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mc32

This opens up a can of worms.

Right now it’s “science”. What will be the next frontier they take on a their responsibility to curate?

Maybe they’ll come for diets?

Maybe they’ll come for social behavior (so called “challenges”)

Maybe they’ll come for political beliefs…

Who knows what they will take on as their responsibility to supervise for the greater good.

I think there is a big difference between quackery and skepticism. Skepticism in moderation is a healthy habit.

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I feel like this always gets brought up, as if the slippery slope is a natural inevitability. What if it isn’t? What if you can ban actively harmful content without that ban spreading?

You are right, we need to ban the actively harmful content. Let's start with the stuff you like and want to hear that is problematic. You like cooking content? Well cooking unapproved dishes is associated with obesity. Banned! You like hiking and being outdoors? Well, it disturbs animal habitat and ecosystems. Banned! You oppose and want to speak out about the mandatory microphones and cameras in every room of your house? Well, that clearly interferes with the greater good of catching people trying to commit suicide, avert domestic harm, make sure you are raising your child properly and in accordance with expert approved government requirements, and to make sure you are getting your mandatory amount of exercise of the required energy expenditure every day in order to not be a burden on society ……

But no one is saying these contents should be banned. You can publish it, everywhere! Create a hundred sites and post it, feel free! Now, if I don't want it on my site, why can't I take it down? You're saying that if I create a video site for videos of healthy dishes, that I should not be able to take down a video recipe for something that I think is very unhealthy.

> Create a hundred sites and post it, feel free!

When you do that, then they come for your hosting providers and payment processors.

London, circa 1830. Nobody is saying you have to work 70 hours weeks in a cotton factory. You can grow your own cotton, feel free to process it any way you want! As long as the attention market concentrates in the hands of a handful of megacorporations by virtue of economies of scale, the freedom you talk about is not very tangible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_in_Great_Britain_during_t...

I wish I didn't have to work 40 hours a week. Can I just go to some random plot of arable land that isn't cultivated and start farming? Can I just process it any way I want? US, circa 2021.

But those are all obviously, patently absurd. You’re proving my point. The slippery slope argument immediately descends into hysteria and pretends like people aren’t capable of understanding context.

The old saying, give them an inch and they’ll take a mile seems to hold true if allowed.

The problem is, who decides what actively harmful content is? For anyone in favor of this ban, imagine if Google had an anti-vaccine CEO, and was banning all pro-vaccine content for being "actively harmful" instead.

Then pro-vaccine people everywhere could start using google less and start talking about how Google has harmful/unscientific stances toward content, etc.

And with how big Google is, how effective do you really think that would be?

>they take on a their responsibility to curate?

So what? Let them curate whatever they want. There are other platforms to post my video to. Hell, I can create another one. I can create 50 others. I can create a mailing list and send to everyone on it. Are we going to argue wether spam filtering is censorship too?

I've long said, Flickr's solution works pretty well. They have groups, you can form any group you want and set your own group rules. You can set filters and you can opt to view "adult" content or not (take me back to kittens").

It's all about opting-in.

You have certain taste, go find that group or found your own.

You don't like certain groups, don't become a member of such group.

You want to have your own private invite only group, go ahead, create your own invite only group.

Flickr never achieved the prominence of FB or IG, or flash in the pan like Tumblr, but I think they built it from the ground up to provide a decent service for everyone with a light touch. For illegal stuff, yeah, you get kicked out, that's legit. Need to escalate to site admins, that's possible too but only if the group admins are acting in bad faith.

If spam filtering didn't let recipients opt out, and permanently deleted emails instead of putting them in a spam folder, then it would be censorship too.

> Are we going to argue wether spam filtering is censorship too?

It certainly is censorship, but users opt in.

> There are other platforms to post my video to. Hell, I can create another one. I can create 50 others.

Its not just YouTube. Its their platform, and your hosting provider, and your DNS provider, and your payment processor, and your bank. Consider what happened to Parler.

Lets not cheer on the loss of a public good because we could theoretically replace it some day.

So, I presume you would be totally okay if Youtube one day decided they just wanted to deplatform anything such as "tax the rich" or "defund the police" or "no child left behind" or any talk about Mark Zuckerberg, just because they can?

What if one day FB is under investigation and FB decides it will only carry FB propaganda and not let any dissenting voices, would that be totally cool?

Yes, I'd be okay, and I would stop using them, as I have done with FB, and start looking elsewhere. Like I said before, I don't agree with Youtube taking anti-vaxx videos down, but I do think they, as a private company, should be allowed to. If they take enough content down, they'll end up losing users.

Ok, that's pretty even reasoning though I feel it's an abuse of their monopolistic position.

> What will be the next frontier they take on a their responsibility to curate?

Social Justice. Your very existence as part of society affects others, therefore anything that you say or think must conform to the standards of Social Justice the Platform has deemed necessary. If you don't like it, go found your own Platform.

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