Hacker News Reader

Comment by feralimal | Hacker News Reader

It is hard to get a handle on what disappears; at least I haven't seen a straightforward breakdown.

Certainly things that talks about 911 not being an act of terrorism, Sandy Hook and other school shooting being a govt sponsored hoax, the Las Vegas shooting hoax, things relating to space being hoaxed, etc. I'm not going to provide an opinion on these things.

Whatever your perspective, the thing I would argue, is that if you want to be informed you need access to all the information and evidence, not a subset selected for you by the governing class.

It used to be a popular thing to say: "I hate what you're saying, but I'll fight for your right to say it". I agree with this. But we have been educated to think that so called 'hate speech' is a problem, whereas the real issue is the prolonged infantilisation of adults - in that we don't trust our own judgement, and would prefer an authority to do it for us.

View on HN

I love freedom and it is basically the first thing I think of when coming up with a list of "things I care about the most".

With that said, I'm trying to think about what would reddit/youtube/<insert any public viewable platform> look like in my utopian world of free speech.

Where would I draw the line for which can and can't be posted? Should media related to pornography, terrorism, or pedophilia be allowed or forbidden? How about gore, violence, or any other form of crime / morally wrong concept?

I've personally seen (without intending to) the video of the New Zealand Christchurch shooting. On seeing that video I have never been more disgusted in my entire life. I felt like I wanted to puke, hell I want to puke as I type this. Should that be allowed or forbidden?

In my view everything should be allowed, that is, there should be no form of censorship whatsoever. It is up to the individual, based on the value system that he/she has accumulated throughout his/her life, to decide whether what he/she is seeing/reading is acceptable or deplorable. But no one should be able to decide that for another individual.

Personally this sounds like exactly the type of content I want to have removed from platforms I frequent. Same as foreign election meddling ads on Facebook or Nazis and bots on Twitter that users urge the platforms to deal with in a better way.

If I look at the front page of some peertube instances it consists of Liveleak-like content, conspiracy theories and ISIS recruitment videos and I can see how that is not very appealing to the average user.

Well, you are saying it is a good thing that certain information is unavailable to you, and that you trust google, the government to do the job for you. I couldn't disagree more!

My response would be, don't you think you can judge for yourself what is ok, and to not watch things that are nonsense? Also, aren't you concerned that you could be manipulated as you may be trusting authorities who - out of self-interest - could fail to disclose information to you; ie that you will be unable to reach an informed opinion as you will be in ignorance?

Personally, I have zero trust in any other parties judging what is ok or not for me to know about. I am happy to judge for myself, without parental guidance.

> you are saying it is a good thing that certain information is unavailable to you, and that you trust google, the government to do the job for you.

That's not what I'm saying. Removing the information from YouTube isn't removing the information from the internet. They are just making use of their right to decide what they give space to on their platform. I can still go to a specific conspiracy theory website and read about it there if I'm feeling like it.

The "government" has nothing to do with that as we are talking about a company applying their own policies to their website not a government mandated take down of content.

But it does. Its public knowledge that google was partially funded by inqtel. The government subsidises corporations.

I think you and I must have different ideas on what governance is. You probably think education, corporations, government and media are separate. I don't. I think they are part of the same governance apparatus.

Hence you have a search company providing email, content, etc in google. And you have Bezos who supplies your online request and media. And Elon who supplies a car service (that he can shut down), space, and neural laces. Microsoft who provide the world's operating systems, family planning and viruses. Etc.

> "Removing the information from YouTube isn't removing the information from the internet."

What gets "flagged" or "removed" from Youtube, mostly also gets the same treatment at Facebook, Twitter, etc. Some extreme examples have seen people be deplatformed from a wide range of "internet" platforms, including their hosting. It's a sad road to go down, and each time we concede things such as removing content from Youtube because of "user safety" and "experience", we add legitimacy for the deplatforming, cancelling and exclusion of individuals with different or controversial opinions.

Yes - corporates, media, education AND government form the governance system we have.

I think it's important to realise that anybody can be influenced, even smart people who look at any information with healthy criticism.

Unfortunately, the human brain is not without its problems. One of those problems is that information that is repeated often will start to "feel" true, even if it is false. If you want to read about these kinds of biases, I'd recommend the book Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman.

With platforms like YouTube, it's incredibly easy to get stuck in a filter bubble. Their recommendation algorithm is more than happy to keep recommending you conspiracy theories, because users seem to like those, and the algorithm doesn't care about the actual content.

And once you've watched 10 of those videos, the 11th will no longer sound as ridiculous as it would have if you had watched it without first being (perhaps subconsciously) influenced by those first 10 videos.

This is a real risk of algorithm-based recommendation platforms, and something that Google/Facebook are trying to address now because it has already caused real problems in society.

Yes. But do you mean to use conspiracy in a pejorative sense?

I think its pretty obvious that people 'breathe together' and formulate plans that work best for them. So with us, at the individual level, and so with those who have all the money and operate at the macro level. Are you saying that conspiracies don't happen? What is your method of finding the true ones?

The answer is that we require unfiltered information, and open communication with others. We need to personally engage in verifying claims. We can only confirm or deny whatever claims are made, if we have the information. If that is unavailable because of censorship we can only verify very little. This is where we are today.

As we can only verify very little, the problem is that we are not getting the information. Who is restricting information then? Is the world's leading, corporate-sponsored, search indexer (google), preventing the free flow of information? Well, yes it is. So we can say google is part of the problem, not the solution.

It's easy to look at the extreme examples and get widespread agreement, sure. The problem is in all the grey areas between benign, reasonable, controversial, factually-incorrect, manipulative and then "really bad" content.

And the argument becomes even more moot when you consider that no one is "forcing" people to watch content that they don't like, they simply ignore it and heck the platform can just hide content you ignore/report. At that point, we're conceding that we actually don't want people to see certain content because of certain reasons. And I think those reasons boil down to us collectively thinking that people can be manipulated/influenced, are unable to look at these videos objectively, and can fall for the lies contained within it.

> when you consider that no one is "forcing" people to watch content that they don't like, they simply ignore it

Throwing something into the recommendation algorithm over periods of time or showing you ads will likely have an influence on you even if you wouldn't usually look at the content or search for it.

Facebook itself already experimented with that in the early days of social media: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...

One can block the channels on a per-user basis. And you can "personalize" recommendations to users to exclude channels or videos that are similar to ones they've previously blocked/excluded. Heck you can have curated block-lists that people can subscribe to. You can allow users to disable any non-subscription feed mechanisms so that the only way to find content is through search or other discovery mechanisms that may be external to the platform. There are so many different ways to solve the user-experience issue without deplatforming.

The more you peel back the superficial layers, the more you find that this is just about control as we "don't want to let people make their own opinions by finding content that we don't like".

Edit. Grammar.

Blocklists don't solve the problem of dishonest or scammy ads. If they did we would have solved the spam problem by now. Someone still has to review all that stuff manually.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com