Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest
mediaite.com
mediaite.com
Does YouTube's TOS really not contain statements giving them the ability to stop hosting any video, at any time, for any reason?
Edit: I guess not: the only content removal clause I see is this one, which is definitely not "we can remove your video for any reason, as long as we feel like it." I'm a little surprised they don't seem to have included anything like that.
> If we reasonably believe that any Content is in breach of this Agreement or may cause harm to YouTube, our users, or third parties, we may remove or take down that Content in our discretion. (from https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms)
Powerful enough governments can just choose to ignore or re-interpret things any way they like and act on them, though.
Seems like a common trend in many countries around the world. Tech companies tend to be american, so they're a popular punching bag/scapegoat when it comes to enforcement actions.
The clause in the sentence before that part reads "Beneath the rule of men entirely great,..." It was referring to authoritarian government.
It sounds like YouTube's stance is that the video may cause harm to their users; one of their criteria for removal.
Literally anything can be argued to be "harmful."
If there weren't people that blindly accepting it as the truth and verified everything this wouldn't be bad, in fact would be good because it could drive attention to something that perhaps was ignored.
Unfortunately large part of population has no idea how to do fact checking, and what's worse many take their news from the Facebook.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/15/online-ha...
(For what it's worth, the proposed law now refers to "safety" rather than "harms").
>UK
Or let me try, is “hateful”?
Yeah. That about clears it up, I guess. Clear as mud.
Google might also be intentionally lazy, the Google Play licensing terms for example generally fail in front of a court when they are challenged, as they actively violate every law on anti competitive behavior you could think up. Whenever that happens Google just carves out a new licensing region for that courts jurisdiction and keeps the terms unchanged for the remaining world.
Companies have obligations too, and I think that in Europe (compared to the USA) more people would agree that it's better to limit companies if it benefits people.
Certainly, in this case, it's better for people to have their protests heard than for Google to flex it's censorious whims.
For consumers, it is even better not to read the terms, because then they can say that they have been taken advantage of (it is harder to do that if you change a passage manually in a written contract).
This is a discussion about Germany making it clear to Google what they're prohibited from removing.
The highest court in Germany (for civil and criminal proceedings) wrote this in one of their rulings:
> Depending on the circumstances, especially if private companies - as in this case - move into a dominant position and take over the provision of the framework conditions of public communication themselves, the fundamental rights obligation of private parties can in fact be close to or even equal to a fundamental rights obligation of the state.
So as long as YouTube, Twitter etc. are open to "the public", they could write "we reserve the right to remove any content for any or no reason at any time" in their TOS and it wouldn't be valid in Germany.
And anyhow, the GDR dissolved over 30 years ago, I should think their economic policies died with them.
No one is holding a gun to YouTube’s head and telling them they have to serve video content to Germans. They want to be in Germany serving video content, so it’s only fair and just that they should listen to the Germans and do what they say or leave.
Germany could probably tell Google not to host any videos from the opposition political party under penalty of fine or expulsion. Hopefully we agree that that would be bad?
It is entirely possible for countries to do things which are against their constitution.
We can agree that bad things are bad, but that doesn’t really gives us much insight.
If they want to diminish the impact legally and profitably, they can just drown it in in more intrusive ads.
I actually think Germany has it backwards here. If the German government wants to provide a free-speech "safe zone", they should provide it themselves.
You're encouraging government coercion of action.
But that is what they are doing here, no? They just use Youtube as the way to provide it. Governments doesn't have to run businesses themselves, private actors are much better at running the day to day stuff usually.
Similarly if you own a huge amount of land and build a city there and let lots of people move in, don't get surprised when the government seizes your square and roads and make them public, or at least force you to let people move there as if they were public roads.
Whether or not Youtube should have a clause in their terms allowing them to remove arbitrary content is a different question, and yet another is whether they should be allowed to have such a clause.
Some people currently seem to have the attitude that a corporation can be protected by the state but not responsible for its actions that negatively impact the common good. This was not the original intention.
> But wether public or private, corporations were originally only granted special legal privileges by government, conditional on them serving some PUBLIC good. With special rights came special restrictions, and their operations were periodically reviewed for compliance with their stated purpose. However, over time the system of incorporation has been altered by corporations themselves, such that the benefits of state-grants have been kept, while the responsibilities discarded. [0]
[0] https://ptolemy3.medium.com/but-corporations-are-private-com...
Then, on YouTube (or woke mailing lists) there are mostly two sides, only one of which gets censored: The one that opposes the dominant clique.
YouTube is full of filth that is kept up because it is non-political and makes money for Google. If Google were really woke, it would take down all videos that are demeaning to women (according to their ideology). They don't, because these videos are a cash cow.
Now someone walks in and starts offering Corona. It's not everyone's favorite, but still decently popular, and the owner has no problem with that.
Until a few hours later, when a new line is added to the list of rules on the door: "no Corona". Then the owner tells the person handing out free Corona that they're breaking the rules and kicks them out.
Is that fair? Not in this case, says the court. Everyone agrees to the rules when they walk through the door, but the owner can't just willy-nilly change them after the fact.
(If you want to really understand the decision, you'll have to read the original instead of relying on analogies.)
Of course now you might say, if such a phone company existed, those people who were denied service could just choose another one. But if this company would be the one dominating the market, this would mean they couldn't reach all the people they would want to anymore. This is the analogy with Facebook.
And you're advocating for foreign private companies to have more rights than the democratically elected governments of the countries they operate in.
Last time I checked laws still come from countries, not from Google. The world isn't America's private companies playground
I think we are way past the illusion of democracy and governments protecting their people at this point.
They might have very different views than Americans and Google about what should or shouldn't exist.
As if America and its private companies have the monopoly of what's "right" and what it means to "protect the people" of the world, this is ridiculous
Companies can only provide products and services to willing customers. To restrict them is to restrict the choices of your own people to choose products they prefer. So what you're really arguing for is the majority in a country restricting the freedom of a minority in that same country.
How did you extrapolate that ? No
I really don't get your second point. You can't sell me a car without seat belt, you can't sell me weed, you can't host a jihad video platform.
You're already restricted in many ways. The world doesn't have to kneel in front of YouTube &co and accept all their bullshit.
America isn't a role model, neither in politics nor culture, the world doesn't need to conform to what America think is right.
Also, YouTube doesn't exist to serve the people, certainly not, it exists to make money and uses tax evasion to pay as little as possible in most EU countries, if they wanted to serve the people they could start there
As for the second point, yes and those examples are also cases of restricting their own citizens. Hence the discussion is still about rights of the citizenry versus their own government restricting them, not "rights" of companies as you put it.
The world is free to not use YouTube and always has been. And by the way I don't agree with many of the major websites' censorship decisions in the last couple years either. They depict only what a loud subset of America thinks is right.
Companies generally make money by serving people. I suppose there are business models where this isn't so (e.g. they exist to sue people or something, but exploiting govt's ability to take money by force instead), but in YouTube's case, they entice people the consensual way.
The biggest difference generally between a private enterprise (foreign or domestic) and a democratically elected government is that participation with the government and its rules are:
- compulsory - enforced by physical violence
If I disagree with googles rules I can avoid google. If I a disagree with the governments rules (for example tax rates they impose), there will be people with weapons to force compliance.
That's exactly what Germany's highest court denied if they "move into a dominant position and take over the provision of the framework conditions of public communication themselves" because it is not easy to avoid Google/YouTube.
But to me, it's not a punishment. It's a natural consequence of YouTube's dominant position: they have to start acting like it.
This idea that private companies earn special privileges in this regard because they were started by individuals needs to die.
So what's your take on Lawrence v. Texas?
Two people in their house,
a large, transparent non-profit advocacy organization,
a dark money lobbying org, and
a hundred-billion-dollar for-profit incumbent that acts as a pillar of human interaction for news, education and entertainment across the globe
are very different situations. It isn't as simple as scaling up numbers.
Companies exist to benefit the state and the people. If a company is so successful it distorts rights for everyone and puts fundamental rights at risk, it's not 'punishing' the company even though it might feel like it. It's making sure the conditions that created success for youtube remain in place for future generations - free speech to some degree, competition, etc.
I think corporate personhood and corporate rights are a cancer on society and the corporatism/corporate state/fascism-lite that the west is already deep into is destroying the fundamental freedoms in the country. Disney will always have more money than you to argue for their corporate rights against your personal rights.
This ruling is wisdom.
I've recently had to talk to my internet provider, and that certainly increased my citizen's fervor in regulating companies in dominant positions, because every company will immediately turn around to milk/punish consumers, and try to influence politics for their benefit.
An attempt at practical antitrust regulation might mean, for example, that if a Walmart replaces every other business in your town through the sheer merit of its business model, that Walmart doesn't get to refuse to do business with you on the grounds that the manager hasn't liked you since high school. It might even mean that you reserve Constitutional rights like assembly/protest within the area that is functionally the public square, which is the private sidewalk in front of the Walmart.
I know which approach I would prefer.
By phrasing what happened in the passive voice, you are downplaying the fact that Google actively strove to make it hard for new competitors to become established.
Of course there still are competitors to YouTube, depending on how we define the market for online video sharing, and Google didn't invent Metcalfe's Law, but nor should they be surprised that it was hard for alternative sites to compete. That is, after all, why they bought YouTube in the first place and discontinued Google Videos.
So ideally if a video is to be taken down, it ought be under a rationale along the lines of "you agreed to not doing [very specific thing] and this video does it, therefore we took it down", not "technically by clicking on a link in our site, you agreed to fine print that says you'll sell us your soul, so suck it"
Yes, and that's a good thing because it encourages competition. No market should have a player with such a dominant position.
No, it is just attaching some minimal responsibility to the enormous benefits that YT exploits their dominant market position for.
No, they bought that status by regularly sending dump-trucks full of gold to record labels.
I feel like it is largely a question of what expectations you work to produce among users and potential users.
If people are actively aware of the organization saying "we can remove videos on a whim if we want to, and we very well might do so", and especially if they are generally known to occasionally do that in practice, and this isn't a surprise to any users with a reasonable level of awareness, then I think that's probably fine.
But if the impression they give to a typical reasonable person is that they are "a platform for almost everyone that behaves according to fixed rules, where you can be reasonably assured that if you follow the stated rules your content will stay available, as much as we are able to accomplish this", but then they go around removing videos on a whim / because they have a grudge against someone / because someone paid them to / whatever , then that's not good, because they aren't being honest about the service they provide.
Whether the govt has any place making an organization who is misbehaving in that particular way stop, I'm, not sure one way or the other.
2. Because it's lazy and lacking credibility: it's a claim to being privy to 'the correct path for society', without showing the ability to create something of value.
The state could still tap market forces to bring about public squares that abide with its guidelines, by providing subsidies to private parties developing such platforms, in exchange for the parties entering into an irrevocable covenant that requires them to follow the state's rules.
Also, the company did not have to go to jail, it got a fine.
All legal injunctions are predicated on the threat of imprisonment, even fines:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforci...
A company is generally its own legal entity, intentionally separated from its shareholders to protect them from any fallout should the company ever go bankrupt or get sued into oblivion. You can get into serious trouble if you founded a company and failed to correctly distinguish between your own and the companies property, because as far as the government is concerned you explicitly told it to make this distinction.
And there is very little privilege that incorporation grants corporations that is not entirely contractual. Limited liability for shareholders for tort is the only one I can think of, and that, in my opinion, should be repealed.
Limited liability for debt can be entirely contractual in its basis, and established by shareholders/companies operating outside of the corporate structure too, simply by stipulating that condition in any loan agreememt the business enter into with another party.
> §14.2 GG: Eigentum verpflichtet. Sein Gebrauch soll zugleich dem Wohle der Allgemeinheit dienen. [0]
Which roughly translates to:
> §14.2 GG: Property obliges. Its use should also serve the public good.
I think I will take a stroll through the forest, maybe I meat a bear that plays guitar and sells refreshing lemonade. I am prepared for anything.
>>Completely free capitalism brings the kind of aberrations that we can already see destroying the livelihood of millions of people in the USA
The idea that the US has "completely free capitalism" is the Big Lie promoted by the state's unionized activist bureaucracy. The US, along with the rest of advanced nations, has rapidly moved away from being a free society with economic liberty, toward one that has a significant amount of centralized control over the private actions of its citizens:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
If you believe otherwise, then I challenge you to convince a court of that. Courts, under common law, will invalidate any contract where the parties to it did not provide informed and genuine consent to the terms contained in it.
Resorting to legislative intervention suggests lacking the confidence in the validity of the allegations that premise it to use the judicial free market track.
>>as someone living in a country with multiple nation wide and regional state owned television channels I think they are terrible idea because they are extremely inefficient compared with private ones and also degenerate into propaganda machines for the political party in power, and the longer the same party is in power the worse.
Two points:
a) you think the polity is incapable of managing large organizatons competently enough to compete with shareholder-run private enterprises, yet you think this same polity can craft effective cookie-cutter rules that will affect millions of interactions a day. It's not a coherent model of the world.
b) the state is not limited to organizations under its direct management to support its policies. As I explained in a response to a sibling comment of yours, the state could still tap market forces to bring about public squares that abide with its guidelines, by providing subsidies to private parties developing such platforms, in exchange for the parties entering into an irrevocable covenant that requires them to follow the state's rules.
Yet another option would be the state funding decentralized open-source protocols that are capable of entirely replacing centralized parties in many markets. The state, being publicly funded, is the only entity capable of cost-effectively funding non-profit initiatives like this that produce public goods.
My larger point is that the state should not be monopolizing industries. It should provide alternatives to the private options. If it fails, the public still has the private options. If it succeeds, it did so by providing an option superior to those provided by the private sector. This imposes accountability on the state, by leaving it with competitors to act as a yardstick, while ensuring its interventions only impact the market to the extent that they improve it.
In Spain at least there are lots of instances of courts overturning contracts, the most famous ones maybe related to mortgage conditions. I'm not sure if this is good or not in the long term, but it's the case.
The Japanese infrastructure slush funds are a classic example of that.
And I would also submit that state intervention in healthcare and education has been a dramatic failure, with costs in these two sectors skyrocketing over the period in which the state expanded its role in them.
>>In Spain at least there are lots of instances of courts overturning contracts, the most famous ones maybe related to mortgage conditions. I'm not sure if this is good or not in the long term, but it's the case.
If a court overturns a contract, that is fine. One of the roles of the state, in a free society, is to rule on contracts via its courts, and invalidate those that do not meet the bar for consent.
But legislative bodies do not engage in the same impartial and deliberative process as courts so they are not the proper venue through which to restrict private interactions.
There is nothing wrong with state-owned corporations in principle. They need not violate any one's rights. How they are funded, and what laws are created to assist them, can of course be problematic, as can the general inefficiency of the state sector.
But if the funding sources for the state subsidies are not based on violating private property or contracting rights, there are no laws enacted to give the state-sponsored enterprise a monopoly over a market, and the subsidies address an externality to produce significant positive economic returns, then it would be fine.
This approach to government intervention is less risky, as failure of government administration will only waste the resources expended on the state-sponsored enterprise, while leaving private citizens with the private sector alternatives. Regimenting an entire sector with top-down rules risks destroying that entire sector if the government chooses the wrong set of rules.
Double-edged sword...
> The German court held that YouTube failed to make its enforcement authority clear in its contract with the account operator who posted the video.
It does contain language quite similar to "regardless of the contract, we hold that ...":
Dahingestellt bleiben kann dabei, ob die Nutzungsbedingungen bzw. die „Richtlinie zur medizinischen Fehlinformation über COVID-19“ einer AGB-rechtlichen Kontrolle standhalten, insbesondere, ob sie dem Transparenzgebot genügen bzw. den Nutzer nicht unangemessen benachteiligen (§307 BGB). Denn die Inhalte des streitgegenständlichen Videos verstoßen bereits nicht gegen die Ende Januar 2021 gültige „Richtlinie zu medizinischen Fehlinformation über COVID-19“ (aa). Bezüglich der Neufassung der vorgenannten Richtlinie hat die Beklagte dagegen nicht glaubhaft gemacht, dass diese wirksam in den Vertrag einbezogen ist (bb).
"The question whether the terms of use resp. the "guidelines regarding medical disinformation about COVID-19" would withstand a check under ToS-law, especially whether they are sufficiently transparent resp. inappropriately disadvantage the user (§307 BGB) can be left aside. Because the content of the video under dispute already does not run counter to the "guidelines regarding medical disinformation about COVID-19" that were in effect at the end of January 2021 (aa). As for the revised version of the aforementioned guidelines, the accused has not convincingly argued that it has been effectively incorporated into the contract (bb)."
Which ruling? Have a link (in German is fine)?
https://www.engadget.com/facebook-turkey-emails-200407588.ht...?
I don't even understand why Youtube should be forced by a country to host someone's content. I can understand the opposite (being forced by the government to take down content in their jurisdiction, that has been done before), but forcing a site to keep a video feels really strange to me.
It doesn't appear to be settled even in U.S. law whether requiring a company to host something would be governmental overreach. The traditional "common carrier" doctrine is pretty broad. It's not an exact analogy for the kind of regulation some people would like governments to undertake regarding YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc., but it's not totally unrelated either.
Eugene Volokh from UCLA's law school recently posted a 79-page draft article on the legalities of regulating social media companies as common carriers under U.S. federal law: https://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/carrier.pdf. One large section, II.A., "The General Constitutionality of Compelled Hosting" (pp. 35-58), argues that compelled hosting isn't in general prohibited by the U.S. federal constitution, so in his view the U.S. Congress could pass a common-carrier-style law mandating such companies host content on a neutral basis, if they wanted to (at least if the law avoids various issues he identifies).
Clearly the line is not 'all speech that is allowed in the US'?
Startups less regulation, global conglomerates more regulation.
However, that document does not actually order a fine. It warns about imposing one ("up to 250'000€") if Youtube doesn't remedy the problem. Considering it's now exactly 3 months later (decision dates April 13th), that lines up.
From what I understand (not a lawyer, yadda yadda) this is a purely civil matter and doesn't really go as far as some statement on free speech. The issue discussed mostly seems to revolve around which terms of service are valid and how they can be changed.
Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
Other ways to help are here : https://lbry.tech/contribute
Never heard of them, but they seem to have chosen a poor name that might be censored elsewhere due to the first five letters.
I'm getting the impression from the Google Translate'd version of this[1] article, that they violated a contract with the company?
[1]: https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article232421961/OLG...
> “With the historically high fine, the Higher Regional Court makes it very clear that court decisions must be observed without restriction, regardless of whether YouTube assumes a violation of its guidelines or not,”
What confuses me is that the article states the video was removed in January, which would only make sense if it was January 2021, because January 2020 there were no restrictions in Switzerland. Maybe the above date should be May 2021.
I think the relevant piece from the Welt article is this:
> Es [the court] kam unter anderem zu dem Schluss, die geänderten Richtlinien seien nicht wirksam in den Vertrag mit dem Accountbetreiber einbezogen worden. Hierzu sei ein Änderungsvertrag erforderlich. Der bloße Hinweis, dass es künftig Änderungen geben könne, genüge nicht.
Roughly translated, the changed ToS of Youtube were not contractually effective, because the user was not asked to accept them. Stating that changes can happen any time is not enough.
That "future changes may apply without notice" is invalid in Germany, that's evident. Companies writing bullshit like that in AGBs (ToS) or contracts don't realize Germany is not the US, they need a new legal team.
If the news is correct you are right about the fine being about ignoring the court, not about removing the video in the first place. With a fine that high it has to be about that, there is no way removing a regular video could cause this. Basically the court saw youtube in contempt of the court, kinda.
Might also be politically charged though, East Germany is highly penetrated by Nazis and with a high percentage of corona deniers. Depends on the judge of course whether that was a factor here.
But I was asking why the court was forcing them to re-instate a video in the first place.
None. They violated their civil contract with the user AND failed to fix it within 3 months. cf. toplevel post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27838603
The point was that, as a platform, you cross a line which is very difficult to ever revert when you optionally censor your platform in response to political pressure because both sides are then forced from a game theory perspective to aggressively pursue censoring your platform in their favor lest the other does it first. The platform ends up being collateral damage in some political war they never cared about in the first place and they can never win because no matter who they bend too, it automatically enrages the other side.
This seems like where youtube and twitter and facebook are at now. They caved to censoring things that were reasonable, but now anyone can make them censor anything as long as they have some poltical power somewhere. It's not going to end well for them. Their only winning move was to stay neutral and do nothing but comply with legal requests.
To me, the fact that they don't care about it is the problem. Those companies are having issues because they have no moral or ethical compass. It's become untenable for them to remain neutral because there is no neutral actor in this scenario. There's never going to be a service that's not held to a moral standard for their content regardless of what the law says.
You can argue that you don't like that they are accountable to their shareholders but it is true.
No? This narrative is a bit ahistorical - and it's fueled by this idea that hyperliberal boogeyman started censoring everything.
If you look at what happened in 2017, Google started "censoring" things because advertisers threatened to boycott. The platforms couldn't stay neutral because advertisers became more and more concerned with staying out of any potential scandal.
I even saw (this mostly was Facebook, but also was done on YouTube) where the channel/fan page purposefully switching videos to private while talking they are being censored.
Sometimes channels will do this because they have "strikes" shown on their creator pages, so they hide their videos to avoid having so many strikes they get shut down. Some science and engineering channels I watch have run into this problem.
Doesn't demonetization on YT just mean the ads still run but the money doesn't flow to the creator anymore? Considering YouTube does it that way with copyright claims and also automatically added ads to previously ad-free videos just because they could, it would surprise me if they'd remove video ads by themselves.
> One of the videos that had been restricted was a trailer for one of his short films; another was an It Gets Better video aimed at LGBTQ youth. Sam had been shadow-banned, meaning that users couldn’t search for it on YouTube. None of the videos were sexually explicit or profane.
> ... five YouTube channels alleged that the platform had unfairly targeted LGBTQ content creators with practices similar to those described by Bardo: demonetizing videos, placing them in restricted mode without warning, and hiding them from search results.
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/lgbtq-...
They tried to get YT to do it, when YT ignored them they went after the money... It is right from the liberal playbook
What actually happened isn't that one side of the political spectrum "censored" the other side in some sort of targeted attack.. it's that advertisers and private companies optimized for generating as much profits as possible by (obviously) pondering to the majority of potential customers.
Ironically.. such is the nature of capitalism.
For example, Conservatives demanded radio stations stop playing the Beatles, and, only slightly more recently, the Dixie Chicks. They called up advertisers as well.
You could probably find people complaining to artists' patrons in Medieval texts, if you looked.
We libertarians did not mind our flank and Authoritarian liberals today are about 10000000x more of an issue than even the most extreme bible thumping conservative from the 90's ever was
https://truthout.org/articles/right-wingers-are-taking-over-...
Are these tax payer funded libraries, and could it be the fund reduction is simply a result of the fact that many, including myself, believe that libraries should not be funded by forcible taxation of the population.
This position is often turned by left sources as "raaaaccciiism"
And "what-aboutism" was exactly the point, I was specifically pointing out that boycotting based on morals isn't in any way only the domain of "hyperliberals."
Saying that liberals or conservatives have this to a greater or worse extent is looking at it through the wrong lens.
If you want recent examples, look at WAP, its Super Bowl and Grammy's performances, Lil Nas X, or the NFL and Colin Kaepernick. There's also the witch hunt and boycott on teachers, companies and anyone else they believe are part of a nationwide critical race theory conspiracy.
"Share and publicize, through existing channels, information already available on critical race theory (CRT)"
"Provide an already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project."
"Commit President Becky Pringle to make public statements across all lines of media that support racial honesty in education including but not limited to critical race theory.
This isn't limited to universities, either - it's being taught in K-12 schools[3]:
"Responding to prompts such as “In the last year, I have learned _____ about race and racism,” and “One way I will work for racial equity in my work,” teachers say:
“American society makes it hard to have high hopes.” Racism infests the nation’s “entire fabric.” Everyone must “lean into the discomfort.” “Older millennials are disappointingly racist.” “Aspects of the anti racist movement have been co-opted by neoliberal corporations, and reactionarily [sic] opposed by many even mainstream conservative thinkers.” Racism is “layered into everything we do at school.” We must “share the harsh reality of the BIPOC and LBGTQI communities with our students.” “Discuss issues of equity as arising in most every book I teach.”
Oh, and the statement by the NEA was removed from its website shortly after[4] (https://ra.nea.org/business-item/2021-nbi-039/ now redirects to the homepage), which is only further evidence for the fact that many of those pushing this ideology are simultaneously attempting to gaslight and actively lie to their opponents in an attempt to convince the public that it doesn't exist.
I'm not sure why you used the phrase "witch hunt" when the ideology clearly exists and is actively being pushed in education around the United States. Perhaps you meant to use the phrase "accountability culture"?
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210702133611/https://ra.nea.or...
[2] https://nypost.com/2021/07/04/teachers-union-vows-to-fight-b...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/23/teacher-p...
[4] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/national-education-associat...
This confusion was deliberate work of a few conservative thinkers, who wanted an obscure "elitist" academic theory to use as a catch-all term for all anti-racism work.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/opinion/critical-race-the...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conse...
According to that same mob, when they couldn't find the critical race theory at the school board meeting, everything they didn't like, along with diversity training, suddenly became critical race theory[3]:
> While critical race theory was not on the agenda, parents and community members accused the school district of requiring teachers to take a diversity training that discusses the concept and then teaching it to students. They also criticized the school board for proposing a policy that would allow gender-expansive or transgender students to use their chosen name and gender pronouns and use the restroom that corresponds with their asserted gender identity.
That sounds and looks like a witch hunt for teachers to me.
Also, this is where the conspiracy comes in. Everything conservatives don't like is critical race theory now, and that's by design[2]:
> Christopher Rufo, a prominent opponent of critical race theory, in March acknowledged intentionally using the term to describe a range of race-related topics and conjure a negative association.
> “We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions,” wrote Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’”
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/partisan-war-over-teaching-...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/05/29/critical...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/news/picture/pandemonium-at-virginia...
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/24/us/loudoun-county-school-boar...
Yep the liberal playbook that was kicked off by an investigation by the progressive news outlet... The Times[1]... which is owned by Hyperliberal Billionaire... Rupert Murdoch.
Do you even bother to do a small amount of research into your biases? It blows my mind that people think the world is controlled by a couple of megalomaniacs on Liberal Twitter.
[1] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/youtube-hate-preachers-sh...
There’s been a lot of really bad information on 230 from people who ought to know better.
If a site wants to hide all posts/videos that promote some unpopular political belief, or use offensive words, then implementing that censorship as the default user experience is perfectly acceptable, as long as users can choose to opt out of that censorship.
There might be multiple reasons why a given post/video could be censored, and perhaps there is a small burden on sites to tag every single reason rather than mark it for censorship at the first excuse, but I think that a lot of the tagging work could be made the responsibility of the user who uploaded it.
Such a system would hopefully make moot the slightly disingenuous argument that "If sites can't ban political opinions I don't like then they also won't be able to ban spam". Obviously sites would be allowed to put neutral resource limits on users, to prevent DoS attacks.
It sounds like it's doing its job.
The fulfillment of this fantasy of forcing platforms to abandon their efforts will just lead to all of social media degenerating into cesspits as they fill up with porn and swastikas and all normal people leave.
I agree that highly-public social media anything like what we see now wouldn't work anymore.
I don't even necessarily think that we should kill 230, but I don't think you should be able to curate and promote content, and claim strong rights to posted content, and still enjoy its protections. Yes, this means "algorithm-curation" social media with broad public visibility of content and that claims significant ownership of posted content, would be in trouble. I think services like that should struggle to operate that way. Take ownership or don't, none of this pretending to be one thing while doing another stuff. That doesn't mean we have to crack down on web hosts or ISPs or email providers or anything like that, since they're not doing most of that stuff.
They can pit the providers against each other. And that's basically how a free market works.
Yeah, it's called Facebook. Regardless these weren't some no names who were boycotting, it was pretty much the whales like P&G and CocaCola who were complaining. (Just those 2 spend $8BN/year). At the very least having any of them pull out would cratered at least one exec's bonus.
1. Google definitely censors things on their own as well. Their own search engine turns up a long list of examples, so I won't rehash them all here, but one illustrative example is their censorship of the dissenter plug-in (https://reclaimthenet.org/google-chrome-web-store-bans-disse...), which also seems to be an example of censorship collusion within the tech industry.
2. Google has a long history of internal activism that is highly progressive, and regularly applies pressure on the company, and creates a culture of fear for employees who are either conservative, centrist, or even moderately left-leaning. The James Damore fiasco is a great example of the internal political culture rearing its head and how it impacts who's comfortable speaking up and steering the company's culture (https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/google-fires-employee-for-...).
3. Why do you think advertisers became "more and more concerned"? It's because of left-leaning activist pressure from groups like Sleeping Giants who have made it their mission to organize activists and create a false sense of societal pressure on advertisers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Giants). It's the same as Google censoring things, because typically activist employees will draw attention internally to these activist campaigns, and try to alter the company's otherwise neutral stances. There's also a pipeline from internal activist employees to certain members of the press (like Geekwire) to try to use external pressure to move company stances.
I'm willing to accept the premise that Google could have neoliberal pressure on the company (I don't know if I would consider the pressure you allude to be progressive or left leaning). That said, James Damore's memo, if you've read it is not a good example of it and I believe he was rightly exiled for it. The memo is poorly sourced and poorly argued. It reads like someone who doesn't understand Dunning–Kruger is.
From Lee Jussim, a professor of social psychology at Rutgers University who was a Fellow and Consulting Scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (https://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists...):
> The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right.
Can you define "reasonable" here in an objective way that we could all agree on?
There's no such thing as neutrality. Leaving up a popular anti-vax video is just as political a decision as taking it down.
>There's no such thing as neutrality. Leaving up a popular anti-vax video is just as political a decision as taking it down.
Nonsense. We don't apply this standard to anything else in life.
I'm not sure what "elsewhere in life" means, but bookstores choose what books they will sell while also not necessarily endorsing every book they carry.
and
> I refuse to take down this video, because I do not think it needs to be taken down
are two VERY different things. The first one is a political choice about taking down videos in general. The second one is a political choice about a specific topic. The second one is more or less similar to taking down the video because you think it needs to be taken down (same topic, different political decision)... the first one is absolutely nothing like that.
Edit: In case it wasn't clear (because I replied in the wrong place), this is the comment I was discussing
> There's no such thing as neutrality. Leaving up a popular anti-vax video is just as political a decision as taking it down.
While it may be "just as political", it's a political about a totally different thing.
Anyway, a social platform that only removes illegal content (not even spam?) sounds absolutely dreadful and I would not use it and no one would pay to advertise on it.
If my friends bring me dreadful content that I don't like, I'm not sure we'll stay friends. If my friends are spamming, I'll ask them to stop and if they continue, I'm not going to stay friends (or at least I'll unfollow them where they're spamming).
If people post garbage to my posts, I'll delete their garbage and restrict access to my posts.
There's no need for the social platform to do moderation, until it starts putting unrelated people's content in front of me; which is something I don't really want from a social platform.
Presumably, you don’t notice you’re on a moderated platform, but HN is very much not an unmoderated free-for-all.
It would be interesting to have a social platform where you can only see mutual connections. I imagine it'd have a hard time competing with email and group texts and all the other ways people who already know each other can stay in touch.
If I'm searching for a video, I try to do it in a web search, and likely it'll lead to YouTube, and hopefully it'll actually be useful content (or Rick Astley, I actually like that song).
Anyway, if I were YouTube, I would turn off comments everywhere, and review videos before including them in recommendations (which would leave a lot of videos out of that section) and probably have a lot lower views.
That's a misconception, and basically what the whole trolley problem is all about. Doing nothing is not the same as doing something. Each have their own ethical consequences and it's not as easy as you think to spurt out the "right" answer. Sure, you might have a preference that's difficult for others to argue against or for, but others also have the right to reach a different conclusion.
With that being said, may I ask you what you know about vaccination? Are you using information from articles you've read online from "authorized" sources, or are you an expert on the matter? Again my point here is not to say that you're wrong or right, you're absolutely free to reach whatever conclusion you desire, but it's really difficult even for actual experts in the medical field to know what's going on currently, who's motivated by altruism, greed, selfishness, or cronyism. Taking up these stands and pretending it's "science" is an insult to science, because "science" is ever evolving and there's no such thing as consensus in the scientific process.
> popular anti-vax
since Anti-Vax has now been refined to include anyone that opposes government mandated vaccinations, I am a Vaxxed Anti-Vaxer as I oppose all government mandates. People should be free to choose on their own if they want a vaccine or any other medical treatment.
So should a video of me expressing this position be removed under an "anti-vaxx" policy?
I have locals.com account, reddit accounts (which is diminishing amount of my usage as they continue to "mainstream" aka censor the site) , and HN, that is pretty much it for me
If you haven’t seen the issue with echo chambers by now… you’re in one.
But I think you'd find two problems: determining what could be illegal is really hard (what's a "true threat" and what's a tasteless joke?), and also you'd end up with a community that looks a lot like 4chan or parler. Not a place I would choose to hang out.
So the "just create your own platform" trope has be tried and failed.
While that may be true.. do you not believe that the exceptional openness of either of those two platforms has an impact on places outside of them? Do you think there's no intangible benefits to you by these places merely existing?
Oh, there's definitely an impact.
> Do you think there's no intangible benefits to you by these places merely existing?
Yeah, the campaigns to harass a game emulator developer to suicide because "40% is a good start" are a fantastic benefit to society, obviously.
I have yet to hear a positive argument for their existence, and "well it collects the dirtbags!" is actually not one. I spent years tracking reactionary and fascist movements on the internet and how they interrelate and spread information; these sites more or less exist to do exactly that. The targeted harassment campagins that target random people they've decided not to like--that's just "for the lulz".
So if I were to continuously upload hours-long videos of digital noise, thousands of them, millions, YouTube ought to be obligated to host these ersatz videos, and not remove them unless they were deemed illegal? In that case, someone could in theory run a successful encrypted cloud backup business off YouTube's servers. Or just use YouTube as a massive versioning backup for their own personal data, confident in the knowledge that the files can never be deleted.
Why is it political? They didn't commission the content or request that it be created and hosted on their platform in any way. They're offering the same reasonable self-hosting process that they offer to anyone who shows up with an email address.
It only seems to become political when you decide to take action and either protect or remove the material. You're now no longer a disinterested third party, you're making editorial decisions and it's hard to believe they've taken this step without considering the impact of those decisions.
And profiting from it. The scope changes slightly when you realize your business could get sued repeatedly because you promoted misinformation (which is how it would be spun) and someone died because they followed that misinformation.
This is risk, and few of these businesses want to tackle that risk apparently.
It's a testament to how well marketers over the decades have sold the idea that companies care about anything other than their shareholders that people mistake profit-driven motivation for political stances.
Other publishing media do not have this standard. For example, the radio waves are another medium where the FCC (which regulates them) could say that only certain things are allowed, or they could say you can broadcast whatever you want. (In fact I think they regulate content, re: obscenity, but I don't want to look it up right now.)
So again, the idea of being only a neutral 3rd party who hosts videos for all-comers is a choice, which has political implications.
They can only do so because there is a limited number of them and users cannot share the space, so it must be licensed to be practically useful.
Also, the FCC cannot dictate to a station what it can and cannot air, the FCC can enforce _community standards_ of the community which is being served by that radio station. They're not in a position to go searching for violations and then act upon them, they merely respond to complaints from the communities themselves.
> So again, the idea of being only a neutral 3rd party who hosts videos for all-comers is a choice, which has political implications.
Yes, but the service clearly exists to make money.. not to make a political statement; which I agree may be incidental, but that shouldn't be the basis for interpreting their actions.
A lot of the replies to your comment fixate on this, since they take issue with “everything is political”. But I think it’s very true, and agree with you.
Why should YouTube host anything and everything that random anonymous users decide to upload? Why is this /holy/ act of uploading deemed undoable and unrevocable?
It’s a very weird way of thinking that it’s political only if the video is removed, but not if it is kept online.
Because keeping it up is the default, while you have to go out of your way to remove it.
If I own a store, is it as much of a political act to allow Trump supporters to shop there as it is to ban them?
It is like getting a warrant to search your house. It can be expedite if someone is in grave danger.
On some level, we have to acknowledge that whoever is running the shitshow at youtube and twitter are actually responsible as well, in that they believe they know enough to literally dictate what everyone in the world should see and read.
For example banning Trump from Twitter is a great example of this. Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of his politics (or Biden's, or any of them, same shit different smell i say), but who the hell do Twitter people think they are that they feel confident enough to ban him? Not talking in the sense of a private company here, sure it's their business and they can do whatever the heck they want, but does anyone really think that by banning him they prevented whatever ideas of his that think should not be encouraged to stop? At best, this shows tremendous life inexperience, which I expect from kids who read a couple of books and think that they understand everything, the typical example of a tech company worker in a company like Twitter.
https://www.axios.com/reddit-hate-speech-policies-reduction-...
https://www.vox.com/2021/1/16/22234971/trump-twitter-faceboo...
But the new and very different point that you're making, which is "removing bad actors improves the quality of information on social networks", is also very disputable and shaky.
- First link is "Reddit says that the rules Reddit made helped Reddit." is not exactly impartial, so forgive me to mistrust it.
- Felt bad opening a Vox link (since so very obviously biased, but whatever, opened it for a laugh). The say: "misinformation slowed, the research indicates online discussion around the topics that motivated the Capitol riot has also diminished" if you don't see it (or if it doesn't happen online) it doesn't mean it diminished overall. The whole article is full of bias honestly. Sad that you feel it's worthy enough to source.
I don't think it's been "debunked" as you say. Provide evidence. A few examples is not evidence to make such a blanket statement.
> The best ideas arent the ones that win out, it's the loudest ones and the ones that appeal to our most base emotions that win.
Again, very much disagree with this. If you look short term that may be true, but long term historically speaking at least that has not been the truth.
Maybe on the scale of millenia ideas based in truth are more likely to dominate, but I don't see how you could make that claim about history when our current paradigm of empirical knowledge is only a few centuries old, and already it seems as though cracks are starting to form.
Why do you say it's on the rise? Have you considered that there's lot more people, or that that the internet and various "communities" on the web just gave extra amplification to all sort of ideas? This is exactly why nothing should be banned. If you want wrong ideas to be corrected, you let them be discussed in the open. If you start pulling down videos that talk about flat earth you're gonna end up with grouping all people who think like that in a community where they only get exposed to ideas that affirm their erroneous belief.
> and already it seems as though cracks are starting to form.
again, provide examples or evidence for how and where you see this.
That's exactly what not banning them is doing! Not that I think flat earth content should be banned, as it seems to be mostly harmless. Before the internet, people who believed in fringe conspiracy theories didn't have a good way to coordinate and group together at scale.
Hell, even in the mid 2000s, after the internet had been around for a while, fringe communities tended to self-segregate in their own forums. They group together and formed echo chambers, yes, but they were also insulated from broader society, and therefore had little ability to acquire new converts. It was recommendation algorithms that popularized fringe ideas, by pushing them to bigger audiences that otherwise never would have been exposed to them.
I think that's really the core of the problem, recommendation algorithms. The algorithms don't know how reliable or accurate the content they push is, they just push whatever the machine learning model predicts will keep the user engaged. I would much rather group the people at the fringes into online ghettos than have them roaming the broader web and spewing their nonsense to anyone the algorithm recognizes to be vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking.
As to examples of cracks in the paradigm is respect for empirical knowledge, I don't think you have to look far. The rise of political extremism has resulted in more people on the far right and far left, ideologies that are hostile to the notions of nuance and cool headed reasoning, and thrive on emotionally driven messaging. More than 15% of Americans believe in QAnon, and nearly a third believe in the election conspiracy.
Meanwhile on the left, you have rhetoric that is increasingly hostile to data-driven approaches to problems, instead preferring "lived experience", ie anecdotes. You have cases like David Shor's firing for daring to tweet a study from a respected scholar that appeared to challenge the zeitgeist at the time. Many of these people are highly educated, or even academics themselves.
And that's to say nothing of regular old snake oil that has nothing to do with politics. Essential oils, healing crystals, you name it. Misinformation is on the rise, and most of the population is not equipped to deal with it. Maybe this is a temporary growing pain, maybe not. I don't think there's any way to know for sure right now. But we do know that for most of human history we have lived in the darkness, so it wouldn't be terribly surprising if we end up returning to it.
Are you sure? That hasn't helped flat earthers or anti-vaxxers ( of the vaccines cause autism camp), why do you think it's true?
My personal opinion is that even if the thing that gets banned or removed finds an audience (and it will), it's still a good idea for any platform - from a tiny webforum to a billions-strong social network - to have speech rules that are fair and reasonably enforced. It's not fun to be on a platform where a handful of celebrities and politicians (incl. Trump) are regularly flouting rules you have to follow.
Furthermore, I'd much rather be in a community in which the loudest and most obnoxious users are shown the door, purely for my own sanity. Free-for-alls stop being fun when they outgrow their original userbase.
[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/worldlead...
[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/public-intere...
[2] https://torrentfreak.com/could-trumps-twitter-account-be-dmc...
I'd argue that much of their censorship was not reasonable at all. None of it was illegal. Mostly just differences of opinion. My "information" is your "misinformation".
People who think any platform has the right to censor information scare the shit out of me. Save for things that are illegal, every platform should be neutral. Moderation should algorithmically be tied to the law.
you wouldn't have to. and if they were the majority, then it would be democracy in action.
It's not a case of deciding to:
>optionally censor your platform in response to political pressure
Because so many people assume that if some content is removed and it is <content I think should be permissible / like> well then that must have been because of political pressure or views at that company or something like that.
So by default:
> The platform ends up being collateral damage in some political war
Even if the content removed wasn't removed due to political pressure the accusations fly and the game begins.
Nobody is forced by a platform's actions to play the game, the sad truth is people will believe the game is on all the times to explain anything they don't like / don't understand.
Rudy Giuliani thought that Twitter was 'allowing' someone to post content to his account without his permission ... but really he had posted a link to a domain that didn't exist, then someone registered and had some fun with him.
Rudy of course just filled in the blanks of his ignorance with concerns of bias by Twitter... and there's A LOT of people who do that (with all sorts of political views).
We had an article here on HN where up and down votes changed on YouTube ... it was interpreted by some immediately as some sort of political bias.
Have a platform? You're in the game...
Which is why they would have to be very clear that their policy is to only respond to legal orders for takedowns and nothing else.
The scale of spam of all kinds would render the service useless. Even inaction would be interpreted as part of the game ... and you're in the game again.
I think there is also more Grey here. They could have de prioritized things in the algorithm to encourage the direction of the community without explicitly depltforming anyone or blocking\removing content. I think its possible that they could have achieved a lot of what they wanted with this method while avoiding poisoning the well.
My understanding is that users of YouTube pressure YouTube to censor some things, YouTube wants to appeal to its user base, because customers are important for profit.
Now Germany says that maybe in their position censoring things for profit is not legal or something like that and fines them.
Facebook literally set up vote drop boxes to maximize number of votes in precincts that heavily favour democrats in last election. They also banned a sitting president. So why even bother pretending they are neutral, when the evidence is pretty clear that they set out to sway elections. You can watch the Sergey Brim upset video after Trump won in 2016.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/cnnmoney/2018/09/13/google-video-...
I don't have problem with them having a side. And acting honestly and openly or even making one sided campaign contributions.
I have a problem with a reinforcing circle, where they censor to help elect a government which then rewards their censorship with contracts. At that point they become state actors, censoring on behalf of the state. and I think this is the real issue. And I think we are pretty much there.
I feel like the core problem in many cases was building a system where someone gets to be arbiter of content in the first place: Apple claims they take software down due to "legal requests" by/in various countries (though this is a lie as they also do it anti-competitively or for market perception reasons, but even taking them at their word here) and yet they caused the ability to do that as somehow Android devices sold in the same jurisdictions support installing arbitrary software without issue.
Platforms like Twitter and YouTube make their problems worse by recommending content--which is entirely their editorial decision and should be seen as such: any benefits or costs, moral or legal, should fall squarely on their shoulders--and then conflating that with having the ability to publish, but they would be in a much more morally (and often legally) defensible position if they simply didn't actively recommend content they disliked but still let it be found by people who actively followed the publisher.
Regardless, as usual, I will now link to my heavily-cited talk (every single slide is inherently a citation from a reputable news source) that I gave in 2017 (maybe 2018? the video was unlisted and I only just recently made it public as someone noted I had never done that, and now the upload date is weirdly set to last week ;P) at Mozilla Privacy Lab--"That's How You Get a Dystopia"--wherein I push hard at the idea that centralized systems and the arbiters they empower are the core problem and never work out, even if you like some of their decisions for some of the time.
The proper approach IMO is to honour legal requests, but provide transparency and display some information about blocked content, like who made the request to block it and so on. Of course content must only be blocked for requests originating from that specific country.
I maintain the moral equivalent of this for platforms like Twitter and YouTube is to stop conflating their centralized recommendation systems (which should be considered "their speech") with the functionality to publish at all (which should be considered "someone else's speech"): it is going to be way less controversial to stop recommending something that someone else likes if it is still accessible to people who know about it (as they externally discovered the content or author and were directly linked to it/them), and it is also going to be way less controversial to allow people to publish something that someone else doesn't like to their own audience if it isn't being actively recommended to third parties. These recommendation systems have started to conflate "being able to say what you want" with "being able to be granted a large audience" so well that the feature set for moderation fails to separate them, and that's bad for everyone: there is a reason why we talk about "the right to free speech" instead of "the right to be heard".
If that is happening, then the architecture of the internet needs to take more evolutionary steps.
If the state can censor the internet, there's nothing 'inter' about it. It's just a network, subject to the whims of its flailing predecessor.
Yes, that is happening for many years. China being the most known state, but AFAIK even well-recognized first-world democratic countries like UK block some websites.
> then the architecture of the internet needs to take more evolutionary steps.
Adoption of IPv6 is a good example that architecture of the Internet is pretty much set in stone at this moment. We can put more layers on top of it, like Tor network, but underlying protocols are still IPv4/IPv6 with enough meta-information to allow efficient blocking of protocols or resources.
I have some hopes that new TLS standards with hostname encryption (ECH) along with CDN networks will make blocking impossible. But even that is easily circumvented with government MITM. Kazakhstan already deployed all the necessary hardware and did some successful tests on scale. Browsers blocked its root certificate, but will they block (imaginary) China root certificate, losing 1.5B users?
centralization is merely a necessary but not sufficient ingredient for dystopianism. you also need a ratcheting consolidation of power, especially money (provided by advertisers in this case) and attention/influence (provided by viewers). centralization is simply one of those (key) ratchets that can be leveraged to further consolidate power for the benefit of directors and executives.
relatedly, the american constitution is an experiment in crafting a centralized system with checks and balances stable enough to withstand assaults of power consolidation. the jury is still out, but it's looking somewhat bleak at the moment, given a runaway executive branch fueled by an unhinged fed/central bank. we seem to be stomping on the gas pedal even as the brick wall looms ahead.
in any case, i've long been an advocate of right-sizing organizations of all sorts, especially governments and companies. we've concretely learned over the past many decades that the negatives of large (and small, but those tend to self-regulate away) entities eventually far outweigh the benefits, and are better substituted by a more diverse and specialized collection of medium-sized ones.
in this specific case, imagine if we had thousands of mini-youtubes, each with their own curational quirks. no single mini-youtube could unduly influence the whole zeitgeist. most (all?) will be flawed in their curatorial duties, but none could move public opinion in any meaningful way. viewers could also jump from one to another and be exposed to many different editorial perspectives, even without necessarily being cognizant of that. however, if every mini-youtube were relegated to being a single person each (i.e., no centralization), then we'd lose the benefits of aggregation and curation.
the problem of course, is that we societally accept size and growth as good things, and i'm arguing that they're only good to a certain point (and see your argument as saying all centralization is bad), and that we need to change incentives as a function of size/centralization, so that we get right-sized organizations, rather than unaccountable behemoths. our current incentives make right-sizing an unstable equilibrium point on that curve, which is why it doesn't happen.
A senator can ask you to do something but the fact the they are a senator does not legally obligate you to comply.
But if the DoJ sends you a demand (I'm not a lawyer, I'm just making up details here) let's say it's signed by a judge or something, what are you gonna do, say no?
There are also cases like child pornography where you might preemptively remove stuff without any demand because you want to but it would still be under justification of it clearly complying with a law so you haven't poisoned the well of if you censored anything.
And that's really the important factor in the end.
As everyone else had said, if you don't do that stuff, you are just going to get your domain and assets seized anyway.
They could have enforced their policies consistently across all accounts instead of their strong anti-right/anti-conservative bias. It's their selective enforcement that created issues for them.
Staying neutral, or alternatively, trying to appear neutral will most likely in itself enrage.
Walach H, Weikl R, Prentice J, et al. Experimental Assessment of Carbon Dioxide Content in Inhaled Air With or Without Face Masks in Healthy Children: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Pediatr. Published online June 30, 2021.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
https://www.proquest.com/openview/2bb682ad7b07de8051e51873c4...
For a significant fraction of users, the most engaging content will be psychologically manipulative - conspiracy theories, racism, political intrigue, and the like. I see the combination of an engagement machine and such content ethically problematic, but I don't think they're going to turn off the extremely-profitable engagement machine unless forced to, so they restrict content instead.
The trouble is the engagement machine is sophisticated, while the content restrictions are crude. This probably isn't sustainable in its current form, but there aren't easy answers to the problem. A sophisticated "bad" content suppression algorithm sounds pretty dystopian to me.
(BTW, this is what I felt about many of Ravikant's statements: he sounds so wise, so believable, and I want to agree with him, because it fits my own philosophy so much, but as soon as I get distracted from the magic of his voice for a moment, I start doubting if all of it has any ground whatsoever or is it just make believe.)
Edit: However, I think I have to clarify that your interpretation isn't exactly how I remember his point. As I remember, the point was that openly censoring the content for any reason other than the court order is basically the moment where they lose the "plausible deniability" of being responsible for their content, i.e. they cannot be seen as "just a middleman" anymore (this is how they want to be seen). But it is close enough for the matter we are discussing right now.
If it wants to host anything legal, liveleak-style - then that's fine.
But if it decides to remove whatever video it wants then that also should be fine.
One where there are multiple mutually compatible YouTube providers. If your current provider has a weird content policy, then you move. If all providers have a policy you don't like, then either you start your own, or you happen to be at the fringe of society.
People so far at the fringe that they cannot gather momentum (especially on the internet) are either clearly wrong, or illegal. The second option still gives avenues for censorship. But hopefully democratic principles keep that under control.
TLDR:
- YT has to pay a fine because the court says, look, there was a contract, stick to it, and they didn't stick to it.
- This has nothing to do with COVID-19, or free speech. It's purely contract law.
- My prediction: YT will change its ToS and include the pertinent clauses, we'll all agree to the new ones, and then they'll be able to delete anything they want anytime they want (in accordance with their new ToS).
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/why-the-youtube-music-deal-in-germany-...
Edit: Looks like it's for not upholding its terms of service.
Was there some philosophy that they claimed to be representing? What was the basis?
Can this be interpreted in any way other than a vulgar attempt to misrepresent historic reality?
If it only applied to effective monopolies like YouTube, I would be more inclined to agree with it, but the article doesn't seem to know anything about that.
When you agree to it, you are entering into a contract with that company. In exchange for agreeing to their terms, you get access to their services.
I find it extremely difficult to believe that Google signed a contract obligating it to host any and all content uploaded by the user, regardless of what it is. But hey, I've been surprised before.
The fine was then imposed because Youtube took > 3 weeks to comply with the court's order to make the video accessible.
[1] https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article232421961/OLG...
There are millions of other ways this is done. It's not unusual to have to host some files.
> “With the historically high fine, the Higher Regional Court makes it very clear that court decisions must be observed without restriction, regardless of whether YouTube assumes a violation of its guidelines or not,” an attorney for the plaintiff, Joachin Steinhoefel, said in a statement on Twitter.
We've done a terrible job the last 30 years promoting national security literacy and constitutional integrity preservation to our youth.
It may well be this country's undoing. No exaggeration.
But I find it hilarious that Twitter/Google/etc. champion "free speech" in Russia, China, etc. yet in US they literally censored the sitting president and many people are OK with this.
In general Twitter was a terrible enabler for Trump, he's such a coward that he didn't dare firing people face to face, he fired people with tweets. And it made him a keyboard hero conveniently attacking people using it, if he had to go in front of the press to spout his bullshit he surely would've been more reserved, because there'd be direct pushback for everything he said.
Let's do Twitter while we're at it.
Sure they're a private company, and they made a mistake. But the direction of the mistakes are always in the direction the people running the company lean politically.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210322220851/https://www.nytim...
How are they dictating this? What power does the WHO have over YouTube to force them to make this decision?
The WHO is probably just another puppet in the hands of richer state actors, as the infamous Taiwan Skype Interview show us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fASh2_RzMuE
Besides, I don't even think the people involved in YouTube and on a similar level are directly influenced by anyone. They're just a liberal company parroting their party's political line and not noticing how totalitarian these measures are.
It's people higher up setting the party line that are probably on the payroll of richer state actors. Most likely they also own the opposition to make sure nothing happens whoever is elected.
If you go to youtube to be told what to think then you're probably using the internet for things it wasn't designed for lol
> State violence is being used to force a christian bakery to bake (gay/muslim/etc) cakes it finds objectionable. Who's the villain here?
The more you open service to the public, the more control over your output you lose because then it becomes a matter of discrimination.
Relativism doesn't really work, does it. There must be objective standards. Otherwise, power is all that matters.
Same way that when you open a store you can't pick and choose your customers.
Platforms should just obey law and at most create a process where users and lawmakers can express and enforce their opinion on content.
Youtube and facebook are natural monopolies due to their network effect.
All the older natural monopolies, water networks, electricity networks, landline phone networks, railroad networks, and the rest of them are either nationalized, or regulated heavily.
It's long overdue to add social networks to the list.
Their monopoly is their social network. People want to publish video where the audience is, the global audience happen to be on youtube, and going to stay there because that's where most videos are.
The idea that we shouldn't do such things because government could be used to impose horrible things is a bad one. Driving a car could kill you, but you wouldn't ban cars for that reason because cars are not bad in principle nor are they so dangerous that they should be banned. They are regulated, however, and this is good.
But you can mostly pick and choose your customers outside of discriminating against a protect class (in the US). If you don't want to do business with people with brown hair, no one is stopping you.
"genetic information" is a protected class, so you could not discriminate against anyone based on their natural hair color. You could however ban people with blue hair.
edit: Even if genetic information doesn't work for hair color. "Color" is already a protected class, so it's a moot point.
Yes, but this is about Germany and not US, and (AFAIK) consumer protection laws in Europe generally prohibit stores to pick and choose customers arbitrarily.
The same way a store can't kick someone out who's running around saying racial slurs to everyone?
The same way the New York Times is required to print every letter to the editor that is sent to them?
The store example doesn't hold up at all for a number of reasons and online communities have had extra legal standards since the beginning of the internet.
In America at least, there are different sets of rules for different types of business.
A curated opinion piece, carefully chosen by experienced editors, is vastly different from a public swimming pool. For the first, that filter, that exclusivity, that editorializing is part of the draw. It’s good because it’s a filter, not a platform. The public pool should not be a filter, and yes, sometimes there are weird things that float in there, and it takes effort to clean up, but that’s the cost of being open to the public.
They can't kick out whoever they want, governments regulate that. And here Germany decided that Youtube can't kick out people for a particular reason. It is the same concept.
They can but not because the store has negative opinion about this behavior but because that behaving disorderly in public place is against the law. Actually they should just call the cops.
There’s a carve out of protections against discriminating based on membership in a protected class, but you can totally decide to get up one day and not provide service to anyone whose ever worn a hat for instance
Which is generally a thing left up to the store owner and not the government.
YouTube has a product they sell, advertising slots embedded in videos. YouTube's customer is the person buying the ad slot. The video and uploader are, in a tortured analogy I didn't choose about YouTube being a small store, the product that YouTube sells to their actual customer, the advertiser.
Bringing up whitelists and blacklists doesn't change that.
In America, you can, as long as it is not based on a protected class. The "burden of proof" (either "beyond a reasonable double" for criminal or "a preponderance of evidence" in civil) is not on the business, but on the rejected customer.
Further, as this is talking about content that they are required to host, rather than restricting who is viewing a video, a more accurate analogy is a store picking their distributors. Which they obviously do.
Why?
> Same way that when you open a store you can't pick and choose your customers.
Of course you can, you just can't refuse service based on legally protected classes, that's the exception not the rule.
> Platforms should just obey law and at most create a process where users and lawmakers can express and enforce their opinion on content.
Platforms should operate their sites however they like within the confines of the law and individual users can decide which sites they prefer to use based on how those sites operate.
> Why?
Because if it has that right it should have the full responsibility for everything it publishes. With no leeway.
>> Same way that when you open a store you can't pick and choose your customers.
> Of course you can, you just can't refuse service based on legally protected classes, that's the exception not the rule.
Depends on the local law. For example in Poland if you have a store and you put up some good for sale and mark it with a price, you can't refuse it to sell it to anyone that is willing to pay that price. No special classes, just a simple rule. If you are selling, you are selling.
> Platforms should operate their sites however they like within the confines of the law and individual users can decide which sites they prefer to use based on how those sites operate.
Right, and the law should say that they can't have an opinion about the content they publish, and they can't take down or promote stuff based on that opinion.
I don't understand your reasoning. When you say "full responsibility" I assume you mean legal responsibility, as in, a website that removes posts by users should take full legal responsibility if users post illegal content, but I don't see the connection between the two ideas, the illegal content was still posted by a user, what about removing posts makes the website now legally responsible for the actions of users. This would also make the site legally impossible to operate, it sounds like you're suggesting any site that removes user content should be pushed into shutting down. Am I misunderstanding?
If a platform decides to pick and choose then it's no longer a platform. It's a publisher.
It's not the users that post illegal content. Users only send it privately to the publisher and publishers decides to make it publicly available and should bear full legal and moral responsibility for the act of publishing it.
The whole invention of a term platform is so that tech companies can avoid responsibility of publishers.
> it sounds like you're suggesting any site that removes user content should be pushed into shutting down
It can remove user submitted content but only if the laws requires for such content to be removed or if there are technical reasons to do that (content is too large, to popular, too unpopular, some time have passed, etc).
This isn't true though, the distinction you're making doesn't exist, it's still obviously a platform as well as a publisher.
> Users only send it privately to the publisher and publishers decides to make it publicly available
That's not how it works though. Users are free to upload anything they want to the platform and it's published automatically, if it is later determined to be illegal or otherwise in violation of the guidelines, standards or relevance, then it is removed.
> The whole invention of a term platform is so that tech companies can avoid responsibility of publishers.
There is no legal meaning to these words, they are merely a functional description of how these sites work and they are obviously both platforms and publishers.
> It can remove user submitted content but only if the laws requires for such content to be removed or if there are technical reasons to do that (content is too large, to popular, too unpopular, some time have passed, etc)
I understand that this is your stated position of how things ought to work, but I still don't see a reason why it should work this way, sites being able to remove content is useful for moderation and curation which are features that users like and want.
Because I'm fairly sure none of the accepted meanings make any sense.
Any new players will need to figure out the regulations, compliance, licenses and pitfalls before they can start to challenge you. That is a lot of upfront costs that will take a long time to recoup. Hence helping the old players remain entrenched.
Nonetheless, particularly on elements of values and principles: it is possible to create bright-line, lightweight, plain-English regulation. See the US Bill of Rights as an example. Let specific instances be litigated in the future, rather than specify all edge cases up front.
(And btw, the whole antivax "controversy" is a media circus. 98% of Americans have the full regime of vaccines. That's a lot of vaccines. There is no real antivax problem. It's media hype. This given even the moral objections to e.g. the rubella vaccine's origins.)
While there are inviolable limits to what is morally acceptable, and things you should never do, you cannot decide everything beforehand because some things are highly contingent on circumstances. So this is a never-ending process of determining those things. It's called prudence.
What happens when one country requires removing content while another country requires it to stay?
It would have been similar had India fined YouTube for removing videos of farmer protests.
Who gave them that responsibility? I didn't. If no one did, why do they think they have that responsibility? Do they feel that they are the final authority on all matters that they forget that their users are humans capable of coming to their own conclusions?
The goal is to incentivize change, not extract financial benefit for the country. So your first penalty isn't huge in itself, but it's designed to make it clear that noncompliance in the long run will be less profitable.
Edit: People continuously downvote my negative comments about lockdowns. I leave you with this before you downvote:
https://twitter.com/janesays22/status/1415354369126457346
> I turned 18 in Feb 2020. I lost my friends, my education, the first year of my adult life, my mental health, and 20lbs.
> I didn’t make sacrifices.
> I was sacrificed.
Look up: https://gbdeclaration.org/ - http://pandata.org/
I hope a crisis takes some power away from them.
Heck, we don't even need to go back too far in history - a lot of COVID-19 information was labeled "misinformation" before being proven correct/possibly true.
If anything, this shows the zombies that the people are. Anything TV says is truth. A stupid short report from an online magazine made some late show host make a short skit about it and boom, like wild fire. I call total bs on that whole thing. This entire COVID response has been political from DAY 1. Western countries response has not only been shameful, but absolutely reprehensibly.