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Comment by gabereiser | Hacker News Reader

YouTube can choose to keep or delete any content on their platform regardless of truth/free speech/or not. It's in the EULA. You want free speech, go outside and yell. No one is stopping anyone from free speech. What Google is doing is cleaning up content on their service according to their EULA. If you disagree with the EULA, you can gladly go use another service.

I will add, targeting a specific genre of videos looks bad, sure. It's only that we are talking about that genre and not all the others of topics YouTube has removed.

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This is a non sequitur. Free speech is an ideal. We would like google to preserve free speech, even though they are not legally obligated to per the Constitution. If their EULA does not uphold that ideal, then they should change it, not compromise the ideal.

> Free speech is an ideal. We would like google to preserve free speech

Is this self evident? Specifically google, or all and any private platforms? It's not obvious to me that every private entity should hold the ideal of free speech -- particularly a version of free speech that means something different than protection from persecution by the state.

But your desire for Google to host certain kinds of speech against their will doesn't supersede Google's own right to decide otherwise on their own platform.

They have their own free speech rights, as well as free association and the rights of free enterprise.

I generally agree with this but YouTube is a communication channel and has a different set of expectations. Additionally they promoted themselves as an open forum in the beginning.

Ideally, discrimination should not exist in something that is promoted as a public forum.

If YouTube only wanted to serve a certain type of genre or they had the same censorship policies from the beginning then that is one thing. But they promoted themselves as open and free speech and then once they achieved critical mass they changed their mind to push their own agenda.

That is dishonest and an abuse of public trust.

As a contrasting example, censoring porn, while still not free speech, would be fine for YouTube to continue to do since they had this stance from the beginning and people chose to join the platform knowing this.

>Additionally they promoted themselves as an open forum in the beginning.

Was this before or after Google? Because Google's interest in the platform is definitely maximizing revenue and competing with first party streaming services.

> This is a non sequitur. Free speech is an ideal. We would like google to preserve free speech, even though they are not legally obligated to per the Constitution. If their EULA does not uphold that ideal, then they should change it, not compromise the ideal.

I would like to uphold that ideal by putting a political bumper sticker on your car. Can you give me your address so I can send it to you?

If you don't have a car, I can send you a sign to put in your window or a t-shirt with a slogan for you to wear.

I appreciate your cooperation in upholding this important ideal.

If they were a company offering services of transport, they might do that (e.g. ads on a side of a bus).

Alternatively this could be your next great side hustle: live ad and t-shirt marketing in the gig economy.

I'm going to agree but offer a different focus. The agreement is in that YouTube can do this legally and that is not the problem.

But this is also about the practice of ideals. I watched a Chris Martinson video (PhD neurotoxicology, runs something of a prepping channel on YouTube because he doesn't see how the current US approach will resolve comfortably for people who trust the government) on Vimeo the other day because they'd yanked it from YouTube (it discussed the coronavirus). If it has reached the point where YouTube won't let a medical PhD talk about medical research, what use is this platform to me? Music videos, I suppose.

The reason free speech is ideal happens to be because it is better - YouTube is less fit for purpose as an information distributor, it doesn't represent a full spectrum of opinions. I already know what the official government message is - they have a website. I read it on occasion.

Alternative view point sites aren’t really possible.

Advertisers are attacked relentlessly if they advertise on non-liberal media. Been at ad-tech companies and seen this happen in person.

Even 20 years ago this was common pattern for talk radio.

> Alternative view point sites aren’t really possible.

They're certainly possible for alternatives to, say, reddit. These sites already exist. Are you referring to the high costs of serving video?

Video.

Forums are one thing.

Hosting huge amounts of videos, adding in all the security to keep DOS from taking out the system is a lot of money.

Oh and since most sites do this all for free, you can’t really change anything either.

Oh, you're SO right. Fox News has so much trouble getting advertisers. So do Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones.

Fox News has crappy advertisers. Ones that don’t give a crap what others think. Need some gold coins?

Rush used to talk all the time about the nasty calls his clients got.

It was routine for them to get flooded with hate calls.

Yeah, and othre mainstream media organisations - including the freaking New York Times - have successfully campaign dto get many of their remaining advertisers to pull out. To the point where, at least if the people campaigning for this were to be believed, many of the targetted Fox shows couldn't get ads at all.

If youtube wants to remove stuff they can, but they should start with removing the values they state on their about page. You can't say you give everyone a voice and then start blanket silencing people.

I agree completely. Transparency is better than shadow removal.

You seldomly see the ideals of people who believe in freedom of speech but stated so clearly. A world were corporations control all the information people consume but people can "go outside and yell" in frustration. This is the kind of freedom we must bring to Iran.

It’s the kind of freedom that existed for centuries in the US and of course we were all “free” then.

While I’m sure Textualist/Originalists on the court will find innovations to legislate FB “yelling freedom” rights it has not been a historical norm.

I don't even know where to start here. Common carrier laws? The post office? Court cases forcing shopping malls and company towns to allow freedom of speech? I guess these are all innovations by the Textualist/Originalists you despise.

I remember that company towns had to allow private speech, but I never heard that shopping malls had to. I always thought that any protest or disruption or unpopular speech in a mall would get you escorted out by security.

At least in california, they do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

Just because it's legal doesn't mean it makes sense. Monarchs used to make the same argument defending what they did.

Ok what if your telephone or internet company decided the same thing? We will listen in to your private conversations and if you say something we don’t like we will terminate your contract.

Some services are so large and entrenched that they have become natural monopolies that need to be regulated. We place restrictions on what natural monopolies can do because of the effects on society as a whole.

The question that needs to be debated is if YouTube has reached the status of a natural monopoly or not. I think it probably has, but I am open to evidence on the other side.

I’m not seeing a parallel, here. Your example is mixing in a whole bunch of “invasion of privacy” which doesn’t exist in the real situation being discussed, and is going to vastly impact people’s emotional reaction.

Why not use the more natural example? “What if a television network decided the same thing? We will watch your publicly broadcast television show and if you say something we don’t like we will cancel your show.” It’s a lot closer to what’s actually happening in this case, right? And it doesn’t needlessly mix in the hot-button topic of privacy violations.

So what happens when you have a group phone call? Should the telephone company be able to listen in and censor those as it wishes?

The parallel is phone companies in the past did listen in to people’s conversation, but this was recognised as an abuse of a monopoly power. Regulations were introduced to stop this sort of activity.

What we should be discussing is how to regulate natural monopolies like YouTube, not if they should be able to just do whatever they like. Like all regulation there will need to be a balance, but society has a vested interest in ensuring natural monopolies are not abusing their power.

Even if YouTube is not abusing its power, the fact it can is a concern.

Content filtering is impossible to get right.

For Example, Holocaust denial is shitty and something that anyone should be allowed to ban just because they don't want to be associated with it. The problem is that you have to draw the line somewhere between "The Jews faked the Holocaust and none of it ever happened" and " The exact number of deaths in the Holocaust will never been known but it was in the millions". The first statement is clearly false, the second statement could be an attempt to downplay the magnitude of the event, but it is hard to say without context and you may never know the intent of the person who said it.

> but it is hard to say without context and you may never know the intent of the person who said it.

So? There is a certain revulsion that a lot of engineers have for situational decision making, but that's how we've been doing the law for centuries. Virtually every line that matters is hard to draw. Yet we don't paralyze ourselves by refusing to act.

Fine, time for some trustbusting.

If corporations can't discriminate in hiring due to an American principle of anti-racism, then we can also prevent corporations from discriminating in speech on an American principle of free speech.

They have the right to do it, and it will make the world worse off. Taibbi always has had a great guy instinct for normal Americans and how they react to elite condescension, and he's right here.

My idiot brother got twice as radicalized when they kicked Alex Jones's crazy ass off YouTube.

It made people feel better and more morally superior, especially employees. It hurt my brother. Now when he watches that asshole, he's on a website where he is guaranteed to never get the other side.

If you support this, then you don't know anything about how humans react to censorship.

Even before Jones was kicked off, people went to YouTube for insane conspiracy theories and ended up, due to the video recommendation system, still only seeing one side. It really didn't matter whether Jones was on there or his own platform, people watching his videos still only see his (and related) videos.

Consider a utilitarian point of view. This is not about grounding people who already went off the deep end, it's about reducing the number of people who get radicalized. I think from that perspective deplatforming radicals is both ethical and effective.

I don't understand why you are being downvoted. People may not agree with the sentiment, but it seems salient and reasonably stated.

Because people who aren’t radicals have been called radicals, and there’s no way that anyone trusts anyone else to decide who is a radical.

It is true, what used to be radical is now becoming normal. Propganda works.

Obviously I would agree if you're talking about Alex Jones. A thing that worries me is when people are banned or videos are removed when the facts in question are in dispute.

I was a very big proponent of wearing mask in the beginning of the pandemic back when the WHO and Dr Fauci had advised against it not because it was true but to manipulate the public for the purpose of preventing a rush on n95 masks.

If I had stated in a video the truth which was that the public was being manipulated to protect the masks, I would have been contradicting WHO and the video could have been banned. That's a problem.

Sorry about your brother. These platforms are designed for feedback loops. That has nothing to do with free speech or a legal protection to spread libel.

People need to realize that ANY website where a user submits content for is not classified as free speech. A tweet isn’t free speech. A post on Reddit isn’t free speech. These are “articles and or content provided by the public for enhancements to our platform” or whatever EULA legalese they use.

Yeah, like I said, banning a bunch of videos from one genre right now looks bad and people have a right to be upset over it. It’s still YouTube’s legal right to choose which content they want to showcase on their platform.

They hold all the power here. Content creators are at their mercy as far as compensation, views, inclusion in the recommendation engine, etc. then cry foul when the company moves in another direction. Down-leg economics. Specialized businesses based on a supply of value from another business. It’s not a sustainable model for anyone on the 3rd rung.

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