Youtube has become such a mindless distraction of mine. Like television used to be.
And their censorship really is loathsome. I don't need mega-corporations telling me what is and isn't ok to see and hear.
And their censorship really is loathsome. I don't need mega-corporations telling me what is and isn't ok to see and hear.
Lots of other benefits to this model - names that people don't get trapped in extremist bubbles as much when they're not literally banned from everywhere else.
EDIT: This happened to me thrice. I got 3 temp-bans from /pol/ for having politics the mods didnt like.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aap8/the-man-who-helped-tu...
It's far from entirely uncensored.
> Fans were arguing online about the best order to watch the episodes, and the 4chan poster wondered: If viewers wanted to see the series in every possible order, what is the shortest list of episodes they’d have to watch? [...] In less than an hour, an anonymous person offered an answer — not a complete solution, but a lower bound on the number of episodes required. [...] The proof slipped under the radar of the mathematics community for seven years — apparently only one professional mathematician spotted it at the time, and he didn’t check it carefully. [...] Then Robin Houston, a mathematician at the data visualization firm Kiln, and Jay Pantone of Marquette University in Milwaukee independently verified the work of the anonymous 4chan poster [1].
This example tells us a few things. One is that 4chan has users who can come up with new complicated mathematical proofs in a matter of hours. Two - that there are professional mathematicians who read 4chan and can spot those proofs.
Also anecdotally, but on two separate occasions I accidentally discovered that a "smart and well-adjusted" person I know lurks on 4chan. In one such instance the response was similar to "reddit is where dumb people try to act smart, while 4chan is where smart people try to act dumb". I think there is at least some truth in that.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/how-an-anonymous-4chan-post-help...
Of course, this requires big tech to relinquish their power to shape worldwide discourse, which is unlikely to happen voluntarily.
More importantly, it doesn't solve the other problem: I don't want to use a website that supports a certain ideology or promotes dangerous content. So the website operator needs to have some sort of serverside moderation otherwise part of the community will not comfortable using it.
Some imageboards use both system, a client-side taglist that hide undesirable comment, and some "server-side" rules about what is generally allowed. I don't think client-side only moderation is sufficent
Instead of Reddit’s “news” subs banning the pulse night club shooting, you have “popular tastemakers” driving the list doing the same.
Except probably with less transparency or accountability. When /r/news bans a topic, I know roughly which couple of clowns did it, when I never see something because my list-makers pre-decided I shouldn’t, we’ll, who ever are those people?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/698821/influence-offensi...
> What kind of videos can I upload?
>> We accept any type of video content as long as it does not contain:
>>> Pornography or obscene material
>>> Copyrighted content (unless you own all the necessary rights)
>>> Hate or graphically violent acts
4chan sucks because it is too moderated in everything but the speech.
I would prefer just having rules about what speech is allowed or not and then give users full capability to use the site. Twitter does this pretty well.
>I would prefer just having rules about what speech is allowed or not
I'm not sure if you're serious. 4chan has an incredibly tiny amount of rules, one of them being no racism outside of /b/. Half of the forums are constantly bombarded by anti-black, anti-asian and anti-jewish racism. These posts do not get removed.
It has gotten to the point where it is affecting everyone, no matter the content.
They just happen to be one of the most aggressive ones and the best part is they frequently change 'The Algorithm' which is a nickname for YouTube's 'recommendation's engine' to enforce this. Thus, the smaller creators are meant to lose against the established channels (Which are the TV, cable networks)
There are billions of videos hosted outside of YouTube. YouTube is not trying to get them taken down.
Why don't you complain when your favorite news channel fails to include a Communist guest pundit? Because it's their medium and they have editorial control.
I do believe in "the marketplace of ideas", even for ideas I don't hold (how else is one to rethink things?) But without agreed upon facts and, dare I say it, truths, such a marketplace can't really operate. We unfortunately are living in such times.
What is the percentage?
Two things:
A. Even if true, that is still a price worth paying to avoid having a central arbiter of truth that political factions can fight over and eventually control.
B. Lack of access to good counterarguments/innoculation to the radical ideas is a consequence of those ideas being supressed. If people don't even know what a radicalized person believes how can they help dig them out of the hole they are in? It's one of the reasons why "scientific racism" continues to grow.
Or if you will moderate content, then be held liable for your mistakes. Both censorship or recommending false information should make YouTube liable for damages.
"The rise of neo-Nazism and other forms of militant, hard-right reactionary ideology, as well as vaccine deniers, and the hundreds of thousands of lives they have provably cost us, are a price worth paying to make sure that no one can tell me I can't post whatever videos I want on a privately-owned video hosting site."
"And one person gets up and says, “you know what, this holocaust, I’m not even sure it happened. In fact, I’m
pretty certain it didn’t. Indeed, I begin to wonder if the only thing is that the Jews brought a little bit of
violence on themselves.”—That person doesn’t just have a right to speak, that person’s right to speak must be
given extra protection. Because what he has to say must have taken him some effort to come up with. Might
contain a grain of historical truth; might, in any case, give people to think why do they know what they
think they already know. How do I know I know this except I’ve always been taught this and never heard any
thing else? It’s always worth establishing first principle….don’t take refuge in the false security of
consensus and the feeling that, whatever you think, you’re bound to be okay because you’re in the safely, moral
majority"
I think one of the things we've been learning real hard as a globally interconnected species is, if people can do nefarious shit through insisting their intentions be taken in good faith, over a large enough sampling size they WILL do nefarious shit because it is in their interest to do so.
It's like criminal justice. If you look at a large enough population you begin to run into people where you can't take their word on things. And mandating that such people must have the ability to make their case is not the same thing as taking their side. Sometimes what they have to say did not take great effort to come up with. Sometimes they say what they say because they're what they appear to be, and it's a thing that is criminal or otherwise unacceptable.
Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance comes to mind, but my issue with that is who gets to decide what is intolerant? I don't like the idea of some unelected board or career politician deciding what is suitable for me to read or view.
I strongly believe that one of those principles should be that hate speech is intolerable and unacceptable. And yes, there are grey areas in determining what is hate speech (this isn't a silver bullet that removes all need for human judgement and discussion), but there are also very large areas that are not grey in any way, shape, or form.
... Might contain a grain of historical truth; might, in any case, give people to think why do they know
what they think they already know.
Perhaps we'll be able to set up elaborate simulations one day to see how things play out.
If Hitchens had said, "I've weighed the two potential worst cases against each other, and I believe that the harms of protecting Holocaust denial are something that we can all live with", then I'd consider it a valid opinion. As it is, this quote strikes me as shallow and poorly thought out.
He's reduced a complex balance to a simplistic decision by excluding any input from the people at the most risk of harm. If he were Jewish, I doubt he'd have written that paragraph. The strongest advocates of unrestricted speech always seem to be those who have the least at risk, and the risk to others seems completely invisible despite their supposed attachment to hearing from everybody. He's taken refuge in exactly the opposite "false security of consensus".
The argument comes from a place of privilege, is egregiously reductionist, and completely ignores simple precepts like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater.
"I'm not a proponent of unlimited free speech. It's those grey areas that concern me. Like, using Hitch's example, is holocaust denial hate speech or an incitement to violence? Under certain circumstances, I imagine it would be. It's easy for me to say it should be allowed because I know the majority of society right now would dismiss their claims, but at what point (in terms of the percentage of society) would I start to feel uneasy about the idea being discussed? Is it better then to censor it outright? What if, as Hitch says:
... Might contain a grain of historical truth; might, in any case, give people to think why do they know
what they think they already know.
The problem, as I see it, isn't even about incitement to violence. There's plenty of Holocaust denial that isn't an incitement to violence, unless by stretching that term far past its breaking point. It's not even really hate speech, in a strict reading of that term -- it only becomes defined as "hate speech" because we know that it originates from people who have had more explicit hate speech restricted.
But that doesn't mean it's without harm. These "questions" are really assertions that rather than being killed en masse, Jews have in fact inflicted great deception on the world. That creates mistrust -- sometimes violent, but more often merely prejudicial. Those prejudices can take effect in myriad ways, impossible to trace to the questioner, but nonetheless real.
Would a smart person like Hitchens be fooled by this? Surely not. But then again, he doesn't even seem to consider that it's a possibility. As you say, he seems to think that violence is the only way harm could be inflicted, and nothing else seems to be involved. That's a blind spot.
That blind spot is important here, because his entire argument is based on "Let people make their arguments and surely we'll come to the right conclusion". I don't believe he himself is capable of coming to the right conclusion because he's missing something right in front of him -- something somebody must surely have pointed out at some point, but which he doesn't even consider to be a problem worth mentioning.
Every single ideology will say their opponents are responsible for countless lives lost. (And if they lump everyone who disagrees with them together can probably make such a case) Just for an example, capitalism vs communism. I'd rather not be stuck in a China like situation where arguing against government beliefs like "this new virus in Wuhan is nothing to worry about citizen" gets censored or we get eternally stuck in a suboptimal state because arguing for anything different is considered dangerous.
I'll also point out that the deciders in Twitter, Facebook, etc are not the most ideologically diverse bunch, so one could argue that the so-called blue tribe is being the central arbiter.
i'm uncomfortable with the guidelines for that responsibility being decided upon by a third party corporation rather than a state/country level government regulator.
these guidelines are what dictate the citizens perceived reality in many cases; is it sane&safe to compel corporations with biased motivations to be the ones who decide on that perceived reality?
Personally I disagree with corporations controlling thought and dissent; I believe it to be outside of their scope, and I think that their acting as moral judge is both biased and dangerous to society-at-large -- this isn't to say I disagree with the control, I disagree with who is at the reins and what their (probably temporary) priorities may be at the time of control.
I share your discomfort, but I'm even more uncomfortable with government doing it. At least Youtube has a few alternatives. My national government? Not so much. (I mean, yeah, but I have to leave the country to get them...)
Free thought is the gateway to a healthy educated population.
Porn on YouTube cannot exist, legally, in the same way your ideal scenario implies.
A ban on underage rape videos followed by hiring mods to enforce this would have been doing it right.
I'm surprised they made that choice it must have been the most profitable path. I guess the producers left are the big businesses who create premium streams who pornhub can upsell to.
Did they kill their brand?
I have no idea if pornhub as a site would be as successful without it’s unverified model in the beginning.