Frankly I would feel much more at ease if we could all decide that Youtube doesn't get to decide what content should be deleted, provided they also can't keep recommending videos. Let me explain.
By recommending videos youtube has a huge amount of influence on what content is promoted and what content isn't. However youtube's bottom-line isn't to recommend good content (despite what they claim it is) but it is to maximize ad revenue, which means they need to make people watch as many videos as possible. Superficially this would seem like it should drive Youtube to recommend good content, but it's beginning to look like it is biased towards addictive content, which has questionable quality at best, but might veer towards harmful conspirational theories at worst. It's a classic example of value drift, Youtube has turned into a paperclip maximizer that is beginning to harm humans to produce more paperclips.
Can't any choice (not being purely audio, why the title is only in X languages, etc) can be considered editorial, for any TV news show or book? It isn't constructive to construe FIFO as editorial when it is the common way to experience and share events. Since content creators ostensibly retain control of what is published, they could ideally rearrange their content in their feed by re-pub or out of order publishing anyway.
Yes exactly.
> It isn't constructive to construe FIFO as editorial when it is the common way to experience and share events.
In what context?
> Since content creators ostensibly retain control of what is published, they could ideally rearrange their content in their feed by re-pub or out of order publishing anyway.
This sounds horrendous. You want to encourage content creators to spam you with content so that they're always at the top of your "feed"?
Any episodic context, like 99 percent of the media we consume. TV show episodes happen in a specific order of events, movies are constructed of scenes in a specific order, community growth around a channel is built around common experiences already shared, even looking at history channels, if a story spans multiple videos requiring multiple media releases, when each video relies on information provided from another, the content creator would have to be daft to release them in the reverse, or worse, a random order, when everybody is waiting to find out what happens next.
From my perspective, it seems like the only videos that are viable outside of this context are long-form videos (1hr+) or viral trash.
But you're suggesting a single "timeline" for all content. So you get one stream of every show on every channel in order. That's not the usual way we watch episodic content. Hell since the invention of the VCR, we mostly just watch the specific stuff we want, not everything in I ur bundle.
You seem to be conflicting the content made by a single entity with the aggregator. For an aggregator, why does time name more sense than any other view (like say clustered by creator, or as is common today ordered based on presumed interest)?
WRT conflating aggregators and creators, any decision the publisher makes, they should take responsibility for, such as promoting some content and hiding others.
Any "editorial algorithm", by the standards you have put forth, can be abused.
What might be harder is to distinguish sophisticated search algorithms from recommendation algorithms. There's some overlap, but I'm inclined to think that the two are mostly different kinds of things, especially if the search results aren't personalized to the user.
I don't think the concern with rolling back platform immunity is government restrictions on free speech, exactly. In the US, the first amendment provides the same protections it always has. Instead, concerns include that the risk of liability will hamper innovation, that only companies with a lot of resources will be able to take the risk, and that companies will overreact with their own proactive censorship to stay well clear of areas with potential liability.
We've seen the latter with FOSTA/SESTA weakening platform immunity, which is arguably what its creators intended, but I suspect not what everyone in congress who voted for it expected.
To word it differently: "Platforms that recommend/aggregate speech in government sanctioned ways are protected from liability, while those that do not are not". That's, while not open and shut perhaps, certainly spooky.
Tomorrow at 10 AM, join me on the steps of the capitol. Bring your gun and a sign that says "we will shoot you unless you vote no on bill 123.".
The action described is a crime, soliciting others to participate in it is a crime, and my deliberate choice to show it to a larger audience is likely enough to subject me to accomplice liability that virtually any criminal lawyer would recommend against it. If violence actually occurred, there would be an ever lower bar for the victims to clear to sue me. Planning crimes is unambiguously not protected speech.
The proposal described would subject any sufficiently editorial algorithm to similar liability.
That's actually a great comparison. I wonder if it will ever gain traction.
- Don't list these videos in watch-next / suggestions. This avoids people getting lost down these strange rabbit holes
- Insert a prompt which notifies the viewer that the content has been flagged as misinformation. Ideally include links to resources to find out more. This prompts people to check out the widely accepted truth to compare what they'll see in the content
Just because something needs to be done about misinformation doesn't mean censorship is necessary
Try replacing “being indoctrinated” with “reading” or “being prompted to” with “watching crazies talk about how you should”, and try your sentence again without the biased framing.
You misattribute the agency of the viewer. Video games don’t make kids shoot up schools, and stupid videos don’t make people light cell towers on fire.
Even the entirety of Pizzagate led to exactly one guy out of hundreds of millions picking up a gun, and even then no one was hurt.
Meanwhile, YouTube is taking down videos of ACTUAL war crimes in the Syrian civil war, which is destruction of evidence and is hindering prosecutorial efforts.
Censorship is not the solution.
"Shot through the heart, and you're to blame, you give love <sic:censorship> a bad name"
Now I'm a big believer in keeping things shut. I thing prudence is super-important. But QAnon's actions are mainly talk. The state's, however, are different.
QAnon is an FBI-registered domestic terror organization: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/qanon-...
They've been connected to multiple attempted acts of violence. They aren't just talk.
The FBI memo cites at least two violent incidents or attempts purportedly linked to QAnon: An Arizona man harassed and doxed locals he suspected of participating in the child sex trafficking ring at the heart of the conspiracy theory; and a Nevada man at the Hoover Dam whose truck was found to contain rifles and other ammunition, who was later discovered to have sent letters to President Trump containing references to the movement.
Doxing and keeping guns in your car are not violent acts and the connection is tenuous at best. By that measure you could easily classify The Young Turks as a terrorist organization, Elliot Rodger was their subscriber on Youtube. And the violence was real.
Why would people on HN of all places take FBI at their word. How many hackers have been defamed, and even jailed, by FBI like that.
Let me be contrary: who shut down millions of businesses and put millions out of work?
Sweden provides an imperfect but interesting what-if scenario for countries wondering what would have happened if they'd imposed little to no lockdown restrictions.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/30/coronavirus-sweden-economy-t...
Their economy is still taking a very severe hit despite retail businesses remaining open there, because people are shying away from making purchases and visiting shops.
You can (correctly) say that many governments took the decision out of peoples' hands. Perhaps the people of country XYZ would have made a different choice. But Sweden's example suggests that economies would have been screwed pretty hard no matter what.
Exactly.
In most countries, people are willingly staying mostly at home. More, they continue to restrain from shopping and eating out after the lockdown ended.
I don't think this is the case for Germany, Switzerland, or Denmark either.
What countries do you have in mind where lock downs ended and most people are staying at home?
If you believe the disease is rampant in Sweden, it’ll be much higher now. If it’s not, then the hard lockdowns elsewhere were superfluous.
"The disease-induced herd immunity level is 43% ... when immunity is induced by disease spreading, the proportion infected in groups with high contact rates is greater than in groups with low contact rates"
We obviously need to deal with both problems concurrently. There are a lot of actions that can be taken which can help one which doesn’t come at the expense of the other, so it’s not purely a either-or decision.
It would be wrong to turn a blind eye to either effect. The death toll is an immediate concern, but so is a functioning food supply chain, and indeed a healthy economy is critically important to everyone.
No having lived through an economic collapse or a hyper inflation event, for example, it may be hard to appreciate how difficult (and deadly) that situation can be.
From what I gather, the scale of current economic damage is seriously compared to the Great Depression in mainstream media[1][2]. Well, the Great Depression brought Nazi into power in Germany[3], WW2 followed and took lives of 70-85 million people[4] to say nothing of the post-war devastation.
Or look at Venezuela for an example of a bad economy in modern times, where "families buy rotten meat to eat"[5].
Also, if you ask families of people who will die because their cancer wasn't diagnosed in time, they will probably consider lockdowns too excessive[6].
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/19/unemployment-today-vs-the-gr...
[2] https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-economic-cost-and-hum...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression#Germany
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II
Also, the Great Depression was one of many factors that led to the rise of the Nazis in Germany. The tensions that led to WW2 were brewing for before WW1 even started so don't try to claim that an economic depression caused all those deaths. There are far too many factors to make that claim.
Yes, I think I understand what you're saying.
My point is the harm to the economy directly translates to lives lost too. Bad economy leads to surge in violent crime, opiods addictions, gang violence, lost access to health care...
"... the Great Depression was one of many factors that led to the rise of the Nazis in Germany. The tensions that led to WW2 were brewing for before WW1 even started so don't try to claim that an economic depression caused all those deaths. There are far too many factors to make that claim."
It wasn't the only cause, sure. But it was a huge one, afaik. History isn't a hard science, of course, and I'm not a historian (not even an amateur historian) but this quote from Wikipedia doesn't strike me as particularly controversial:
"The unemployment rate reached nearly 30% in 1932, bolstering support for the Nazi (NSDAP) and Communist (KPD) parties, causing the collapse of the politically centrist Social Democratic Party... Large-scale military spending played a major role in the recovery."[1]
When we all look back in 5 years, then 10, then 15, there will be different "obvious" conclusions drawn. Right now, anyone who sides with any action as correct should have a confidence level that is extremely small.
The more varied the responses, the more we learn as a species, and I am glad that not everywhere assumes they are NYC or Lombardy, and acts in varying ways so that in 5, 10, and 15 years the coming studies have different data points of comparison.
Whether lockdowns are justified anyway is a question for another discussion. But economies are hit by lockdowns not the pandemic itself. Let's look at info we can find about Sweden.
Sure, people in Sweden are staying at home more, but the decrease in activity is hardly on the level of locked down countries.
"When people became aware of coronavirus around March 12, we lost almost overnight 30 per cent. It’s OK. For a couple of months, it will work. But after that it will be very, very tough,"[1]
[A pedestrian street in Stockholm on Apr. 1](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2020/04/01/TELE...)
[A market in Malmo during the pandemic (no exact date)](http://archive.is/2siwt/5d1b19d61fd21d052c2cc190f13f722c0bf8...)
[Pubs, eating out](https://www.bbc.com/news/av/newsbeat-52618788/coronavirus-ho...)
It absolutely doesn't look that Sweden's economy took a downturn because people are afraid to go outside.
Their economy seems to be hit by supply chains dependent on locked down countries being suspended[1]:
"One big reason is that Sweden is a small, open economy with a large manufacturing industry. Truckmaker Volvo Group and carmaker Volvo Cars were both forced to stop production for several weeks, not because of conditions in Sweden but due to lack of parts and difficulties in their supply chains elsewhere in Europe."
So, to reiterate, it looks very much like the majority of damage to economies are caused by lockdowns.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/93105160-dcb4-4721-9e58-a7b262cd4...
Isn't QAnon directly promoted by some people directly related to the president of the state?
Don Jr. wears it:
https://www.etsy.com/dk-en/listing/716574473/the-official-q-...
The President himself reused their hashtag:
https://www.businessinsider.de/international/trump-retweeted...
I think giving people the idea that they've stumbled onto dangerous truths just makes them more resolute. Or do you think the issue is they just need to be suppressed even harder?
It sure can be given other means of combatting misinformation. But sure, let's just go with the sledgehammer every time.
That's just off the top of my head. There are dozens of possible strategies, but companies will always do the cheap and easy thing that will stop the bad PR quickest, even if it hurts some people. We should demand better.
The line is already there, we don't need corporations to draw it for us. If something isn't illegal, it should not be censored.
If people commit crimes they'll get arrested.
Including those that commit crimes because they watched the extremely fringe and dangerous Qanon conspiracy theory you mentioned--which from what I've heard makes you torture and kill small animals right after the first video, to continue onto progressively worse things as you keep watching (stay away from it, kids!).
....... Hillary
..... Chuck
Like him or not, the President is a master at branding. If you really think he is going to have his record setting rallies literally filled with people with Q shirts on and not have control of that situation; it's you who is confused.
Notice how the hit pieces never link to the actual posts.
People who want can find them @ q map dot pub, or a level up at crowd sourced news sites like we are the news dot ws, or even a level up from that at citizen free press dot com.
It's common knowledge that the President of the United States posts on 8kun. We are not waiting for the mockingbirds.
Should we halt the sale of knives because they can be misused to murder?
And the actual clearance-by-arrest rates are lower than those values.
And conviction rates are even lower. (*edit: relative to the total number of crimes. Conviction rates are pretty high for the cases that State's Attorneys or prosecutor's offices accept and agree to prosecute)
The standard of proof for State's Attorneys/prosecutors to accept a case from Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) is pretty high, and it's expensive to build and prosecute cases. Clearance rates would be higher if law enforcement agencies had high definition surveillance camera networks covering all public spaces, but I think people would also find that solution unappealing.
I'm a homicide researcher in Chicago and I've come to the conclusion that the legal system will never be able to solve or even make a significant dent in the homicide problem, and taking a "law enforcement only" approach is the same as just surrendering to the problem forever. If you want to solve crime problems, you have to explore preventative solutions, namely give people better paths and eliminate paths that empirically lead to only bad destinations.
[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Education is the preventative solution. Censorship is just security through obscurity.
It's a possible preventative solution, but when designing anything, you should never forget that you are not the user. You have to design for the user.
How does the ignorant person who is seeking education know which source to believe? Educated or uneducated, when people don't have the time or prior knowledge to evaluate claims on their own, they look to the sources they already trust, especially when they're scared. In the US, tens of millions of people deeply trust Trump, and many people are afraid of dying from COVID-19. Trump has been regularly praising hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure ever since an attorney/blockchain enthusiast named Gregory Rigano misrepresenting himself as a Stanford Med School Advisor on Tucker Carlson's show [0] (see too_much_detail below) and misrepresented a bad study to assert hydroxychloroquine had a 100% cure rate. Trump has been telling people to take this drug constantly, claiming he's taking it personally. However, in a study by the VA of hydroxychloroquine's effect on 368 COVID-19 patients, the hydroxychloroquine-only group was associated with increased overall mortality (Rates of death in the HC, HC+AZ, and no HC groups were 27.8%, 22.1%, 11.4%, respectively) [3]. Considering
Many people will die because Trump and the GOP are miseducating people. Why shouldn't YouTube improve the quality of the content on their platform by removing lethal misinformation? YouTube and FaceBook were able to greatly limit the spread of the ChristChurch mass murder (by rejecting video's with matching hashes, looping in human reviewers, and other means) such that I never saw the video, so it's not a technological issue.
too_much_detail: {where he falsely presented himself as a "Stanford Univ Med School Adviser" [1] and claimed a "well-controlled [false], peer-reviewed [false] study carried out by the most eminent infectious disease specialist in the world Didier Raoult MD Ph.D. ... enrolled 40 patients, again a well controlled study [still false, no randomization, no blind, treatment group was from one hospital in Marseille (mean age 51.2), while the control group was from hospitals in southern France (mean age 37.3) [2]] peer-reviewed [still false] study, showed a 100% cure rate [false, 100% of the people who were swabbed every day, which excluded 1 patient that died and 3 that went into the ICU [2]]. The study was released this morning on my Twitter account."}
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4zTt8oLD44
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/magazine/didier-raoult-hy...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/06/hydroxychloroq...
[3] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.16.20065920v...
I get that being a homicide researcher you're rather working on the assumption that a non-zero homicide rate is a problem that can be solved with a sufficiently clever policy. What if it's just a natural fact, like the laws of gravity? What possible solution could there be to homicide as a category of crimes beyond literally being able to see into the future or people's brains, a la Minority Report or Black Mirror? Isn't there a risk the mentality of a "war on homicide" (you talk of surrender) is actually more dangerous than the problem itself?
Attacks on cell towers is a very new problem. The 5G conspiracy theories are stupid, but you know, I got into a conversation with some coworkers about them the other day. We all laughed at how dumb these theories are until one guy said his mother believes it and he couldn't find a way to convince her otherwise.
The source wasn't YouTube. It was just her social circle. Communicating with WhatsApp and FB groups of course because of lockdown but people talk in real life too and always will.
The difficulty became apparent when I did a few quick searches for "5g coronavirus theories". The top search results were all attempted debunkings - pretty good. Unfortunately the debunkings themselves were not. I don't think I've ever seen such crap attempts at debunking a conspiracy theory. The top hits were mostly newspapers, and a common theme was "the world is now full of idiots who believe conspiracy theories, like 5G causing coronavirus or that there are cures for COVID" where the latter phrase linked to a doctor selling hydroxychloroquine. Which just yesterday the UK government started buying in bulk in case it turns out to be a cure. The article also lumped people protesting against lockdown (normal, expected) with 5G conspiracy theorists (not normal, not expected).
So this is the first reason why the theories aren't going away - the sort of people who attempt to debunk them keep lumping them together with any skepticism of government policy at all. But most people understand that being skeptical of a global mass house arrest justified via buggy computer model isn't at all irrational, so when they're told 5G theories are just like that, it just makes the problem worse.
For these conspiracy theories to be successfully debunked will require the debunkers to stop arguing from authority. People don't trust the authorities. That's why they believe in a massive conspiracy to begin with.
First, I'm going to plant the goalposts. A homicide rate of 0 would be nice, but it's not realistic for any large population. Even in the very well educated, upper-middle class Detroit suburb I grew up in, there was a homicide every 10 years or so (the most recent one was actually done by the dad of one of my friends/a soccer coach of mine; he had a great reputation/was a philanthropist/was president of the local Rotary club, but apparently he was also a pillar of the local S&M community and his wife found out so he had her killed). The goal is to reduce the rate of homicides. And 5 minutes of thought will reveal that that's absolutely possible.
Like many US cities, Chicago is sharply segregated [0]. That link also includes maps of counts of narcotics arrests, homicides, and shootings, and if you cross-reference the narcotics, homicide, shooting, and black residents as a percent of census tract population maps, you'll see they're highly correlated. The vast majority of the violence is in the black neighborhoods. It's an uncomfortable fact, but stay with me. As a liberal, seeing this was initially like a punch to the gut, but it makes sense when you ask the question "why would anyone choose to live in these neighborhoods", and very few choose to live there, rather, most people can't leave. In 2016 (and for the US), the median net wealth of black families was about $17k, while the median net wealth of white families is about $171k, 10x the median net wealth of black families. White people have the funds to climb to better areas with better schools with better economic opportunities and they can afford to buy real estate in good or improving areas which provides those white people with a durable store of value (that has typically appreciated at a compounding rate over the past century), but this increases rents and this pushes black people to areas with lower rents, worse schools, brain-damaging pollution (eg lead paint, lead contaminated water [2][3], air pollution from industry), and much higher rates of violence.
Now to get to the question: what's driving the violence? And it's largely economic. A massive portion of the shootings and homicides are committed by gang members (really neighborhood cliques now, with little or no hierarchy and on the order of 10 members on average) who are in cliques that sell drugs, and from an analysis of cleared homicides and shootings, the shooter and victim are very frequently in geographically adjacent cliques that both sell drugs. In the 1920's, alcohol became a black market good and there was a lot of violence between alcohol traffickers that evaporated when alcohol returned to being a regular market good.
So, do I have to be an omniscient precog from Minority Report to know that [legalizing drugs, eliminating lead exposure, and improving the economic opportunities for black youths by improving the quality of education in all neighborhoods to the level white people enjoy] would drastically reduce the homicide rate? No. Those are obvious steps.
> The source wasn't YouTube. It was just her social circle.
That's kind of like saying "guns don't kill people, blood loss kills people". How do the ideas initially get into the minds of people in her social circle? Per Facebook, a lot of misinformation is financially motivated [4] or geopolitical (from a certain malicious surveillance state that wants time to catch up on 5G development) [5] and spread widely through public groups. If the misinformation was stopped from spreading publicly, it would reach the last leg of the trip to the private group/WhatsApp group phase far less frequently and lead to far less destruction.
> The article also lumped people protesting against lockdown (normal, expected)
No, it's not normal, and the protests have been very small and sparsely attended, but they've been massively amplified by the media [6]. As of May 7th, 68% of Americans (10957 people surveyed) were more worried about restrictions being lifted too early vs 31% that were worried about the lifting too late. And saying you're more worried about the economic harms than the virus is way more normal than actually going into public and gathering in a group with other people who are all intentionally rejecting safety recommendations.
> For these conspiracy theories to be successfully debunked will require the debunkers to stop arguing from authority. People don't trust the authorities.
Yeah, it's not possible to change a conspiracy theorist's mind with facts, because any inconvenient fact can just be interpreted as another part of the conspiracy. To those susceptible to conspiracy theories, there is no known cure to the infection. The only way to avoid outbreaks is to stop transmission.
[0] https://imgur.com/a/K9IJKHr
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining...
[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
[4] https://www.facebook.com/facebookmedia/blog/working-to-stop-...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-h...
[6] https://www.vox.com/2020/5/10/21252583/coronavirus-lockdown-...
[7] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/07/americans-r...