the more cautious we should be, as a society... I don’t want to support regimes but I do support political systems and political discourse in general, and I think societal norms eventually change as needed, they have in the past without such widespread individual broadcasting platforms...

The solution isn’t deplatforming, it is arresting these people if they light stuff on fire as that’s the crime. Let them believe what they want.

> I support free speech in principle, but internet platforms are such a powerful megaphone for spreading misinformation, the likes of which history has never seen

This analogy is misleading, because it does not make it clear that in this situation, everyone has a megaphone.

Not defending him, nor do I believe him, but I watched a brief portion of the London Real livestream interview last night and he said that 5G provokes symptoms similar to that of COVID-19, not that 5G spreads Coronavirus.

He's said a lot of bullshit in a lot of different venues. I did a quick search and found a long, rambling article [1] on his website about how coronavirus and 5G are linked. He sums his position up at the end with

> The evidence that COVID-19 is a bioweapon is overwhelming – and so is the evidence that 5G is involved to either cause the flu-like symptoms/pneumonia people have been experiencing, and/or to exacerbate the virulity of the virus by weakening people’s immune systems and subjecting them to pulsed waves of EMF to open up their skin to foreign DNA fragments (including viruses).

So he's been saying both that 5G causes an illness that is mistaken for COVID-19 and that 5G spreads coronavirus.

[1] https://www.davidicke.com/article/564306/coronavirus-5g-conn...

This is also incorrect.

Also he believes that British Royal Family are shape shifting reptiles; he might not have the best judgement on what is backed by evidence.

> Booting people off of platforms merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them.

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.

If you are to just claim that someone made something up, you must yourself raise the standard and provide a scientific or otherwise evidential source. And Vice ain't it.

> If you are to just claim that someone made something up, you must yourself raise the standard and provide a scientific or otherwise evidential source.

Vice in this article links to evidential sources while summarizing the findings. You should bother reading it and what it links to.

ALSO, and this is a bug fucking also, that's not how the burden of evidence for claims works! You just argued against falsifiability! OP is responsible for providing evidence for their own made up claim!

I was responding to you, not the OP. Most statements on HN are not immediately backed by sources, as this is not a scientific forum. But if you are just gonna tell someone they are full of shit, you should have some solid data behind it rather than a questionable clickbait rag that may or may not be cherry picking and massaging its own sources.

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” - Hitchens's razor.

The burden of proof is always on the person making an assertion or proposition. When they do not provide proof of their claim, and another person calls it "full of shit", it is not valid to shift the burden of proof onto them to disprove the original claim.

And there's a great reason for this - the bullshit asymmetry principle: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

I agree with you, but I think you should rewrite your comment to be less aggressive.

Reach is key, IMHO. Freedom of speech, already a very different thing in the US and Europe for example, is about being allowed to say what you want, with certain country specific restrictions. It doesn't mean to be granted access to biggest platforms with the highest reach out there to spread your opinion. Which is fine, as far as I am concerned.

> merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them.

Keep them on or they will radicalize more? That just sounds silly.

Let them radicalize. See how that works when they don't have a voice.

Private institutions should be bound by the first amendment once they've reached a critical mass. The reason I say this is that, if a small number of entities control the flow of information, and they get away with picking and choosing who has the opportunity to be heard, then the first amendment is effectively made meaningless. I want to be able to choose what comments to allow on my block and, at the same time, I want to be able to express myself on a prominent platform in a way that may or may not offend the powers that be.

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.

The big problem with this argument is that youtube is the platform that "recommend" videos based on a hidden algorithm, leading to filter bubbles.

I definitely agree.

Yet when a platform like YouTube deletes accounts and publicly announces the censoring of information that doesn't conform with the Ministry of Information(aka the World Health Organization), there's no mystery that they're violating people's rights.

Not promoting the video in their algorithm would basically accomplish the same functional difference as censorship. Ditto for any platforms that can demote content from their ranking.

Like I said, I [mostly] agree. However, there's precedence that publishers be free to pick and choose the content that they publish. Even if it isn't fair, this is a concept that's already existed at various scales for hundreds of years. To single out YouTube for censorship-by-curation would be much more difficult than to guard against them for blatant abuses.

I'll give you an analogy. In America, businesses can't pick and choose people on the basis of their skin color or their sex. Obviously, discrimination in hiring still exists to some degree, but because it's covert or the result of implicit biases, there's a limited number of things you can do to address that discrimination. On the other hand, if the PR for a fast food chain goes on TV and says that the company only hires white people, that's unambiguous and has no conflict with the rights of the corporation.

Perhaps someone should analyse and pop such filter bubbles instead. We all know US gov is incapable going to bathroom by their own, so perhaps EU could step in and require platforms to publish such filter bubbles. I'm fairly sure most platforms actually curate the bubbles already.

IMHO EU should work on disinformation harm reduction strategy. Similarly how some members deal with drug addicts - contact people infected with bullshit and try to set them straight. I guess that (public mental health) would sound too dystopian for HN crowd.

>Private institutions should be bound by the first amendment once they've reached a critical mass.

That would be impossible, since the First Amendment as written explicitly only applies to Congress, and it restricts Congress' ability to pass laws, which is something private institutions don't actually have the power to do anyway.

Then something has to change, because this situation won't become more tenable going forward. Platforms like YouTube will only continue to grow and obtain power. We either need a bill of rights against these corporations or leverage to get them to comply.

How do you, though, actually decide in a reasonable and objective fashion who’s big enough to warrant being held to a different standard than others?

How do you really quantify that in a way that is objective and obvious

Look at the rise of tiktok. On one hand at least where I live they had almost no mindshare but in the past 2 months now they do, and they’re growing in user count. Should they meet the same threshold as YouTube now? Instagram?

This feels intractable to me, I don’t have a good answer to this problem. Not to mention it could easily become a gating mechanism to competition

Also, how do you determine what information is harmful? Some of it feels obvious, but some of it not so much

I was hoping someone would ask that.

I don't actually know. At some point, we need to figure out how to address that question. I think it can be addressed... I just don't have a good idea, and I don't know that anyone does. But we've been kicking that can down the road for ages.

> How do you really quantify that in a way that is objective and obvious

We set a number. Done.

These are corporations that only exist because we permit them to. Given enough political will, we can regulate them however we want.

Corporations now spin off new companies so that they hover just below that arbitrary number that turns them into a public space. Instead of YouTube, we have YouTube, MeTube, ITube and UsTube.

We're now back to square one, because those companies hover below said number and advertisers control what content is allowed on said sites. All of those individual companies ban 5G conspiracy theories because it's bad for business. Next step?

Subdividing your corporation isn't a right just like mergers this can be disallowed. As with any fraud laws intentionally trying to avoid it can be made illegal.

How about this?

Work out the audience share of a service, then work out the audience share of its nearest competitor/competitors. If the former is twice/four times/whatever as high as the latter, then it's counted as a de facto monopoly and regulated.

So YouTube's got 74.08% of the market and Vimeo has 18.02%[1], and the former is definitely twice or four times more than the latter, so regulate the former.

[1]https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/online-video--12/youtu...

It’s kind of the same argument for your water company. There’s only one company in town, are they allowed to deny you water service without some sort of published process with oversight?

If they did so unfairly, there'd be hell for them to pay.

As you say, they are fundamentally the same argument, except for one thing.

A water company that decided to cut off water to people that its CEO doesn't like would, in short order, have to face both political scrutiny and the proverbial torches and pitchforks, if you will; unlike speech, if the water goes away, people start dying or they are forced to leave.

Speech is necessary, but it's cheap as dirt, and most people don't have a lot to say in the first place. If the speech started going away, even in ways that are fundamentally unfair or flaunt the ideals of the country, not enough people would make a fuss about it. You won't die without speech. It can be comfortable to live without speech, or freedom of speech, anyway.

Otherwise, the argument is the same and, in either case, regulation and the pissed-offedness of the little guy could change the outcome. Such is less likely in the case of speech.

The internet is already available. Anyone can rent a vps and host their videos.

This thread is the first time I've heard someone makes this argument. It resonates with an idea that I've had for years, since the first time someone pointed out that an internet forum is not bound by the first amendment. Yes. But. There's something there that is problematic at scale. Thanks for taking the trouble of bringing this debate forward.

> Hacker News Guidelines

> 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.

From my perspective, Hacker News is a website built for the tech community. However I don't view Youtube as a community, but as a platform for individuals to publish videos, broadcast, and sometimes form sub-communities. It's possible that some people who don't login and hang around on the homepage of algorithmically selected videos treat Youtube as a publisher for curating.

It’s an issue that’s difficult to distill in a way that could work as a law or as a winning argument against snarky commenters playing Devil’s Advocate. In theory the line between rules and censorship is vague and grey, but in practice it’s pretty easy to tell what is rule enforcement and what is political censorship. I guess a good place to start would be examining the rules of a website and determining if the takedowns follow the rules and the rules are not overly broad.

While banning or deleting accounts could go all the way from legitimate to oppression, it doesn't seem like banning the account of someone spreading false information that leads to dangerous situations to be an abuse in any way. Yes, we have to hold YouTube to higher standards than others simply because of the disproportionate power the platform has. But this doesn't change the fact that in such cases the measure was warranted.

People constantly misunderstand "freedom of speech" as something that somehow entitles one to trample over someone else's freedom.

For example every time there's a discussion about "hate speech" someone will say that the laws are routinely abused to punish people for their legitimate free opinions. Yet no such examples of routine abuse are ever given. There's room for common sense when judging a situation. Common sense can't be put in law but you also can't really judge these gray areas without it.

>Yes, we have to hold YouTube to higher standards than others simply because of the disproportionate power the platform has.

That's rather conclusory.

Well there are 2 aspects for this. Laws in general consider magnitude and criticality when defining measures. So would a judge. YouTube's reach implicitly means the potential for abuse is orders of magnitude higher. And the effects of that abuse are far more dangerous than what a small platform can induce.

The other part, the one I was mostly referring to, is moral. I know, it's a company, it doesn't need to have morals. But this shouldn't stop people from holding them to a higher standard.

With a flip of the algorithmic switch platforms like YouTube or Facebook can influence results of elections, escalate social issues over the tipping point, etc. Can you honestly say that my conclusion needed too much explaining?

YouTube isn't a 'community' any more than the roads we all travel on. There is no viable alternative to YouTube/Google. There is no way to escape its influence. And being banned from it can ruin you (depending on how your life/work is structured).

HN is totally different because of the completely different scale and the existence of viable alternatives.

> There is no viable alternative to YouTube/Google

There is an interesting "monopoly" factor here, but YouTube is also not negatively impacting other groups or organizations from trying to start their own video platforms tailored to general content. In fact, it seems there have been various organizations chipping away at YouTube (e.g. Twitch, TikTok) of people who would normally be watching YouTube have other platforms to visit, watch and host content. Nothing is preventing those platforms from also further expanding into areas where YouTube is traditionally the leader.

I watch videos on Vimeo and search on DuckDuckGo.

I struggle to find a good place to read and talk about interesting tech news other than HN though

Yes, as the parent mentions, YouTube can do the same kind of content curation from a legal point of view. The question is whether YouTube is a platform where we should advocate for less censorship/more freedom. I think that since YouTube is a general platform and that no serious alternatives exist, we should advocate for less censorship.

YouTube is different from Hacker News because YouTube is more of a general platform (not focused on a particular topic). In contrast with Hacker News, less censorship on YouTube would not significantly degrade the experience. You can still go subscribe to the channels you like and be completely unaware of the content you don't want to see. On Hacker News, the whole point is that it is focused on particular subjects (I suppose it would be analogous to a curated list of YouTube channels), and its rules keep it that way.

Another factor to consider is what alternatives exist. As far as I know, YouTube is the only serious option at the moment for general video content. YouTube content includes news and politics, and many people use it as their primary source of information. No matter what your politics are, they will likely differ from Google's in some way, and if YouTube begins to aggressively censor opinions they disagree with, you'll find yourself without a platform since no serious alternatives exist.

For one, Facebook's trying to give YouTube a run for their money. There's an entire tab in their mobile app dedicated to small bite-size videos like are watched on YouTube, and Facebook Live is all about connecting small video producers directly to their audiences. Outside of that, there are lesser known sites. Vimeo, Metacafe, Dailymotion, Twitch, Veoh. YouTube has the brand recognition, but simply hosting video online isn't that hard. It's way harder if you have to build your own colo though.

For the casual viewer, YouTube has unbeatable brand recognition, and if I was trying to build an audience for a mainstream idea, that's the obvious place. However, for dedicated fans of a specific ideology, with YouTube deplatforming that ideology, the usual considerations are fewer.

Normally, the friction associated with getting viewers to install an app would be enough to dissuade a large number of users. For users who believe the government lies and that they're seeking the truth, and only the RushLimbaughTube app can expose them to it, I don't know if there's the same friction.

Vimeo,veoh, metacafe et al need to all merge into one and realize they have failed as individual companies more or less.

Secondly rush’s app will be removed, if he says anything that upsets big bro.

Lastly Facebook video will be just like YouTube in terms of enforcement.

have they failed? What are their financials like?

Facebook is unusable without a FB account. A walled garden can't supplant YouTube.

Except if people trivially can make (or already have) FB accounts, and for them it's not an issue whether it's a "walled garden" or not.

> As far as I know, YouTube is the only serious option at the moment for general video content.

Are they? There's Vimeo, Facebook, Pornhub's SFW option, Twitter can host short videos, there's a metric shitload of porn hosts, and if you're in for premium service every major CDN offers video hosting/distribution.

And a video tag in your own website on a raspberry pi.

There’s no problem hosting wacky content. What people complain is they don’t get free hosting and advertising.

You're absolutely right with the advertising aspect. YouTube is not simply a video hosting platform. It is also an advertising platform.

YouTube's dominance is not because video is impossible to host but because YouTube takes care of the advertising/revenue aspect for content creators. Any competitor would need to provide a similar service, and that's hard to do at the same level when you're not run by the world's largest advertising company. A serious alternative to YouTube would need to draw creators like YouTube does, and you need some sort of built-in way to (probably economically) incentivize them to create videos and put them on your platform.

Or like https://watchnebula.com/ be owned by creators in the first place and try to finance by subscriptions without ads. But this obviously will not scale like Youtube..

I had never heared of this.

I followed your link, then struggled to find something as you have to choose from a list of thumbnails. I then clicked to view something and immediately hit a paywall.

How are you supposed to "discover" this content? That is where youtube is so strong. Often on youtube I will be directed to patreon, etc - does this work on the same principle?

I guess you don't watch much YouTube.

A lot of large YouTubers (like Wendover Productions/Half as Interesting) have been doing sponsored ads for a thing called 'CuriosityStream' which is basically Netflix for Documentaries/Non-Fiction and as part of a bundle if you subscribe with their link you get Nebula for free as an extra for as long as you pay for CS.

It's mainly existing content from YouTubers but with premium exclusive videos like Patreon has.

It wasn't quite what the parent was saying, but basically here we're advocating that YouTube amounts to the public sphere in a way that other sites do not.

To be a little extreme: If we limited your freedom of speech by saying you can speak freely, but only in your own house, then that would still effectively curtail your rights. Whilst being technically true that you'd still have the right to speak, it wouldn't be in the spirit of freedom of speech.

This situation seems similar to me.

I think there's an argument to say, for the biggest providers of web communications, that if you would be allowed to stand on the street corner and say your bit that those providers shouldn't be allowed to prevent you speaking that 'bit' either.

Obviously as with IRL speech you have no right to an audience; none of us need listen. And, the provider has no curtailment of providing counter-points adjacent to your "speech", just as counter-protest is a normal part of protesting.

This ability to speak in ostensibly public forums is a natural and necessary part of democracy. IMO we should act to maintain that.

I'd add a couple of provisos:

# warnings on extreme content are fine

# the platform can demand those who are "speaking" be identified by name and nationality

David Icke seems to have moved to BitChute

https://www.bitchute.com/channel/weBLW8e6mgIB/

> since YouTube is a general platform and that no serious alternatives exist, we should advocate for less censorship.

Disagree. Online misinformation can kill people [0] and act as a recruitment tool for Nazis [1]. Less seriously, it can result in people burning down 5G towers. There's plenty to lose by YouTube hosting this stuff, and they're under no obligation to do so in the name of free speech.

It strikes me as odd that more people seem to want YouTube to permit far-right propaganda on their platform, than want YouTube to permit 'adult content', which just about no-one advocates.

> YouTube is the only serious option at the moment for general video content

People don't have a positive right for their poisonous nonsense to be hosted by, and discoverable on, YouTube. Such content should be forced off mainstream platforms.

> if YouTube begins to aggressively censor opinions they disagree with

'Disagree with' is trivialising the problem. This stuff is serious.

[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/iran-700-dead-drinkin...

edit It's not clear to me whether [0] was the result of online misinformation.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbzzzx/youtube-decides-to...

And then you wake up one day to Brexit and Trump being elected. Forcing content/ideas underground doesnt stop it spreading, you just become totally unaware of the spread, its not even talked about in social settings. But still it silently spreads. Do you want a situation when it becomes vacine time, half your country revolts? Do you just not care about these people? If thats the case why bother supressing it at all. The time to address these ideas is now, but no its all too easy to stick your head in the sand and exclaim shock after the fact.

> you wake up one day to Brexit and Trump being elected > Forcing content/ideas underground doesnt stop it spreading

In what way were Brexit or Trump "forced underground"? Trump got millions of dollars worth of free advertising from the second he announced he was running because the media could not stop covering him. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox aired 30 minutes of an empty podium for him!

And Brexit was constantly in the media in the UK. There was no "underground" at all. The BBC were almost a full-on propaganda arm with their fawning over Farage and terror that any even slight non-worship of the Tories would be reflected in yet more license fee beatings by ukgov.

Well thats my point, they werent forced underground. It was clear for anyone who looked to see what was going to happen. My point is there was an oportunity to engage and faciliate real conversations around these things. That oportunity was squandered with these two instances, because despite them not being outright supressed it was not socially acceptable to have a reasonable conversation around them without being labeled racist etc etc.

If you force them underground you have no idea how prevalent the ideas are, nor do you have any oportunity to genuinely change peoples minds. You cant address a problem you are not aware of.

> Well thats my point, they werent forced underground.

My mistake, I misfollowed your logic.

> it was not socially acceptable to have a reasonable conversation around them without being labeled racist

Well, that's because Trump is an outspoken racist, the GOP is also pretty racist (but better at keeping it quiet), and Brexit was largely predicated on racism.

Sure, you may think all these people are racist. Does calling them racist change anyone's mind? No, it just makes them and their supporters mad at you and just poisons the well.

Instead, debate the policies. Explain why they're wrong in a reasonable conversation. You'll actually have a shot at changing people's minds this way.

> Explain why they're wrong in a reasonable conversation. You'll actually have a shot at changing people's minds this way.

This seems to be expecting the opponent/interlocutor to be open to having their mind changed, while not being open yourself.

Also, when it comes to values (as opposed to questions of fact), you can't really argue the point, you can just understand the differences between the positions. If someone values sovereignty so highly that it outweighs any possible cost of Brexit, for instance, then they're not likely to change their mind after a discussion.

Do you really believe there are 15,188,406 racists in the UK and 62,984,828 racists in the USA?

If you truly believe that then I feel sorry for you, because you live in a really sad world. Is that really the experience you have living in or visiting these countries or travelling around them, that 1 in 2 people you meet are racist?

I think its a bit lazy and easy to substitue fringe views from within these two camps as the views of the majority.

If you agree that they are not the views of the majority of peoplpe who voted in these directions then clearly there are other areas that made them vote this way that could have been discussed and had there minds changed over but werent, because well racist. Everyone loves to complain that trump supporters and brexiters suffer from a lack of critical thinking, and especially conspiracy theorists, but come on. How lazy is it to say all these people are/were racists or that is why brexit/trump won.

> Everyone loves to complain that trump supporters and brexiters suffer from a lack of critical thinking

Which is easily demonstrated by their support for platforms and policies that crumble under the merest hint of application of critical thinking.

Sadly, this is quite evidence backed. Somewhere around 1/3rd of the UK population have racist attitudes based on multiple surveys across multiple decades. In the 60s and 70s there was close to 75% support for ending immigration into the UK for non-whites.

So yes, it's absolutely believable to have 15M racist wankers in the UK.

I'd say most people want their country to "win" against others, they want to be richer than other people and want their country to be the richest sat the expense of other nations.

That's racism/xenophobia, isn't it?

Brexit seems to be predicated on the idea that Brits would rather suffer than risk the possibility that mutual benefit would be weighted towards others in the EU. That's pretty extreme racism (albeit founded on greed) IMO, and is endemic in British society AFAICT.

How many racists would you guess are in the USA? I ask because it seems like you're using a very binary definition of the word.

> How many racists would you guess are in the USA?

Obviously that depends on how you define "racist". If you define it as "votes for an explicit racist from a racist party espousing distinctly racist policies", about 62M.

Forcing content out off mainstream media quite plainly does limit the spread of information and does limit radicalisation, we have plenty of examples of that. Conartists rack up millions of views because they can use free infrastructure of companies (companies that in turn convert human attention into profit via advertising, the sale of user data etc.). Without access to the infrastructure they can't have their business flourish as it does.

The link with Brexit and T you make doesn't make sense either, both of these phenomenon got plenty public exposure, with all information available to those who wanted to find it. The central theme tieing both those developments was the ability for people to use the architecture built by digital corporations to quickly spread misinformation unopposed. People receive the information in isolation, they don't get it side-by-side with other views. People engineering the spread of misinformation know it's not a fair contest, that's why it is so effective.

And that's the point being missed by people who say keep the content up and let bad ideas be exposed by better arguments, the problem is that the ideas aren't being opposed or presented in a robust way. Hosts like Brian Rose and others for instance interview in a way that don't challenge their controversial guests, instead they add credibility to their guests. And because we are thinking of these characters as individuals expressing themselves and exchanging their personal views, people are distracted from the fact that they are businesses operating a money making scheme. And they are only able to do that on this scale because they can use other corporate infrastructure for free.

This content has been deliberately weaponised. Various interests, some of them hostile, have a stake in promoting it. See e.g.

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

Of course various US (Chinese, UK, Israeli, Saudi, Indian, Iranian, etc, etc) interests run their own versions, both at home and elsewhere.

And corporate astroturfing is not a new thing.

There's a huge difference between kooks sharing a bit of kookiness with each other, and industrial misinformation campaigns created for political and strategic ends - which may include political destabilisation, radicalisation, and the promotion of extremism and domestic terrorism.

The two phenomena are not even remotely comparable. But at the moment information consumers literally cannot tell them apart, because there is no practical way to do that.

The crucial distinction is between individual freedom of speech, where people with unusual views are allowed to say whatever they want as long they don't incite violence, and industrial misinformation, which is inherently toxic and cannot be excused or justified.

There is no principle that can defend deliberate mass manipulation of the public through lies, exaggeration, and wilfully misleading manipulation.

The challenge is getting that principle enshrined in law. So-called free speech advocates will of course agitate against it, and they will be wrong. Knowingly and deliberately running a campaign to mislead the public should be considered a criminal act with criminal consequences.

Trump and Brexit aren’t silent spreaders, both used targeted video and social media to hit the people most open to their message. MAGA is magical for certain populations — they basically took the people who were loving Ron Paul back in the day and weaponized the message.

It was silent to you, because the broadcast wasn’t aimed at you.

> Online misinformation can kill people [...] Such content should be forced off mainstream platforms.

Censorship can kill people. Look at China's initial reaction to COVID19, to name a timely example. Admittedly, YouTube doesn't censor to the extent that China does, but whenever you have censorship you open the possibility of censoring life-saving speech, which may be controversial at the time.

Yes, if taken blindly without critical thinking, online misinformation has the potential to do harm and even lead to deaths, as you mention. For freedom of speech to work best, you need an educated and thoughtful population. If you think people are sheep and believe everything they read online, then certainly at first pass it sounds like censoring what they see is the right move. But this relies on a critical implicit assumption: that you (or the censor you defer to) know better and are never wrong. Have you ever changed your opinion? Perhaps you from five years ago would censor something important you would say today. There is no flawless human being in the world that can be trusted with this power.

Okay then, how about we just censor the obviously bad stuff, like Nazis or the 5G conspiracy theories? As other commenters have suggested, censorship will just feed into their narrative, further radicalize, and drive them underground. Instead, for things that are indeed so obviously wrong, simply explain why. Counter their flawed ideas with your correct ideas. If they're so obviously wrong and you're so obviously right, this should be trivial. Reasonable people will see that you're right, and those that don't would be radicalized anyway.

> It strikes me as odd that more people seem to want YouTube to permit far-right propaganda on their platform, than want YouTube to permit 'adult content', which just about no-one advocates.

Personally I would have no problem with adult content on YouTube as long as it's labelled as such. And it's not just "far-right propaganda" that falls under free speech, but also "far-left propaganda" and anything in between. True free speech would not discriminate.

> 'Disagree with' is trivialising the problem. This stuff is serious.

Censorship is also serious, and has serious consequences. It is important to think carefully about the consequences of censorship.

>Disagree. Online misinformation can kill people [0] and act as a recruitment tool for Nazis [1].

Same as online, officially accepted information. Only the latter can be even more dangerous.

As a reminder, the actual Nazis had the official, state sanctioned, platform on their hands, and they also labelled whatever they didn't like "misinformation" (from Jews, communists, etc).

No war was ever started by David Icke and his conspiracy theories. But NYT "official" and "sanctioned" Saddam's WMDs stories were crucial in building support for the Iraq war. Same for many other wars -- it's usually the state, official, sanctioned, news that are more dangerous...

Who decides what content gets censored?

My comment was on the topic of YouTube's content policies.

And you're content with YT effectively having the ability to choose the way "public" discourse is censored?

Media outlets have immense political power because of this ability to keep the demos out of the loop of what can and can't be censored. Politicians have leverage with the media outlets, but The People do not.

I'm not particularly content with that.

> And you're content with YT effectively having the ability to choose the way "public" discourse is censored?

This strikes me as a backward way of approaching the problem.

My opinion is that it's not only acceptable for YouTube to ban certain categories of videos, but morally obligatory. It would clearly be atrocious for them to officially permit ISIS recruitment videos in the name of freedom of expression, or in the name of never taking down political videos (ISIS is political, after all).

To put that another way then, my position is that:

1. A video platform like YouTube clearly needs to have, and to enforce, a content policy. It seems obvious that it cannot be a free-for-all. 2. Videos with political content cannot be granted a special exemption from the content policy on the grounds of political videos being special.

The question then is what categories should be on the ban list. It clearly shouldn't include ordinary political videos. It clearly should include recruitment videos from ISIS or neo-Nazi groups. It clearly should include dangerous misinformation about COVID19.

There may be contentious edge-cases, as there are for just about any matter of policy. That doesn't mean YouTube should run a free-for-all. That's just not a reasonable option.

If you want a free-for-all, a centralised platform like YouTube isn't the place to start anyway.

> [On YouTube] You can still go subscribe to the channels you like and be completely unaware of the content you don't want to see

Generalized, therein lies the crux of the tension.

It's not about the existence or accessibility of content, but rather its discoverability.

That YouTube's recommendation algorithm is so psychopathically ammoral that they had to rig it (several months back) not to suggest conspiracy video after conspiracy video should have been the alarm bell.

Content + discoverability composes the potential danger to society, and YouTube wholly controls one of those levers.

HN is a niche community focused on startups and tech. Youtube is the monopoly on user-uploaded video content and has 2 billion users.

I am unsure of your argument.

Are you saying that the size of the company factors into what policies it can enforce? i.e., smaller companies can have more freedom in policing content, but if an undefined critical mass is reached (perhaps market share), they should have less flexibility on curated content?

Or is it a factor of what it's trying to build? e.g., if YouTube only focused on hosting political content, should they be allowed to censor that content or shape what is permitted?

Yes the size most certainly matters, obviously Facebook should be held to a different standard than some niche social network for pet owners with 100 users. Monopolies should be held to a different standard.

I'd argue that the nature of the business should factor into it as well. Since Youtube advertises and presents itself as a platform where any user can upload any kind of content excluding pornography and dark stuff (eg. animal abuse), I don't think that censoring on the basis of political views alone is justified (I'm not familiar with David Icke, so I can't speak for this specific incident).

>Since Youtube advertises and presents itself as a platform where any user can upload any kind of content excluding pornography and dark stuff (eg. animal abuse), I don't think that censoring on the basis of political views alone is justified

YouTube is pretty clear about their stance on what is and is not allowed. They have made it very clear, in particular, that coronavirus misinformation is not allowed. I see little difference between choosing to censor pornography and choosing to censor coronavirus misinformation. Both are protected speech in the USA but they are both also things that are allowed (and is reasonable to) censor if the platform wishes.

GP argument is similar to the common carrier argument. Some communication channels (e.g. post, telephone, and maybe YouTube) are so pervasive, important, without comparable alternatives, that they should be considered as common goods and regulated as public services, rather than private companies. In particular freedom of speech applies to their users.

I would be for the common carrier argument if the logical extension that YouTube also gains the protections afforded to common carriers. No more having big companies get special treatment in abusing the Content ID system.

As much as I dislike YouTube’s policies in general, I find it difficult to argue against their current actions simply because powerful entities are already abusing the system behind the scenes to moderate content themselves.

Why should the size of the community matter? Under what rationale are you going to decide that HN can moderate but YT cannot?

Platforms that are monopolies or close to it are essentially the modern day town square, except instead of police and government enforcing rules, it's tech companies.

The courts have made it quite clear that they’re unwilling to consider companies to be similar to the “town square” unless if they’re doing literally what governments have traditionally done. There is no clear way to argue that YT is doing something that governments traditionally did, so you’re out of luck there.

If you believe YT is a monopoly, then it would be far less harmful to everyone if it was just broken up, rather than basically banning moderation on the internet.

You're commenting about "the courts" in a thread that started with "I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech."

What’s your point? That we should ignore how the courts and first amendment law actually works?

In a discussion about morality and the health of our society it is perfectly reasonable for decent people who are exploring the question of 'what ought to be' to set aside the decisions of the courts and the letter of the law.

That’s an interesting thing to do, but sans a means of enforcement it seems kind of pointless to me.

This argument could have been used to discourage people from discussing the need to make any ethical improvements in our society, including, for example, ending slavery.

The power of enforcement follows from policy, in a democracy policy is influenced by public opinion, public opinion is shaped by discussion. We ought to discuss moral issues for which there is currently no enforcement.

It's good work to ask how things could be better than they are, but setting aside the law may not be great way of approaching the issue because:

* a good portion of the law as it exists is actually a result of people thinking, in legal contexts, about what ought to be, at least insofar as any portion of the law represents values and ideals.

* any new "what ought to be" that turns out to be at some point in the future will need the force of law in one sense or another, which means it must be nested within a legal context, probably one enough like the present legal context that some if not all present constraints will matter.

Did you post this comment in reply to my comment in isolation, or as a reply to my comment in the context of the previous comments in the exchange, starting with

"I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech."

and ending with

"What’s your point? That we should ignore how the courts and first amendment law actually works?" ?

Yes.

The First Amendment is one specific protection of freedom of speech. It does not equal freedom speech, which is a general concept that private companies can also uphold (but I think everyone here acknowledges they are not legally obligated to)

I think that the government coming in and telling companies what they can and cannot do with their private platforms is entirely contrary to freedom of speech. What would be better is a wider array of communication platforms, for which there is a entirely different set of regulatory tools available.

Not only are they not legally obligated to uphold free speech, very few (almost zero) companies allow anyone to say whatever they wish whenever they wish.

Im still wondering why anyone expects this of youtube but would never ever expect it of the bar down the street.

> Im still wondering why anyone expects this of youtube but would never ever expect it of the bar down the street.

I haven't been in a bar where the patrons were told they couldn't discuss quack medicine.

> I haven't been in a bar where the patrons were told they couldn't discuss quack medicine.

That's over specific.

All bars (even the worst ones I could find) usually have unspoken rules about what can be discussed, until you start to talk about those subjects (eg drug dealing, weapons dealing, planned violence, etc) openly. Of course you can't effectively restrict communication between individuals, but that's also not the issue.

Maybe. I was in a Bait and Tackle shop yesterday that had a sign on the door warning of a $100 fine for speaking the word "coronavirus" inside.

Monopolies are hard to break if the product is free for consumers.

The problem with YT tends to be less the price, and more the fact that Google controls search, most ads, and YT. Compare this to FB which mostly controls ads on its own site, Google as a whole is more problematic.

Of course “more problematic” is not the bar for anti-trust regulation; I leave that to the lawyers.

Because Youtube presents itself as being agnostic to the content and letting anyone upload anything (excluding porn and dark stuff that any reasonable person would deem inappropriate like ISIS propaganda or child abuse).

If Youtube presented itself as being a video platform for <insert political affiliation> from the getgo, then I wouldn't see a legal problem with moderating videos containing opposing views.

You’re implying that there is a legal difference between being a publisher and a platform, which is not actually a thing under US law.

Then why was this legislation introduced ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

Section 230 does not require that YT or any other service be neutral. It is extremely common for people to represent 230 as if it requires neutrality, but it absolutely does not.

Here’s the entire text of 230, it doesn’t have a “unless they’re biased” clause.

> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

I don't believe that was the point GP was trying to make.

You're correct that section 230 doesn't require neutrality, but that was part of the point of the legislation. The case law prior to section 230 did result in such a distinction, though not necessarily in those terms.

The cases in question are:

- Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe Inc., in which CompuServe was held not liable for content hosted on its systems as it was merely a distributor and did not have knowledge of the content, and

- Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co., in which Prodigy was held liable for defamatory content posted on its systems as it performed moderation and was therefore considered to have editorial control over the content

Section 230 introduced a carve-out for internet service companies to avoid liability for user-generated content, but given the case law it does seem like this is otherwise a distinction made in US law.

It was a distinction made in US case law, until Section 230 rendered it moot. Section 230 was in fact written partially in response to Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co., because the ruling was considered such a threat to the growing internet.

How and where does YouTube present itself as being "agnostic" to content?

And if you think it's only natural that YouTube disallows "propaganda" that "reasonable people" would object to, why are you surprised that they would remove other varieties of propaganda? Of course, different people will have different definitions of reasonableness.

Youtube also presents itself as an international platform, so what you say about ISIS might have very different perceptions e.g. in comparison to a US Navy ad in the US than in the Middle East. Or do only US standards of what is reasonable free speech apply? Why is porn obviously not free speech less than lizard people conspiracies (that's what Dike is propagating).

No they don't. YouTube is very clear that they will remove many types of videos, and even ban accounts.

The degree of a corporation's control over the flow of information matters because the harm done to our society is different.

The problem I always have with this argument is that everyone is undervaluing the unintended consequences of holding companies like YT to the first amendment only. Most people like to image that what they’ll get is more free wheeling discussions on the topic, but in reality all you’ll get is porn.

See, YT bans all kinds of stuff that the first amendment protects, including pornography, violence, and a lot of other nasty stuff that they don’t want on their platform for entirely clear reasons. Eliminate YT’s right to clear those off their site, and it’ll be filled with the lowest common denominator very quickly, as regular users flee from the torrent of unwanted offensive material.

Of course, it’s easy to imagine that we can give YT the right to ban some “offensive” material, but who defines what “offensive” is? The Government? Giving the government the right to control what can and cannot be moderated on YT is kind of contrary to the entire point of this exercise.

If you believe that YT controls too much of the information in our society, then anti-trust or anti-monopoly law is a much richer area for fostering free speech.

You seem to be rather fixated on the "first amendment" lens, while others have their own ideas of the value of the ethical principal of free speech as a means of preventing control over 'that which we are permitted to debate'.

The first amendment is a legal principle with clear implications, limits, and enforcement mechanisms. This makes it much easier to discuss rather than the more nebulous “free speech” which allows everyone to just make up their own definition in-situ, leaving the conversation unmoored from any common definitions.

Aside from that, removing the first amendment from my argument changes very little. You’d still be obliged to create a definition of what is and is not free speech and a mechanism for enforcement, which would be subject to the pitfalls listed above.

>This makes it much easier to discuss

Yes, that's part of my point. That's an incentive to shoehorn, over-simplify, and strawman the ideas and arguments of others.

My actual answer is in the last line, but I'll ramble a bit first. You make an interesting point, but I think there are times in which we can prohibit certain types of posts and comments that might technically be censorship (using the definition of suppression or prohibition of things that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security), but they aren't bad censorship. I would place some sort of test using focus and/or ubiquity.

Focus: if a community has a stated purpose, then it's okay to censor things that don't contribute to the purpose. If I ran a forum dedicated to ham radio, then it's okay to censor topics about NASCAR. Usually forums have a miscellaneous section for off-topic discussion rather than prohibiting it outright.

Ubiquity: if a community is small enough or in a limited setting, it is okay to censor things. It is accepted practice in many households to censor profanity. That's okay, because each family's censorship only applies to a few people. It is okay for a school to censor certain disruptive things (some people may disagree on what is okay to censor), because it's limited. Once a kid goes home they can read a banned book if they choose to.

Unfortunately for YouTube, I think they fail on both the focus and ubiquity tests. YouTube's purpose (from a layman's perspective) is to share videos. If someone uploads a video then they are staying within YouTube's focus, and YouTube has been pretty free with allowing any video as long as it isn't illegal. So they shouldn't be censoring crackpot videos, because they aren't illegal and seem to stay within YouTube's norms. [Some economically minded people might argue that YouTube's true purpose is to sell ads and should censor videos that cause fewer ads to be shown, but YouTube's previous behavior is that they demonetize/pull the ads from controversial videos, not deleting accounts]. And YouTube has clearly crossed the ubiquity threshold, with zillions of views all over the world.

I struggle a bit with whether YouTube should be legally required to follow the First Amendment (they are a US corporation, not a government), but I can say that I think that their deletion of David Icke's account leaves a bad taste in my mouth- not because I like him, but because I worry that YouTube may one day bow to majority pressure and censor a topic in which I belong to the minority.

To get back to your actual point- HN's guidelines are technically censorship, but they are good censorship. It's designed to keep a community focused and to foster good discussion. The best part is that HN's guidelines are easy to understand and seem to be applied consistently. It would be great if YouTube adopted easy to follow policies and would terminate accounts based on clear breaches of policy, rather than just playing whack-a-mole with whatever topic is hot at the moment. There are tons of other videos spreading misinformation on YouTube about other public health topics (the anti-vax movement being a big one), why is David Icke's account being deleted and not theirs? There are tons of other conspiracy theorists on YouTube, why are Alex Jones and David Icke the only ones to get their accounts deleted?

Great set of questions and points.

> I struggle a bit with whether YouTube should be legally required to follow the First Amendment (they are a US corporation, not a government), but I can say that I think that their deletion of David Icke's account leaves a bad taste in my mouth- not because I like him, but because I worry that YouTube may one day bow to majority pressure and censor a topic in which I belong to the minority.

As an aside to this topic, I would be a bit troubled if YouTube were enforcing policies silently without telling stating what they were. In this case, they are stating what those guidelines are, and how the criteria of how they enforce them, although that brings up another point of yours:

> It would be great if YouTube adopted easy to follow policies and would terminate accounts based on clear breaches of policy, rather than just playing whack-a-mole with whatever topic is hot at the moment. There are tons of other videos spreading misinformation on YouTube about other public health topics (the anti-vax movement being a big one), why is David Icke's account being deleted and not theirs? There are tons of other conspiracy theorists on YouTube, why are Alex Jones and David Icke the only ones to get their accounts deleted?

I would surmise it could be a factor of scale, but even if it wasn't I am not sure it necessarily matters. For example, let's say they state their position on an arbitrary policy (unrelated to this latest policy) and let's assume that the users would nearly universally support it. However, let's also say they only take action on "the worst offenders" (of some definition), would it be better for them to not do anything at all until they have the means to capture the majority of videos / users that violate those policies, or start with the larger groups first?

Another way I like to look at these sort of problems is switching the position around in how the platform developed. If YouTube still positioned itself as a general platform from the beginning, but at their very start they stated that any health / medical content must adhere to WHO policies, and then YouTube grew to the ubiquity it is today, I am curious what sort of acceptance we would have for it in today's environment right now. Would it have made YouTube less likely to become as popular, opening the door further for competitors to enter the space?

> However, let's also say they only take action on "the worst offenders" (of some definition), would it be better for them to not do anything at all until they have the means to capture the majority of videos / users that violate those policies, or start with the larger groups first?

One of the most common forms of discrimination is unequally enforced rules: they nominally apply to everyone but are in practice enforced only against an arbitrary subset of violators. For a rule to be fair, whether it’s a law or private policy, enforcement needs to be against an unbiased sample of offenders that’s large enough for the community to see that it’s unbiased. There also needs to be an effective appeals process that can overturn the enforcers’ actions in the cases where they behaved wrongly. Both of these have costs roughly proportional to the number of potential offences.

In YouTube’s case, that’s the number of uploaded videos. They cut costs along the way by neglecting the executive and judicial parts of this process with regard to copyright violations. Now, when they want to institute a new policy (with good reason), they have neither the trust of the community nor the institutions necessary to implement it in a fair manner.

The issue (at least to me) isn't that they can point to a policy that Icke violated, it's that they are arbitrarily ignoring other videos that violate the same policy.

An easy example is that if YouTube chooses delete David Icke's account instead of just demonetizing him, why are they only demonetizing anti-vax accounts but not deleting them? Surely the anti-vax movement has harmed more people than David Icke. Any cynic would notice that David Icke's supporters are crazy but far-right politically, while the anti-vax supporters are crazy but far-left politically. This is a bad look and lets the far-right crazies play the victim card.

A consistently applied and principled set of policies would either let both sets of crazies have their voice, or neither of them. Letting them both have their voice would let YouTube claim to be more of a "pipe" and not have to spend as much effort moderating their content. Censoring both sides obviously takes more effort but is at least defensible. What they have right now is that they spend effort moderating content, but still take flak for it because it looks like they are picking and choosing based on the political winds (which is great when it's your side winning, but the winds can change direction at a moment's notice).

My answer to that would be that YouTube did not de-platform David Icke because of his wacky views, remember he has had an account for ages with no problem. They de-platformed him because he was spreading dangerous misinformation that could endanger lives. For example, the 5G misinformation has led to 5G masts being set on fire and 5G engineers being threatened and (I think) assaulted. Now you can say what you want about free speech, and I largely agree with you, but if someone is spreading dangerous misinformation that is causing people to commit arson and assault then I think that silencing them is a reasonable option.

I think that argument proves too much. It can be applied in many more cases than it actually is, and I can't help but notice certain discrepancies in who gets the banhammer and who is spared.

What about the dangerous misinformation regarding the coronavirus? We had Twitter accounts telling people not to wear masks. Do we ban the WHO[1][2] and the US Surgeon General[3][4] from Twitter? Do we delete the account of NYC's Health Council chair for encouraging public gatherings during a pandemic?[5]

Those proclamations led to far more harm than just property damage, yet none of those accounts have to worry about being censored. If you support banning David Icke for his crazy views because it might have led to a cell tower being damaged, you should definitely support banning all of these accounts for causing thousands of deaths.

1. https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234095938555260929

2. https://twitter.com/WHOWPRO/status/1243171683067777024

3. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321...

4. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12456974534138511...

5. https://twitter.com/MarkLevineNYC/status/1226566648729133056

There is one big difference between sharing the best avaiable information (taking circumstances into account) and conspiracy theories and disinformation. The WHO falls in the first category, Alex Jones and Co. in the latter.

It was definitely not the best information at the time. Everyone knew that masks worked, but many organizations and governments lied to the public because they didn't have enough masks. And how could anyone think that encouraging people to go to crowded public events during a pandemic is the best available information? It was clearly harmful at the time and it's one of the reasons why over 18,000 New Yorkers are now dead from coronavirus.

It's easy to find far more harmful information than a stupid conspiracy theory that almost nobody believes. Here's a fun one: Should we ban all pro-life messages? After all, they reliably lead to some crazies attacking abortion doctors. Should we ban all pro-communist sentiment? Communism led to mass death and starvation in the USSR, China, and North Korea. If there's a more harmful ideology, I have yet to hear it.

Getting back to cell phones: Should we ban anyone who says that cell phones cause cancer? The exact same argument applies: It can cause people to damage cell phone towers and threaten maintenance workers.

There is no coherent framework for censorship that allows these things while also banning 5g conspiracy theories. The double-standard could not be more obvious.

> Everyone knew that masks worked

Well, that's disingenuous at best. There's still fierce debate as to whether it's worth the general public wearing masks.

Pro life? Communism? You're really digging now. How about capitalism? Lots of people die because of capitalism. Shall we ban any debate about capitalism as well?

Freedom of speech is one of those issues that will never be resolved because there are no clear boundaries. We all agree that there are some things that people should not say. That's why we have things like libel/slander laws. I'm sure you wouldn't like it if someone was going around trying to convince people that your father likes to give blow jobs to dobermans. You would, rightfully, want that person stopped. Is that suppression of freedom of speech?

The question is: where does the boundary lie? This is where we have the debates.

> Should we ban anyone who says that cell phones cause cancer?

Possibly. The difference is we have not (to my knowledge) heard any stories of engineers being attacked because of this whereas there have been a number of stories in the news recently of engineers being afraid to go to work because of idiots attacking them because of these ludicrous coronavirus 5G stories.

I find troubling that everyone in an argument pro freedom of speech and first amendment always says it is OK for YouTube to censor "illegal" content, but isn't making content illegal the definition of government censorship? It is a weird argument to come from the free speech proponents.

I think for argument's sake it's not really about what the government decides is illegal or not, it's that there are some areas of "illegal" that YouTube ignores, while choosing to punish (through demonetization or sometimes deleting accounts) other perfectly legal areas. It's not strictly a free speech argument (at least for me), but the inconsistency deserves to be highlighted.

Consider that snuff films are illegal regardless of their method of distribution- nobody is complaining that YouTube (and every other law-abiding distribution method) censors snuff films and nobody is crying about the First Amendment in this case. Nobody complains because there is a clear legal requirement to prohibit this content, superseding any free speech considerations.

Consider a gray area- filming an activity that might be illegal depending on your location or age, such as smoking marijuana. At a federal level in the USA and in a lot of other countries this is illegal, but it's okay in some areas. YouTube is pretty lax about demonetizing or taking down videos about marijuana. Joe Rogan regularly smokes and promotes weed with guests on his podcast, but there is very little pressure on YouTube to do anything about him.

Consider another scenario for comparison- simply talking about guns on your channel. Following Sandy Hook, YouTube started to demonetize channels that just talked about guns but clearly stayed within the legal bounds and did not promote unsafe or illegal behavior, and some channels have been deleted. YouTube is bowing to outside pressure without any legal requirement. And there is a clear discrepancy in who demonetization gets applied to- promoters of gun control get off scot free, but people that promote legal and responsible gun ownership get demonitized.

YouTube arbitrarily deciding to do something about discussing legally owned guns but nothing about promoting a federally illegal drug is not really the hill I want to die on, but I think it illustrates the inconsistency that frustrates some people. A principled and fair censorship policy should definitely allow the gun conversation to happen if you're going to allow the marijuana conversation to happen, and I think the best way to call this out (without writing the several paragraphs above) is to talk about censoring "illegal" content.

The thing is it's impossible to devise effective policies that are "clear cut" to the point where an entity like youtube can apply them effectively over a media platform with the scope and throughput of Youtube.

It's always going to be a game of wack-a-mole. It's wack-a-mole even on HN. These platforms should be free to yank stuff and be responsible to some extent if harmful content is spread through them. As it is now, the threshold for being deplatformed is too high.

Conspiracy peddlers are totally free to choose another platform for their garbage or create one for themselves. Info Wars is still up and running through their own website. They would be far smaller, however, if Youtube had done the right thing and pulled the plug early-- like when Info Wars started spreading Sandy Hook conspiracies.

We're talking like facebook and google ARE the internet. They are not. They're merely platforms analogous to a "hyper newspaper". Like any news paper, they should have the right to put content of their choosing on it and be held accountable for harm spread through it. No one is going to stop maniacs or anyone else with strange viewpoints from printing up xeroxes and handing them out on a public corner -or- putting together a weird website, that's their first amendment right.

"Community" is meaningless enough, "highly effective community" means even less, and squeezing everyone on the planet into one "community" means something else entirely.

Subtle difference: YouTube is the biggest TV channel in the world, by probably an order of magnitude.

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

Obviously they are. Nominally they censor certain content.

That said, not all instances of censorship are equally bad -- e.g. a parent forbidding their kid to swear at strangers, or some small forum like HN is not comparable to a large platform with big global political influence like FB or YouTube.

I see where you’re trying to go with that, but there is a huge gap between “Here are some suggested guidelines for submissions and comments, please try to follow them.”, and “Under no circumstances can you say anything that contradicts the policies of this particular political organization we agree with, repeated violations will result in de-platforming.”

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.

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

We have a myriad of evidence that societies that suppress the truth for "the public good" don't go in a desirable direction or end well.

That isn’t an answer to the question the OP posed, though. And it’s an important question.

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

You missed my point :) Humans, being inherently limited, are always at risk of being wrong. Being wrong about things is the default state. I simply don't think that we should strive to expunge all forms of "misinformation". That is to say, of course people believe misinformation.

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

Ah, I see my point is easily misinterpreted. I find it very plausible (in fact, I outright believe) that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes". Rather, I think the implications of using that fact to justify suppression is inherently dangerous.

Furthermore I think truth, just like the concepts of agency and free will, are useful abstractions for us to operate under. But when examined in their totality, the concepts unravel. Thus I feel that truth is local, not global, and by acting like there is a global form of truth we are only forcing our local-truth onto others in the misguided belief that we can separate truth from our individualized local contexts.

Coming back down to earth for a second, the problem always remains: "who decides what truth is"?

YouTube is perfectly capable of objectively and correctly deciding that David Icke is full of shit.

And the Constitution decides that the truth is that the First Amendment doesn't apply to YouTube. That's an objective truth you seem to be unaware of.

I consider your statement to really be saying the following:

"According to myself, YouTube is perfectly capable of objectively and correctly deciding that David Icke is full of shit."

That's right, because "Lizard People" are technically "Jews", so he's not actually ranting and raving about fictitious lizards, he's ranting and raving about Jews, so maybe he's not technically objectively full of shit because Jews really exist, huh?

But maybe YouTube's lawyers advised them that the First Amendment doesn't apply to them because they're not Congress, so they booted him for anti-semitism, and inciting terrorism, and being a menace to public health, among other subjective but perfectly legal and valid and morally justifiable reasons.

Just as a statement of legal fact, the First Amendment applies to more entities than Congress.

Just to preempt any question, I’m not saying the First Amendment prevents YouTube from not publishing Icke’s content

The idea that in some cases we do not know what is true is valid. The idea that therefore we can never determine what is true and therefore must, in the name of "free speech" support and help anyone say anything is not.

David Icke is not spreading information. He's spreading nonsense about lizard people. That's objectively true.

I personally agree that what David Icke is spreading is a bunch of nonsense. But I'm against suppressing him because otherwise I can't maintain a logically consistent belief system. That is to say, as soon as we can ban the lizard guy, we can also ban a lot more viewpoints that are not quite as controversial / outright crazy but straddle the line.

And just to head this off, the dimension of palatability to advertisers is separate, and if a site chooses to quarantine or whatever, so be it. I'm speaking merely from a framework of, "is this the kind of society we want?", as opposed to, "is it feasible for a profit-seeking corporation to adopt such an open policy"?

It’s very easy to maintain a logically consistent belief system that allows for private censorship. It’s called “the person who owns the servers makes the rules”, and if you don’t like then rules then buy your own servers.

While this kind of censorship bothers me, I think it's funny everyone forgets we're hanging out at Google's house. If Google wants someone to leave their house that person has no right to protest.

What should be protested is that there isn't really anywhere else to go -- and the best form of protest is to build it.

But your belief is already logically inconsistent unless you are saying we should allow porn, animal cruelty, or ISIS propaganda on YouTube (the last one is very clearly suppression of a political opinion, and abhorrent one, but nonetheless).

This is the issue, if you are saying YouTube should allow all content then you need to be consistent and allow all content. If not you really just disagree on what content should be censored, but then you can't make this out to be a censorship vs free speech debate, because you agree on censorship, just not on what gets censored.

Yes?

I mean, Icke is the most clear-cut of examples. Otherwise you end up backing into "nobody is ever qualified to determine the truth of any statement objectively and correctly". Nihilist anti-positivism.

The thing about the coronavirus is that wrong decisions, both by public health and private individuals, produce real body counts. And quite alarmingly high body counts in those countries which have embraced disinformation.

(Before someone starts in on it, the Iraq war was also a body count produced by the embracing of disinformation)

As with all such matters, its about the slippery slope, and setting precedents. The belief is, we can have our cake and eat it too. e.g. we will allow free speech, except for the egregious cases like X, Y, Z. The problem of course is, who defines egregious, and can it be objectively defined?

Can you expand what you mean by "truth is local"?

I'm asking, because I see it as the complete opposite. The rules of physics apply all over the world and outside of the planet. Yes, some patterns of reality are only found in a specific place on this planet (cultural values, for example), but things like whether COVID-19 is caused by 5G does not.

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

It doesn't. That's precisely why Icke's ban is necessary: he was incredibly popular.

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

The existence of technology as well as science.

Science and technology is advanced by a tiny community of humans, relative to the species as a whole. I don't think it works as evidence for "more often", rather it is evidence for the amazing results that can come when the truth wins even within a small group.

The question was not "do you have evidence the truth wins more often than lies for the species as a whole"; there was no specific context implied as I read it. So, do you have evidence lies win more often than the truth for the species as a whole?

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

>The existence of technology as well as science.

Simply put, the second statement is not evidence to satisfy the request in the first statement.

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

Some people, after being given the opportunity to gamble, choose to place a bet, even when it has a negative expected value. Should Nevada ban blackjack?

Some people, after being given the opportunity to buy insurance, choose to buy insurance, even when it has a negative expected value. Should we ban insurance? If not, what about credit default swaps?

The reason central planning doesn't work is that everything is much too complicated for a central planner to be able to make good decisions about everything. People who are close to a thing know it better than people who are far away, so the decision is best left to the individual. It's their life, they're the one with the best incentive to get it right.

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

Let us take this question to its logical conclusion and apply it to the censors. If the censors can't tell the truth from the lie then they may end up censoring the truth instead -- oops. But how are they any more qualified to decide this than anybody else?

This is doubly true when you're talking about a platform. As if YouTube has "medical expertise" in its bailiwick.

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

That is absolutely possible. But maybe then the answer is to design them differently rather than keeping the bad design while throwing hatchets at random civilians because somebody who themselves has no unique competence thinks they might be wrong about something.

As an example of your point. At some point in the past the censors would have gotten the truth wrong on the cancer/smoking connection. Believe it or not, that began as a fringe belief.

Do you have evidence that censorship wins over lies? Considering that one of the most fundamental and important US laws is freedom of speech, it behooves you to prove that censorship works, not that free speech works.

The fact that the first amendment exists is strong evidence that censorship works. If it didn’t work, why is it so important to prevent the government from censoring people? After all, censorship is futile right?

The question is who censorship "works" for. In most cases it works for despotic dictatorships.

They too switched to misinformation, direct control of media, supression of independent media, etc.

This kind of transparent content removal is not what dictatorships do.

It depends on how much control they have. You'll find no pro-free-market content on Kwangmyong.

You'll instead find the artisanal hand-crafted propaganda, and you won't find constructive criticism. Usually you'll find massive tomes of apologetics full of self-pity and victimization, and of course absolute hope that Dear Leader will still solve this even if the world is against him.

Is there some kind of "list of prohibited books" in NK (like the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in the 16th century)? I guess not, because anything that's not allowed is by default prohibited?

> I guess not, because anything that's not allowed is by default prohibited?

Yes, at least for online content. As far as I understand it, a researcher who wants access to some out-of-country material has to manually submit a request. The censors then download the article or page, go through it, and pass it on if it's found acceptable. In addition, no single computer has access both to the global internet and to the intranet.

I meant physical books, or whatever. I mean is there some contrived reasoning on why those books are too dangerous, or otherwise prohibited? (Like it was with the Papal Index.)

If anything, history shows that eventually, censorship will only allow the lies of those in power.

History also shows that eventually those regimes fall too.

The question should be which set of policies maximizes the power of the informed general citizens relative the incumbents and the irrationals (or very-very boundedly rationals).

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.

The idea that you can convert people who hold racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic or other repulsive thought by just presenting them better facts is of course naive. We have the entirety of human history that shows that the liberal idea of a market place of ideas is ridiculous. It doesn’t work, if only because for example the far right isn’t playing the same game and isn’t interested in fair debate.

Lots of people change their views. Lots of people were racist and aren't now.

> The idea that you can convert people who hold racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic or other repulsive thought by just presenting them better facts is of course naive.

What? We have countless examples of it. What world are you living in? It's free speech, facts, ideas that change individuals and society.

> We have the entirety of human history that shows that the liberal idea of a market place of ideas is ridiculous.

Entire human history? What are you talking about. For most of history, censorship was the norm. That's what made america and our concept of "free speech" unique and exceptional. It was new and rare.

> It doesn’t work, if only because for example the far right isn’t playing the same game and isn’t interested in fair debate.

Neither are the far left - which in america is the greater threat. But guess what? Neither the far right or the far left can take over the US precisely because of free speech. We can call them out. Which is what you are really upset about.

The best protection against extremist far right and far left lunatics is free speech. Also, one of the easiest way to spot far right and far left lunatics is their hatred of free speech.

I'm sorry to burst your bubble but the best protection is not free speech and studies have shown cognitive bias enables people to effectively ignore what disrupts their beliefs.

http://ubplj.org/index.php/jpm/article/view/974 In fact we've known this for some time https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fh0082790

And very likely you yourself are also affected, in this case by your very belief in free speech. You hold it so intimately that it has become a core of your own self.

The fatal flaw in your argument is that "cognitive bias enables people to effectively ignore what disrupts their beliefs" applies to the people with the power to censor as well.

> I'm sorry to burst your bubble

Thank god for free speech which allows people to burst bubbles.

> but the best protection is not free speech and studies have shown cognitive bias enables people to effectively ignore what disrupts their beliefs.

I know, that's why free speech is important. If people are shown to be cognitively biased, then censorship is the worst thing for society since it keeps people in their bias. Yes, people can ignore whatever they want. It's life. How is censorship an answer here?

> And very likely you yourself are also affected, in this case by your very belief in free speech.

My belief in free speech comes from getting an education and actually thinking about it.

> You hold it so intimately that it has become a core of your own self.

Oh god. This is so obvious and pathetic projecting.

Using your logic, you should be against censorship as it fosters cognitive biases and enables people to live in their bubbles. Without free speech, abolition movement, civil rights movement, lgbt movement, etc can't happen. Without free speech, countries and cultures can't discuss ideas and progress.

Once again, ask yourself why nazi germany, soviet union, north korea, etc love censorship? And ask yourself why you love censorship. It's for the same exact reason. Control and wanting to protect your bubble.

The difference between you and me is that I don't mind my bubble being challenged or bursted. My bubble didn't become a "core of myself". But you, obviously have an agenda and beliefs that you don't want challenged and you want to hold onto your pathetic bubble as long as you can.

You want people think exactly like you, believe things that you believe in and don't want anything challenging it. Just like nazi germany, islamic extremists, communist china, etc.

No one thinks that. They just present that argument as a way to head-off such ideas from being marginalized and ostracized.

> Booting people off of platforms merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them. > Let the truth fight for itself.

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 believe in shining a light on them

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.

> I've never seen a bad or immoral or harmful idea die out when more people learn about it and scrutinize it.

Communism.

> I hear this a lot. Light is the best disinfectant. What evidence do you have for this?

The propensity of totalitarian governments to censor dissidents is proof of it.

Ah, but it's not bad when we're censoring the wrong opinions, don't you see?

/s if it wasn't obvious.

I know that HN is an international community but it's based in the US and most users are Americans. In the US, you need strong evidence of negative repercussions to restrict speech, and even then it's extremely difficult, due to the 1st amendment being one of the most important laws of the land. It's not the other way around - evidence is not needed to show that allowing speech is helpful.

That's just not true though. In the US the rights of property trumps the rights of Freedom of Speech in 99% of cases.

If someone puts up a cardboard box on my property and begins a speech, I have the right to kick them off of my property. We have 'Free Speech Zones' which we kick protesters into so that their exertion of their rights doesn't bother other people. We have cases of senators getting people arrested solely because they laughed at them.

And that's ignoring our long history of suppressing people based on their race or origin. Black Americans are the first ones that come to mind, but we treated Italians and Asians as second-class citizens not that long ago as well. We've had this 'freedom of speech' right enshrined but not at all interpreted like people seem to think it was.

"one of the most important" != "The most powerful"

That's not what the first amendment says. The first amending only stops the government from enacting laws that limit speech. Private companies and individuals are free to limit speech however they like on their own platforms and environments (within the bounds of the law of course).

The first amendment is like 50 words long, you should read it.

No need for snark. Of course I've read the first amendment. I'm speaking of speech in general. This post is about censorship by private entities, but there is current of thought in this thread that speech should be restricted in general.

> most [HN] users are Americans.

Apparently, that's not true. I initially had that strong impression too, from the way estadounidenses talk on here, (like as if everyone in the world lives under US constitutional amendments etc) but I heard the majority are non-US. Last I heard, HN might have another survey on that question soon. I hope so, I'd love to know what the numbers actually are.

What you are missing is the bad, immoral and harmful ideas that perpetuate themselves by virtue of being proclaimed true by the authorities. Every totalitarian regime out there perpetuates a set of such 'official truths', that are painfully and obviously untrue to the subjects, but have to be aquiesced to.

There's even a saying for this: "A lie can travel half-way around the globe before the truth gets done putting its shoes on."

> 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.

Really? Seems to me like there is a resurgence in hate and ignorance right now and deplatforming seems to only be adding fuel to the fire.

You don’t see a pattern? We went from questionable analysis of COVID cases by actual doctors last week, over to 5G coronavirus conspiracy theories this week.

This is the proverbial slippery slope, albeit a bit anachronistic as the more egregious case is the latter (5G conspiracy), so the escalation is unable to be painted by the sequence.

I’d also ask you consider that your line of thinking as a framework has been misused throughout history, often in the context of censorship.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair

Of course, the obvious retort is that these people aren’t Galileo, but I’m arguing that this framework is bad on a societal level.

The '5G coronavirus conspiracy theory' is a convenient broad brush to paint any dissident thought as inane, even if 99% people entertaining dissident thoughts are just as appalled as anyone at the 5G theory.

are 99% of people entertaining dissident thoughts getting banned from youtube?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23063265

> We have a myriad of evidence that societies that suppress the truth for "the public good" don't go in a desirable direction or end well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23063531

> Are you saying that the truth is "Covid-19 is caused by 5-g towers"?

So you already do things like this for, say, rap music. Right?

"More importantly, I've also seen the opposite: Private platforms actively suppressing people trying to harm humanity does work."

On who, really? David Icke and the dude from infowars? Are these the big players in the harming humanity business? I don't think so. I'd go as far as to say they're irrelevant. David Icke was a crank on youtube and now he's a crank off youtube-- which might sound significant until you remember he was a crank before youtube, and could well be a crank after youtube.

The big players, the significant forces harming humanity, they won't be challenged by private platforms, because the private platforms need their money, or need access to them, or in some other way have their interests entangled.

The problem is that your bad ideas are my rules to live by.

Canceling the spread of ideas itself because you disagree with it or fear that others may agree is downright scary.

> I've never seen a bad or immoral or harmful idea die out when more people learn about it and scrutinize it.

Leaded gasoline, phlogiston, cold fusion, phrenology, scientific racism, basically the entire history of the progress of science.

But let's also not forget that you're asking for a list of discredited ideas, so you wouldn't have heard of them, by definition, if things are working as they should, because they're wrong and the former proponents have long since abandoned trying to disseminate them to you.

> 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.

If all you're doing is defining "work" as "the censorship target was censored" then you're not claiming anything. When you kick these people off of major platforms, they don't cease to exist, they break off like an extremist splinter group and go to a place with no moderating influences to fester. You don't see them anymore, but they're still there, and then suddenly somehow Donald Trump is the President of the United States and people can't believe it and don't understand how it happened.

> In fact, social pressure is one of the most effective tools against hate and ignorance like this.

Censorship isn't social pressure, it's force. Social pressure is telling wrong people why they're wrong, every time.

People who are wrong need to be made right, not made frustrated and angry and yet not only still wrong but now even more convinced that their wrong ideas are right because they now have real evidence that they're not getting a fair public debate.

> Leaded gasoline, phlogiston, cold fusion, phrenology, scientific racism, basically the entire history of the progress of science.

The progress of science wasn't driven by nutjobs delivering spittle-flecked rants on Youtube. Almost all of it was driven by careful peer review of ideas -- which is the exact opposite of unrestricted speech.

"E pur si muove...!"

Galileo didn't deliver spittle-flecked rants either. He carefully gathered evidence and wrote it up, and his ideas gained acceptance by peer review.

Let's have a word about gay rights then. Once upon a time a pride parade full of rainbow hair dye and BDSM leather and face paint and drag queens and hairy-chested shirtless men would have been right next to your "spittle-flecked rants" in the proper gentleman's book of ways not to get your message out, but I wouldn't want to be the one to say that they should have been censored over it.

Not everybody is a traditional upperclass gentleman and not everybody who isn't is wrong.

But that's not actually how it worked out. Gay marriage didn't go from an unpopular stance to a popular one throughout the 2000s by displays like this. If anything, they were used as ammunition by people strongly against gay marriage in order to slow the change in public opinion.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-ri...

First you show the world you exist and convince your friends it's worth trying to change things, then you convince the moderates, then you win the fight, then you wait for your bitter enemies to die because they'll never be convinced but at least their kids are open to new ideas.

Pissing off your bitter enemies can be hard to avoid and still get the job done.

But this article is making my exact point. By the time gay marriage was actually gaining acceptance, the largest pride parades had become as tame as 4th of July celebrations, with SF pride marching with the police, the mayor, and Google employees. They're completely different from their predecessors, like the Stonewall riots.

Because it's a different stage of the fight. You don't start off having a parade with the mayor in it because the mayor won't give you the time of day until your movement is big enough to be taken seriously, which starts with getting noticed and getting out the base. Being bland and studious doesn't do that.

And the parades are still full of weirdos, but they won, so now it's okay.

The point stands that even these seemingly "queer", radically expressed ideas clearly became a lot tamer, less insolently-stated and more agreeable over time, despite the lack of anything approaching real censorship. That's precisely what you want if you care about not harming society at large, especially in the longer run.

> That's precisely what you want if you care about not harming society at large, especially in the longer run.

Please, explain: how do queer ideas harm society, in the longer run?

My whole point is that censorship is what harms society, not ideas themselves.

Regardless of whether they helped public perception, should they have been censored until public opinion caught up?

Actually, Galileo did largely deliver self-aggrandizing spittle-flecked rants, full of personal attacks against other astronomers, which were complete rubbish. His arguments for why the Earth revolved around the Sun were complete nonsense, and were more theological, than scientific in nature.

His contemporaries were not particularly impressed, but he probably wouldn't have been censored, if he also didn't try his damned hardest to personally piss off everyone in his social circle.

His 'efforts' probably set the adoption of heliocentrism back by decades.

Interesting, do you have further reading on this to recommend?

If you have a few hours to kill, page through this:

https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...

And Isaac Newton did a lot of work in alchemy, occult studies and predictions of the apocalypse founded in the period equivalent to the "Bible code". I don't know why people assume that the foremost scientists in recorded history did not benefit from an overall intellectually-open social climate and worldview. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Galileo in particular was prosecuted by the Catholic church for making spittle flecked rants against the Pope. Much like a modern YouTuber, he then pretended he was persecuted for his science.

Those ideas were originated by careful peer review of ideas— they were put into practice by unrestricted discussion proliferating throughout the populous.

Peer review being so widespread and regarded as necessary is remarkably recent, and it's not at all clear that it's necessary or terribly effective for science.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/the... has some indications that peer reviewers generally don't do a great job.

When did scientific racism die out? Mainstream US publications are still publishing op-eds that assume scientific racism is a legitimate topic. This has been going on since the country was founded. I'm not sure how effective a disinfectant sunlight is if it takes centuries to work.

> When did scientific racism die out? Mainstream US publications are still publishing op-eds that assume scientific racism is a legitimate topic.

I encourage you to review some of the early to mid 20th-century publications on the topic. "Science" backing segregation. Americans pontificating about whether Hitler was right or that blacks should be sterilized, and then actually doing it. Doctors. In hospitals. "Three generations of imbeciles are enough" from the US Supreme Court.

If you think we're in the same state now as we were then, you don't know where we were then.

> I'm not sure how effective a disinfectant sunlight is if it takes centuries to work.

You would prefer the alternative where anything contradicting the then-prevailing doctrine of racial supremacy and eugenics was censored? How long does the truth take to get out in that case? And what happens in the meantime?

The body of opinions designated as scientific racism has changed over time. Giving the parent the benefit of the doubt, I took their statement to be referencing traditional scientific racism, such as that which rested on craniometry and other bizarre pseudoscience.

Vigilante lynch mobs instead of a justice system also do work.

The problem is who decides what's a "bad idea"? Every group has its own list, whether it's Scientology, the CCP, NAMBLA, PITA, etc. What group do you trust with defining your list of "bad ideas"? Historically the "bad idea" list has been generated by whoever rules/controls you. Why do you think it's different this time?

Yes, this is a completely valid question. In this specific case: Do you think it's bad for YouTube to be active in reducing the spread of this information? Because to me it's almost self evident it shouldn't be entertained as a valid idea.

I might also ask why you aren't protesting Hacker News having moderators? Content is deleted from this platform all the time.

Again, the issue is the abuse of power. Google is very nearly a quasi-government organization. They have endless government contracts, they spend more on DC lobbying than anyone else, and they actively share data with US intelligence agencies.

At some point, the laws that protect us from government, must also apply to these massive quasi-government monopolies - or they quickly become worthless.

> At some point, the laws that protect us from government, must also apply to these massive quasi-government monopolies - or they quickly become worthless.

Except that Google cannot arrest you, prosecute you, sentence you to prison or limit any other right you might have. The best that they can do is no longer letting your voice be heard on their service because you have violated one of their _stated_ guidelines. If corporations were doing this in secret, that's a little bit different, but Google is being very forthcoming on the guidelines they are setting.

I would venture that the government should be protecting its people from misinformation like Icke's (after all, they enforce things like "truth in advertising", "medicines must state side effects", etc.) and not leaving it up to YouTube.

The problem is, the "protection" and "regulation" quickly become tools to eliminate your political enemies. In some ways this is already happening in the western world.

We are becoming what we used to oppose against to.

Is protection against fraudulent advertising, poisonous food, products, and "medicine" being used to eliminate political enemies? If so, is it not worth it to limit the ability to lie to prevent the massive ensuing harm?

> I might also ask why you aren't protesting Hacker News having moderators? Content is deleted from this platform all the time.

You don't see the difference between debating whether there should be moderators and debating what those moderators should do?

Nobody is questioning whether YouTube should moderate its platform. We are questioning how they moderate it.

Moderators don't delete content on HN in the sense of removing it altogether. The most we do is kill it, meaning remove it from the default view of the site—but anyone with 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile can still see it.

I think it's a silly analogy because sunlight won't do squat for many infections. There are clearly better disinfectants out there.

But in terms of speech, a better quote is: the best response to bad speech is good speech.

That's an idealistic statement but a false one. Bullshit is much easier to produce than truth, and is inherently much more appealing, because it isn't constrained by having to be true.

For example, the "good speech" counterpart of David Icke is a number of real experts who are taking to Twitter and blogs. I've seen a few. They usually have single digit reach. In five minutes, Icke can reach a larger audience than all of them combined throughout their entire lives.

Perhaps you'd prefer a quote like: the best response to bad speech is an authoritarian censor with unlimited powers to silence and imprison people? Because if your only criterion is effectiveness at silencing someone I think that misses the point. Built into the statement is the idea that otherwise the cure (censorship) is worse than the disease.

This slope isn't nearly as slippery as you're saying. If YouTube began issuing a million times more bans, it might approach the quality of an average newspaper in terms of accuracy. Would we be living in a dystopia at that point? No, we'd be living just like we did in the year 2000, when YouTube wasn't around but newspapers were. Just like a nutjob in 2000, Icke still has print, radio, TV, going outside with a megaphone, and going door to door with pamphlets to promote his message. In fact, he's even luckier, because he still has access to the entire rest of the internet.

Indeed, the fact that we're here discussing Icke's massive popular impact is proof that in 2020, there is far more free speech than there was in 2000, when he was mostly ignored. 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%.

I'm not making a slippery-slope argument or freaking out over anything. Just noting the metric you are using will always prefer a more authoritarian response. I.e., did the policy work to silence every example I can find for any conspiracy theory that might survive to gain attention? Defenders of free speech obviously want us to take the bad with the good.

As for the internet, I think of it as technology that brings advances also brings new problems. Sometimes we just have to accept them.

Not that I'm against YouTube censoring their content as a private company, by the way. Just defending a quote here.

> I'm not making a slippery-slope argument

> Perhaps you'd prefer a quote like: the best response to bad speech is an authoritarian censor with unlimited powers to silence and imprison people?

This is literally the slippery slope argument.

And I say it isn't. Speaking of logical arguments, you haven't really brought a lot to the table, by the way.

And you've misused "literally".

There are huge differences between YouTube (a platform for user-generated content) and a newspaper (a publisher). The latter curates and is legally responsible for anything it publishes, the former isn't.

I think YouTube is a lot closer to AT&T than to the New York Times.

Maybe legalistically it is, but my point is that it's like the NYT and radio and print in the sense that these are all routes for one-to-many communication. Restricting one route of one-to-many communication isn't the end of the world. (Meanwhile, AT&T facilitated one-to-one communication. It would indeed be horrifying to censor that -- which is why precisely nobody in this giant comments section is advocating for it, nor is it going to happen.)

Why is censoring one-to-many communication so much less horrifying? One-to-many communication is integral for any social or political action.

Because, as I said a couple comments ago, the degree of one-to-many communication available to people has been continuously skyrocketing for decades, and currently stands at levels far beyond any seen in history. Even the heaviest possible strawman-censorship one could imagine on Youtube would only erase a small part of this rise. That's because the internet has allowed one-to-many communication to massively scale up, while almost by definition one-to-one communication can't.

Totally disagree. Sure the degree of one-to-many communication has greatly increased, but it's been mostly concentrated within the top platforms. Losing access to those would be severely limiting. And no, an email blast isn't a proper alternative to Facebook, any ideas kicked off of major platforms would be at a severe disadvantage.

I feel like we're going in circles here. Even if every single site and app coordinated to kick off David Icke, he would end up, at worst, as silenced as the average American in the year 2000. It just doesn't seem all that bad to me.

No, that's simply not true. The forums of pubic discourse from before do not exist anymore, the collective's attention has moved. If you lose the megaplatforms, you are much worse off than someone in 2000.

What forums are you talking about? Radio, mail, TV, and newspapers still have audiences of hundreds of millions. Internet forums are in decline, but those have always had completely negligible public reach (as in, down by more than 2 orders of magnitude) compared to the others.

The audience of the things you've listed has shrunk dramatically, in terms of percentage at the very least. Just look at where ad dollars have been moving for the past 15 years.

> 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.

There is a significant amount of evidence for it. For example, one could measure the effects of showing people fact-checks, and it has been demonstrated that it does indeed work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact-checking#Effects

And there are countless ideas that have died out when more people learn. It's easy to forget about them, precisely because they do die off. A few big ones that were held by the majority but died out:

- flat earth (before Galileo)

- pro-slavery views

- human sacrifice

- caning children

- hanging

- smoking is good for you

- communism

- laws against gay marriage

> In fact, social pressure is one of the most effective tools against hate and ignorance like this

It can be used to enforce hate and ignorance as well. It's naive to think that the way you propose enforcing it would be different to all other times in history when it was used.

Most of those ideas didn't die out because one day people found out about them, and then we put an end to them.

Most of them _everyone_ knew about for thousands, or even tens of thousands of years, why didn't this "sunlight" disinfect them?

Because "sunlight" includes the norms of a free and intellectually-open society, which didn't develop until well after those thousands of years. Censorship itself is not even that bad merely due to how it might deal with the YouTube fruitcake du jour; it's really, really bad because it's openly destructive of these hard-gained shared norms, in so many ways.

Maybe, but the argument is that mere public existence of an idea effectively promotes correct ideas and demotes incorrect ideas.

That is absolutely not in evidence.

My comment wasn't about whether people knew these practices were occurring. People knew they were occurring.

The mere public existence of an idea (like in some dusty old book that nobody reads) is not sufficient to change majority option, no.

Sure it is. All kinds of ideas died when information became readily available, even when the authorities tried to suppress them.

For example, the idea of a nobility class.

Past results do not guarantee future performance.

This is a pretty low effort comment, but more importantly is conceding the several upthread assertions that freedom of speech has historically been effective at correcting bad ideas.

If your claim is that we shouldn't expect this to continue in the future, that's a whole new claim that you need to support.

I mean, a teleological view of history and ethics is just so absurd that it disturbs me that professed "rational" scientifically minded people believe it. There's no basis for believing just because things "tend" to get better that is in itself a causative argument about some intrinsic nature of humanity.

I mean, even the example used ("the noble class") is preposterous on face because:

1. The Russian Revolution? Germany 1849? Even the American Revolution? None of these are about ideas, or "shining the light on ignorance" -- they're about putting the nobility up against the wall. If there's some kind of teleology at play here, it's not that we thought about it in the marketplace of ideas long enough and decided to do away with the concept.

2. Nobility still exists! At best, this just means we live in a secular society, where we no longer believe the Word of God justifies massive inequality.

All the events you list happened in the wake of the enlightenment, the period when ideas challenging the validity of the dominance of the monarchies, nobles and the church were disseminated and popularised in large part due to the invention of the printing press - i.e., an instrument of free speech.

This either trivially true, in the sense that the Western canon builds on itself, or patently absurd, in the sense that you attempt to frame the 1918 revolution as being a mere effect of the invention of the printing press 500 years earlier. Neither strikes me as being particularly rigorous historiography.

> particularly rigorous historiography

It was one-line discussion-board summation of what is widely accepted by historians (as you said, "trivially true"), but if you'd like to share an explanation of how the spread of ideas leading to the revolutions of Europe could have happened without an innovation that had the same effect as the printing press did, I'd be intrigued to to read it.

> patently absurd

So far, three of your replies in this thread alone have contained the word "absurd".

They probably all break the HN guidelines ("Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation", and "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says").

But more importantly, you're too busy sneering at other people's comments to make any positive assertion of your own.

So what is it you actually want to persuade us of, about the appropriate levels of constraints on speech in the modern world?

> If you'd like to share an explanation of how the spread of ideas leading to the revolutions of Europe could have happened without an innovation that had the same effect as the printing press ded, I'd be genuinely intrigued to to read it.

History is more complicated than a single invention! It's needlessly reductive.

I could also say: "how could have the revolutions of Europe happened without mercantile capitalism challenging the economic structures of feudalism?" But that's just imposing a post-hoc narrative on history that happens to fit my existing views.

> So what is it you actually want to persuade us of, about the appropriate levels of constraints on speech in the modern world.

My sole reason for participating in this thread is to firmly reject idealism and the teleological view of history. Ideas aren't magic. Technology isn't either.

(P.S. it's kind of hilarious that you're invoking HN rules regarding my speech in the same breath as you are defending the merits of free speech.)

> History is more complicated than a single invention

Yes, of course, I never claimed otherwise. But some concepts are more fundamental and influential than others, and the flow of information is more fundamental and influential than most.

> My sole reason for participating in this thread is to firmly reject idealism and the teleological view of history. Ideas aren't magic. Technology isn't either.

If that's all you're trying to say, then, OK, thanks for pointing that out.

> it's kind of hilarious that you're invoking HN rules regarding my speech in the same breath as you are defending the merits of free speech

Fine, have your free point :)

But dismissing everyone else's comments as "absurd", "preposterous", "hilarious" etc whilst not making any effort to construct a solid assertion about the main topic is just a waste of everyone's time.

> Nobility still exists!

Only as formality in some countries. In America, there are some people who call the Kennedys "America's aristocracy", call JFK's white house "Camelot", and make references to members of the Kennedy family being "entitled" to office, but there's no legal basis for it.

Apartheid in South Africa is also gone.

> All kinds of ideas died when information became readily available > For example, the idea of a nobility class.

America literally has a nobility class right now. The UK isn't far off.

> America literally has a nobility class right now.

Literally nope. For example, there is no law that says the word of one group of people is worth more in court than another group. There are no laws saying only certain people can be in power based on their ancestors. There is no law enshrining divine right.

> For example, there is no law that says the word of one group of people is worth more in court

And yet.

> There are no laws saying only certain people can be in power based on their ancestors.

And yet. Just because there are no explicit written laws does not mean this doesn't happen every single day in multiple ways.

Common people with nobody parents routinely wind up as Presidents, Senators, Representatives, and SC Justices.

I think "routinely" is overstating it. These days, "infrequently" is probably more accurate. US politics is very much of the monied, for the monied. Without a huge warchest, barring odd circumstances[1], you've got little chance of making it through the various filters.

[1] e.g an extremely unpopular incumbent against a popular challenger with excellent ground game.

> politics is very much of the monied, for the monied

This is somewhat true of course (though Obama is a notable recent exception).

Indeed it's pretty true in most countries and systems of government (though my closest experience is here in Australia, where all our prime ministers going back almost 40 years, and most others in our ~120 year history, have come from modest origins).

But the topic at hand is freedom of speech/expression.

Whose interests are likely to be served, ultimately, by constraints on speech/expression?

Those already holding power, or those seeking to reform/subvert the system?

Let's look at Presidents:

Obama - commoner

Clinton - commoner

Reagan - commoner

Carter - commoner

Ford - commoner

Nixon - commoner

Truman - commoner

Sounds like routinely to me.

Why has the goalpost moved from an idea dying out, to dying out within one day? And who is "we"?

> Most of them _everyone_ knew about for thousands, or even tens of thousands of years

That's not true. People didn't know about it. When the sunlight came, people changed their beliefs relatively quickly compared to how long the false beliefs were held. Sometimes within a few years, but generally within a generation.

Do you really think people at large didn't know about hanging, slavery, human sacrifice, and ideas about a flat earth in societies where these ideas were applicable?

I meant they didn't know the truth about them. They obviously knew that slavery was occurring.

So you're arguing that once the public knows the truth... then the public will know the truth? Does sound like a rather weak claim, doesn't it?

No.

stevebmark said "I've never seen a bad or immoral or harmful idea die out when more people learn about it and scrutinize it"

So I gave examples of some ideas that did in fact die out when people learned about them and scrutinized them. My argument was that it's naive to think censoring ideas this time will be on the right side of history.

Not only that, the truth as it's taught in history books was relatively short-lived. Prior to mercantilism and the industrial revolution, slavery and serfdom were basically equivalent. There was a lord and you worked for them in exchange for room and board and protection. You might not love it, but there wasn't really anywhere else to go for anybody who couldn't raise a military force and become a lord themselves.

Then suddenly there were factories who would hire anybody who showed up and pay them real money and plantation workers started running off to work in the factories left and right. It was no longer that people stayed because they had no better option, they were then being forced to stay against their will. The dynamic changed. Chains and beatings entered the scene to keep slaves from running off. They did anyway, so their replacements had to be forcefully kidnapped because there were no longer any volunteers.

The whole thing collapsed and was dismantled in a relatively short period of time after that.

I mean, like many things, this just comes down to axioms that ground your meta-ethics. I don't find moral Platonism very convincing.

There's no natural inclination of humans towards justice or injustice, beyond the limits of our own psychology. To me, the idea that there is some internal teleology towards justice is absurd. These are material struggles and material gains that must be defended materially.

We should reject this kind of naive idealism.

I also reject platonism. I really don't mean to imply changing these norms was easy, or is only a matter of putting the information out there disregarding material conditions and then just hoping for the best.

It seems that having free speech is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition to improve society. It's a principle worth defending.

I think that framing ("necessary but not sufficient") is a much more productive way that I wish free speech advocates would use more.

My opposition to censorship derives from the fact that it tends to require an unjustified hierarchy (i.e. the violence of the state).

However, I have a real problem with imparting some kind of magical quality to ideas. I'm particularly annoyed by the way in which free speech advocates act like social norms are a form of censorship. More specifically, that free speech requires platforming -- i.e., rejecting a freedom of association.

While I do think that the power companies like Google exert of society is well wroth investigating, in general I find that these are much weaker examples of the use of force to censor ideas.

> Most of them _everyone_ knew about for thousands, or even tens of thousands of years

This is false.

For most of the past several thousand years of history, "knowledge" has been imposed and speech has been restricted by religious and/or political decree.

Freedom of speech, along with the value of the individual, are enlightenment values - i.e., they have only been around for a couple of hundred years, and even then only in a few parts of the world, and even then they have continued to be suppressed and assaulted at every opportunity.

But those of us who have been lucky enough to grow up in societies that have relatively high levels of freedom of speech and freedom of the individual can easily take these freedoms for granted.

But if you look at all the positive societal changes that are espoused by people who believe in liberal values: workers' rights, women's rights (to vote, work, refuse or leave marriage, own property, drive), equality and rights for racial/religious minorities, immigrants, the disabled, gay people, etc; these changes have happened first where there has been the greatest freedom of speech.

Yes I know it's unpleasant to hear speech that feels uncomfortable or dangerous, but be assured it is immeasurably better than the alternative.

Edit:

For what it's worth, I've been paying attention to the David Icke story since he first appeared on London Real a few weeks ago, and I'm a financial supporter of an investigative reporter who has gone deep researching and revealing the possibility that this whole thing looks like a financial scam by London Real.

It looks every bit like The Streisand Effect is at work here, and that YouTube's ban of Icke is only serving to amplify his signal, increase his following and generate huge amounts of money for London Real (and possibly Icke too).

So it's the Hydra myth playing out yet again. Be careful what you wish for.

> flat earth (before Galileo)

That people thought the Earth was flat before Galileo is a meme. Even Ancient Greeks knew it was round.

> pro-slavery views

In 1776, America is born with its Freedom(TM). In 1829, Mexico abolishes slavery. In 1835, Texas revolts, resulting in Republic of Texas (1836), which then merges with the US (1846), which triggers the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), which leads to, among other things, recognition that Texas is a part of a slave-holding nation. Slavery won't be abolished until the Civil War (1861-1865).

In the end, slavery wasn't abolished by debates: it was abolished by literally sending troops to shoot slave owners.

> communism

Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital in London while writing articles for New-York Daily Tribune. Whatever its merits are, his ideas were widely known throughout Europe, and still accepted widely enough to turn Russia into Soviet Union.

> That people thought the Earth was flat before Galileo is a meme. Even Ancient Greeks knew it was round.

Well knowledge wasn't spread as easily, and could be lost. People knew, then they didn't and so on. It doesn't detract from my point that flat earth is an example of an idea that died off when more people learn about it and scrutinize it.

> In the end, slavery wasn't abolished by debates: it was abolished by literally sending troops to shoot slave owners.

Abolishment of slavery took many angles since it was a massive change of society. Sure, you can pick one country where it required a war. But that doesn't mean the battle of ideas aspect is any less important. Even to rally troops you need to convince them their ideas are worth fighting for.

> (communism) still accepted widely enough to turn Russia into Soviet Union

Sure, and then we saw the results, and the bad idea died off (mostly)

Have you not noticed that the most populous country in the world is run by a self-identifying Communist Party?

And the USSR, #4 was Communist until it collapsed economically, not intellectually?

Communism collapsed intellectually in the West after the economic collapse of the USSR and the relevant death tolls. I know China is communist, but in democratic countries, for the most part, communism is an idea that died off.

It's on the rise again. https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article237089274.h...

I'd say it died off for generations because of active deplatforming of anyone involved rather than an open debate on the merits. For instance it was literally illegal to be a communist in the US due to the Communist Control Act of 1954.

China is not communist, at least not in any way related to the western definition. There is no common ownership of the means of production and there is still very much an independent state, money, and social classification.

> That people thought the Earth was flat before Galileo is a meme. Even Ancient Greeks knew it was round.

And no number of people saying this seems to make this meme go away.

Facts don't generally change people's minds.

Google "do facts convince people" and you'll see lots of stuff about this. Here's one, from scientificamerican.com...

> In a series of experiments by Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan and University of Exeter professor Jason Reifler, the researchers identify a related factor they call the backfire effect “in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.” Why? “Because it threatens their worldview or self-concept.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-convince-s...

Yes that is a good point. The link I gave mentions that study, and says it has failed replication attempts. I think the truth is more nuanced - there are ways it can be more effective and yes sometimes counter-effective. But that doesn't mean we should just give up fact-checking entirely. I think there are several ways we can make corrective fact checking more convincing to people and am working on building a collaborative fact-checker https://verifact.io to try to do that

> - flat earth (before Galileo)

I believe this isn't true - the sphericity of the Earth was widely believed well before Galileo.

> - human sacrifice > - laws against gay marriage > - caning children Were these ever views held by the majority? As opposed to, say, a minority of religious zealots in power?

Yep you are right. I should have said geocentricity.

> * I've never seen a bad or immoral or harmful idea die out when more people learn about it and scrutinize it.*

If this was true, all bad or immoral or harmful ideas from all of human history should currently be vigorously alive.

That is obviously not the case.

> In fact, social pressure is one of the most effective tools against hate and ignorance like this.

If you de-platform people, you no longer have a way to pressure them. Declaring them "beyond the pale" means giving up further rational influence on them. Nothing is left but violence.

The people we revere as history's greatest moral leaders never took this approach.

>However, I have repeatedly seen the opposite: Sharing bad ideas increases their audience, increases ignorance, hate, fear, and human suffering.

A lot of time hate is already there, just it doesn't find a way out untill someone shows there is no consequence of doing so.

Hitler is one example of this who harnessed anti Jewish sentiments, he didn't create it, you can't make so many people change their beliefs.

That's off the mark. It's more that there are angry, frustrated, or stupid people and they taught how to channel their anger, frustration, and stupidity into specific forms of hate. Conspiracy theories don't grow because all these people came to the same conclusion independently and then found each other.

I disagree. I think you have to accept the consequences of destructive behavior. If someone was talking like this at my office, I'd expect them to be fired. Same as if they were outwardly racist or sexist. It's detrimental to other people's well-being.

What if the person was in the street? Should they be removed?

Who chooses whether it’s detrimental to other well being? What if that person who chooses is tyrannical like the CEO of Reddit, who suppresses all right wing posts?

Reddit has tons of right wing content. Even TOS violations were permitted on Trump subs for years before being quarantined.

No. Not unless it's outwardly threatening.

> COVID-19 has added the additional element of this new concept of "disinformation". The argument is seductively simple: "being exposed to this information could lead you to engage in patterns of behavior that harm society. Therefore we can conceptualize this speech as being an indirect form of violence/negligence and therefore we have a moral obligation to remove such content".

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.

Wouldn't you want a health organization to be able to quickly adjust their advice if needed, if new information has been found? Or if a fault in the old studies or information has been found? Or how would you have them behave instead?

Looks like they haven't changed their stance, so not sure what you are referring to: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

> 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.

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.

> Many may disagree, but I think we need to throw out this concept of "disinformation" entirely. 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.

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?

The 'shouting fire' example is not a trump card that's valid outside non-live situations. It's not applicable in a live situation where someone [as in your (2)] believes the fire, for what appeared to be a good reason, to be a true risk. Finally, in (4) you seem to believe that an abstract statement is necessarily rendered invalid by someone's failure to adhere to the thrust of its message. It isn't.

The first amendment is about the government. Your speech is not illegal. The government cannot persecute you for your opinion or beliefs. It has absolutely nothing to do with your ability to be heard on the internet.

> The government cannot persecute you for your opinion or beliefs.

United States v. O’Brien?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._O%27Brien

Edward Snowden?

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

Neither of those are cases of the government prosecuting you for opinion or belief.

One is the government prosecuting you for destroying government property. The other is the government prosecuting you for sharing information that you are not allowed to share.

It has always been the case that certain forms of protest are legal, and certain forms are not. Protesting in ways that are illegal doesn't mean that your right to free speech is curtailed. You can still say whatever you want, you just can't say it while burning cars or whatever.

> Neither of those are cases of the government prosecuting you for opinion or belief.

Really?

> One is the government prosecuting you for destroying government property.

A draft card is not government property.

> The other is the government prosecuting you for sharing information that you are not allowed to share.

Which is protected under whistleblower protection laws.

Maybe I’m not convincing you? What about Schenck v. United States? In this case, all the prosecuted did was distribute flyers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

Abrams v. United States?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrams_v._United_States

Dennis v. United States?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_v._United_States

> It has always been the case that certain forms of protest are legal, and certain forms are not. Protesting in ways that are illegal doesn't mean that your right to free speech is curtailed. You can still say whatever you want, you just can't say it while burning cars or whatever.

All four cases involve some form of protest against the government. All four were peaceful; They did not harm others. All four involve the Supreme Court upholding their convictions.

> Your speech is not illegal. The government cannot persecute you for your opinion or beliefs.

Don’t you tell me that the government doesn’t try to censor speech or that they can’t.

Corporations should not be allowed to persecute based on option or beliefs either. Corporations already cant persecute based on sex, race, religion, orientation or age. Why should beliefs be any different?

You're missing the application part.

Employers may not discriminate based on these things. They can let you go for what you say. It's called employment at will and I should have the right to remove someone from my private company who is toxic to our culture. If someone is acting unprofessional, I can see no way to force the company to retain them.

This is completely separate from private publishers and platforms. Should a magazine or news paper be forced to publish anything? Does YouTube not charging you for producing content somehow change their relationship?

I must admit I find your reply a bit frustrating, because I literally began my comment by addressing what I feel is exactly your argument:

> I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), but that's different from saying that we as a society should want our private platforms to engage in such censorship and suppression.

In other words, do you see how your response is taking exactly the "well, technically it's legal" attitude that I was talking about, and how my point was about that there is a difference between what is legal and what we actually want in a society?

You're completely ignoring the fact that corporations are comprised of people, and as such have First Amendment rights of free speech and self-expression of their own.

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

I understand your letter of the law/spirit of the law position on free speech. I agree that the dichotomy is frustrating, for a ton of issues beside speech.

I disagree that "platforms" answer to a higher calling than I do. The first amendment is a contract between a US citizen and the US government. I'm not shrugging off your argument as "this is how things are"; I believe this is how things should be.

Many of the comments in this thread focus on large players' significant influence on the information that Americans consume. I don't think this has anything to do with free speech law; if anything, it's an anti-trust issue. Forcing for-profit, non-governmental organizations to publish all speech of all Americans sounds like a nightmare. I don't want to live in that society.

Free speech is something unconditional by definition. Congratulating YouTube for thwarting this is a performative contradiction.

"Give your worst political enemy the power to decide what is "hate speech" and what is "disinformation" and then you'll realize that free speech isn't something we should ever compromise on". - Naval Ravikant

By this logic we shouldn't let governments regulate anything, for fear of Hypothetical Hitler one day abusing it.

No. Regulating the speed of cars on the freeway is radically different than giving a group the ability to decide what does or does not qualify as "disinformation" and regulating accordingly.

> Booting people off of platforms merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them.

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

> 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

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.

> Booting people off of platforms merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them.

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.

Please consider the following situation.

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?

The high and mighty freedom argument is tired. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean an inalienable right to broadcast or use someone else’s property in a way that is against their wishes.

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

this is very naive.

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.

The following may seem frivolous and/or uncharitable but I think you would find them hard to disagree with:

- 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.

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

Not censoring an idea and arguing that an idea should not be implemented are not equivalent.

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

If this is true, i.e. reporting of the censorship increases the visibility of the bad idea, then it completely destroys the pro-censorship argument that it reduces the visibility of bad ideas. It would also immediately cease to be true if censorship ever became uncontroversial, in which case you couldn't claim that it's giving the allegedly bad idea a chance at a fair debate.

> 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.

Is somebody suggesting that YouTube should be prohibited from creating and distributing their own videos?

> Not censoring an idea and arguing that an idea should not be implemented are not equivalent.

I'm not sure this is correct, but I'm willing to be convinced if you can expand a little more. I guess I see it as censoring the act of censoring.

> If this is true, i.e. reporting of the censorship increases the visibility of the bad idea, then it completely destroys the pro-censorship argument that it reduces the visibility of bad ideas. It would also immediately cease to be true if censorship ever became uncontroversial, in which case you couldn't claim that it's giving the allegedly bad idea a chance at a fair debate.

In this case, it is true. But youtube censorship is not equivalent to societal censorship, it just signals that youtube does not endorse Icke's ideas and does not wish to publish them, but people can still evaluate them somewhere else.

> Is somebody suggesting that YouTube should be prohibited from creating and distributing their own videos?

No, the suggestion is they should not be allowed to write their own terms and enforce them.

> I'm not sure this is correct, but I'm willing to be convinced if you can expand a little more. I guess I see it as censoring the act of censoring.

Censorship applies to information. Restricting information can't be justified because it's by definition impossible for the public to evaluate whether what's being censored is appropriate when it gets taken down and they can't see it. "Censoring the act of censoring" doesn't have any such problem -- if YouTube was prohibited from censoring videos, they can do it even when everybody has full knowledge that they're operating under that constraint.

They could even run a banner at the top of videos they don't like that says "YouTube things this is wrong" and link to their own video explaining how, and that wouldn't be censorship. But you don't need to take down somebody else's videos to do that. It's in fact better if you don't, because then more of the people who come to see the video you think is wrong will see the message explaining why you think it's wrong, instead of going somewhere else where there is only the alleged misinformation.

> But youtube censorship is not equivalent to societal censorship, it just signals that youtube does not endorse Icke's ideas and does not wish to publish them, but people can still evaluate them somewhere else.

That would be fine so long as the somewhere else is equally prominent, but YouTube is too big for there to be any such place. If you're a monopoly/oligopoly then you ought to be a common carrier. If they really wanted out of that they could always break themselves up.

> No, the suggestion is they should not be allowed to write their own terms and enforce them.

Enforcing terms as a monopoly is effectively legislating, so they should follow the same rules as the government.

> I believe in shining a light on [bad ideas]

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.

"But, indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries. To speak only of religious opinions: the Reformation broke out at least twenty times before Luther, and was put down. Arnold of Brescia was put down. Fra Dolcino was put down. Savonarola was put down. The Albigeois were put down. The Vaudois were put down. The Lollards were put down. The Hussites were put down. Even after the era of Luther, wherever persecution was persisted in, it was successful. In Spain, Italy, Flanders, the Austrian empire, Protestantism was rooted out; and, most likely, would have been so in England, had Queen Mary lived, or Queen Elizabeth died. Persecution has always succeeded, save where the heretics were too strong a party to be effectually persecuted. No reasonable person can doubt that Christianity might have been extirpated in the Roman empire. It spread, and became predominant, because the persecutions were only occasional, lasting but a short time, and separated by long intervals of almost undisturbed propagandism. It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it."

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

> 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.

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.

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

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

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

There's no free speech if the guy is lying on purpose on public issues. You're entering propaganda territory.

That's a slippery and dangerous road to say whats propaganda and whats right speech, and saying propaganda isn't allowed is like saying you can't have the government give announcements either.

Are you saying that I am entering propaganda territory, or instead that David Icke is/was? The meaning is not clear to me, although I assume you are referring to myself.

Again, the distinction here is that I don't think being wrong (even if you think it's intentional) is something we should try to suppress. And the reason I think that is because right/wrong is ultimately a value judgement, and thus opens the door for equally flawed individuals to castigate a viewpoint as false while conversely spreading their own falsehoods (which they themselves view as truth).

As far as advertising revenue is concerned, I understand that business incentive. So, if they want to use Reddit's quarantine concept - or even boot them off their platform as they are doing now - they're free to do so, but I don't think that it's the _right_ thing to do.

In other words, we can agree that a business is acting in its own self-interest and thus would want to get rid of these types of people. I believe that they have the legal authority to do so, as well as all the incentives. But where I don't agree is that I don't cheer them on when they do it. Rather I think it's very dangerous.

So in other words, I suspect the difference between our beliefs here is that you are cheering on YouTube for doing this. You're (correctly) seeing that David Icke is a total fucking wacko and saying to yourself "good riddance". I certainly understand that inclination. I just don't believe in it myself, for the reasons that I've outlined. (I hope I haven't mischaracterized you there - sorry if I did)

Do you believe that YouTube has an obligation to publish objective, demonstrable lies that harm people?

What about cryptocurrency scams, what about media co-coordinating assassinations of targets they don't like?

Yes

> There's no free speech if the guy is lying on purpose on public issues.

Yes. There is. If you only have free speech for things other people think are true, that's hardly free speech.

> You're entering propaganda territory.

Absolutely, and yet, free speech means you can do that.

The “platform” (section 230) discussion has always been based around a bad faith reading of the law; Ken White (1st amendment lawyer) covered that in his podcast “Make no Law”.

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.

At small groups shinning light on falsehoods does help, at the scale of internet where 8 billion people are interconnected on social networks is not working at all, I would like to see research proving otherwise but it's as the old saying goes: A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.

I want to believe what you write here, but reality seems to be proving that there are just far more absurdly gullible people out there than I would like to believe.

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.

> Let the truth fight for itself.

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 also like to cite Ben Franklin, writing about the time more than 250 years ago, about him being one of a very few printers in the whole new nation, and facing the same dilemma:

"In the conduct of my newspaper, I carefully excluded all libeling and personal abuse, which is of late years become so disgraceful to our country. Whenever I was solicited to insert anything of that kind, and the writers pleaded, as they generally did, the liberty of the press, and that a newspaper was like a stage-coach, in which anyone who would pay had a right to a place, my answer was, that I would print the piece separately if desired, and the author might have as many copies as he pleased to distribute himself, but that I would not take upon me to spread his detraction; and that, having contracted with my subscribers to furnish them with what might be either useful or entertaining, I could not fill their papers with private altercation, in which they had no concern, without doing them manifest injustice. Now, many of our printers make no scruple of gratifying the malice of individuals by false accusations of the fairest characters among ourselves, augmenting animosity even to the producing of duels; and are, moreover, so indiscreet as to print scurrilous reflections on the government of neighboring states, and even on the conduct of our best national allies, which may be attended with the most pernicious consequences. These things I mention as a caution to young printers, and that they may be encouraged not to pollute their presses and disgrace their profession by such infamous practices, but refuse steadily, as they may see by my example that such a course of conduct will not, on the whole, be injurious to their interests."

From "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin", written between from 1771 to 1790, now in public domain.

In theory I agree, but freedom speech should come with responsibilty of speech, especially when you have a broad audience. When you built an audience that you make believe "science is bollocks" and spread that 5g is responsible for the spread of COVID-19, how do you prevent the potential death and destruction it's gonna result in? I agree that just shutting down a youtube account is not the best approach, but in this case, something has to be done and there's no good framework for that currently.

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

Even constitution-level free speech shouldn't be thought of as blanket freedom to lie, but exactly where the line lies is still under debate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_statements_of_fact

>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.

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.

Related: Gresham's law as a mental model - Bad drive out good

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law

That is related to currency and none of its backing arguments have any applicability to speech. Using it in this matter is highly misleading, and could be cited as a form of misinformation.

https://fs.blog/2009/12/mental-model-greshams-law/

> The outcome described by Aristophanes is common in competing human groups or organizations: When bad behavior has taken root, and that bad behavior has a “survival advantage” against good behavior, it becomes difficult, and occasionally impossible, to drive out the bad behavior; a process akin to natural selection.

This is the mental model reference I was thinking about when posting.

I understand that you’re arguing they should honor the spirit of it, but the language is:

“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.”

> That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment

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.

what evidence do you have that shining light on bad ideas is effective? ive spent 30 years online trying to shine light on bad ideas like creationism and climate change denial and seen way way less penetration than a hastily made conspiracy video.

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

Unfortunately, I fear the reality of this situation is a lot less nuanced than you're expressing here. It's more likely that the advertisers who give YouTube a lot of money simply threatened not to advertise on the platform should he continue to have a presence there.

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.

Couldn't YouTube have adopted Reddit's quarantine concept? (Ignoring for the time-being the inherent tendency of such a concept being used to drive out dissent as happened with Reddit with respect to fringe conservative voices)

If YouTube's advertisers found that kind of thing agreeable, I suppose they could. That said, I'm not sure the incentive exists for them to undertake that kind of work.

The platform existing for everyday people to disseminate their views is secondary to using user-submitted content as a vehicle for advertising revenue. Another way of thinking about it is that the popular content subsidizes the not-so-popular content.

As a corollary: The more popular your content is, the more advertising revenue it needs to bring in. There was even some controversy somewhat recently about this very thing.

At the heart of your opinion is a contradiction.

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.

The very nature of scientific inquiry is to question conventional wisdom. Often those new ideas are heretical.

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.

Suppressing blatantly false, inflammatory ideas isn't "all but the 'blessed'".

It is taking the man on the corner who is shouting "Ducks are responsible for your failure!" and "Letting the blacksmith build a second shack will cause insanity in all the children!" off to a quiet room where he no longer causes people to throw stones at the blacksmith, or shoot ducks on sight.

Icke was that special kind of conspiracy nut who wouldn't dare fact check his own bile because he'd find his whole worldview based on nothing.

Slippery slope questions aside, we tend to put controls on things like schizophrenic rambling and people having psychotic breaks... I consider him in that same category. He should be isolated for his own protection and those around him.

Have you actually read any of his books, or simply believed the misinformation spread by the media?

If you had read his work first hand you would be aware of how much research, references and citations are included.

It's amusing that you say David Icke doesn't fact check, as this only highlights that you haven't..

> I don't believe in fighting "bad ideas" by suppressing them

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?

So, operatives for ISIS, should be allowed to put up bomb-making or even just videos on how to shoot a gun properly with infidel-like targets (manequins in business suits for example), and it should just be allowed? Should they be allowed to put up recruitment videos to get more kids willing to become walking bombs?

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.

We tried shining light on bad ideas. It didn't work. All the light the world could muster was being shined onto the lack of a link between vaccines and autism, yet there was a measles is having a resurgence.

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?

I could accept almost any standard if I felt it was credibly being applied to all members of the platform. We're far from that world today.

There are other ways to censor content.

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 kind of agree and disagree, we should somehow remove it, but again we need to withdraw root causes for those. Sometimes it is just lack of public answers and experts inability to simplify really complex knowledge to drive people to those "alternative" stories in case of covid for instance.

I think they’d be more effective if they added an un-skippable ad before each video which contains the best argument against the content that follows.

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.

This is a frighteningly naive take on the rationality of humans.

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.

>I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), but that's different from saying that we as a society should want our private platforms to engage in such censorship and suppression.

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.

> Let the truth fight for itself.

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

the askhistorians mods adressed this - the problem is the bullshit asymmetry principle:

'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...

By the way, there is a different form of censoring which YouTube uses: its discovery/recommendation system.

My argument is a bit different.

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.)

You're basically just saying about YouTube/Google what people have been saying about any large corporation that does things that are legal but less than agreeable.

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.

You say this as if the converse hasn't been attempted - platforms without moderation. They exist and instantly fill up with trolls, kooks and nazis to the point where they become unusable by anyone but trolls, kooks and nazis.

I'm sorry, but "freedom of speech," as in the first amendment protects the right to express opinions. It does not protect misstatements of fact.

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.

>It does not protect misstatements of fact.

What about alternative facts?

Exactly. In France there is a set of laws that forbids the denial of various genocides, in particular the Holocaust. Unfortunately this backfired badly, as several prominent Holocaust deniers, who are generally despicable nazis over that, got condemned and from then hailed by their hateful followers as "martyrs" and even "martyrs of free speech". One even managed to have Chomsky say something nice about his "oppression" (which is quite ironic given the guy's an antisemite).

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.

Who decides the truth? When conventional knowledge is fatally flawed, how can it be changed?

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.

Please don't use HN for ideological battle. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys the curious conversation that it is for.

(Ditto for nationalistic battle, which I add because made an appearance in your previous comment.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Quite often, the damage caused by disinformation is simply allowing it to be spread.

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.

That is because the media decided to direct attention in exchange for clicks and ads revenue.

No, the media covered it because the president of the most powerful nation on earth making a speech about a global pandemic is newsworthy, and his words and actions have national and global impacts.

When the platform receives 85% (or whatever the percent is) of all video sharing internet traffic "we are a private organization!" shouldn't really apply.

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

Our society is based on science.

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.

And those in 'science' captured by a groupthink? How do we deal with them?

Don't forget that the 'lipid hypothesis' was everywhere just a few years ago and everybody believed it. Now you have more chance of finding somebody who will admit to be being a member of the Stasi.

Science is, at its base, the rejection of hypotheses by experimental validation. Quite a lot of what is touted as science either hasn't or can't be experimentally validated. The non-falsifiable stuff dressed up as science, when it is really philosophy (or perhaps religion) is just flat earth thinking with better PR and credentials.

This is the reason free speech has to be defended. Remember Cromwell's Plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."

Not every nutter turns out to be nuts.

This is a very dangerous viewpoint in my opinion. There is no true science without free speech. Kepler for example was censored due to his highly controversial views about the sun being at the center of the solar system.

If the science is so shaky as to be blown over by some crackpots then it is no science good at all. Interestingly, some among the flat earthers have independently verified the curvature of the earth. This is a beautiful outcome for these true skeptics and critical thinkers. These are true scientific minds in my opinion.

I'm not talking about 'science' which is sho shaky as to be blown over by some crackpots.

The science for 'we are not on a flat earth' is here. We still have YouTube Channels saying otherwise without being able to prove it at all. And they do create issues in our society.

I agree. It's the spirit in which these actions have been taken, as if to conform to a narrative, which in itself, has see-sawed between facts and fiction, as to almost being intentionally confusing. It's not a "conspiracy theory" to ask questions, critical thinking has taken a huge blow since 9/11.

This is a valid point, but as a matter of pragmatism, these platforms are going to have to police information there's no way around it.

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.

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