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Comment by mach1ne | Hacker News Reader

People don't see what the actual problem here is - perhaps because they don't want to see. What is happening is very much the transformation from an open society to one where freedom of speech is limited and certain other individual rights are stripped away. Perhaps not de jure, but de facto.

And sure, one might argue that it's for a good cause (even though it's a complex topic). However, the fact is that as this is done once, it becomes something that can be leveraged as the norm. There is a very real danger here, and nobody knows whether it will realize or not.

The question is not whether you can post anti-vax content today. It's whether you can post anti-anything tomorrow.

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I genuinely don't get it. YouTube, a private entity and not a government entity, is saying they don't want certain content on their platform. This is not the end of your free speech. This isn't really even a movement away from free speech. It's YouTube exercising their right to freedom of speech by not allowing what they believe to be harmful or disagreeable on their platform. They already do this with other categories of thing. This is no different.

You are more than able to start your own company and let whatever you want on that site. Or just go to your local city center with a megaphone and give people your thoughts - perfectly legal.

If YouTube is THAT essential to getting your views heard, you need to take a lesson from business - don't rely on anyone else for critical infrastructure.

This fallacy of "private entity" when talking about a corporation that's more powerful than most governments is truly ridiculous.

It's okay if the East India Company enslaves and exploits the savages and mongrels, murders opponents, rigs elections, installs corrupt politicians and destroys communities; it's a private company and it only hurts stupid people! Just stop buying their tea if you don't like it, amirite? Start your own company!

Except not. Google isn’t more powerful than most governments. They can’t kill or imprison people, or seize land or property. This is simply a false analogy.

Google isn't a "private entity" in the sense of a small business either. More like a utility company. False analogy

I recommend reading this article for a quick overview of the current political landscape: https://theconversation.com/who-is-more-powerful-states-or-c...

The fact is that states and corporations collude and compete with each other for political control internationally, and corporate power outranks the vast majority of state powers. Weirdly though, I can't find Alphabet Inc. in the power rankings.

What is your definition of "power"? Because I think your perspective is incredibly naive.

Google has immense power, far more than most governments. Governments all around the world are often manipulated by corporations like Google, laws are written based off these influences of power, shaping democracy, all the time.

If they really wanted to they could do almost anything to you. They could easily steal your identity, they could frame you, they could put you in prison, they could do basically anything. Is this legal? Obviously not, but power extends further than what is legal.

I don't see this same energy when peope want to nationalize internet or electric companies. Why is it that only when media companies moderate the content available on their platform do we suddenly not care about property rights?

If we're talking about regulating large corporations because they're monopolizing resources I'd much rather start in the energy sector to set some precedent before we just force youtube and facebook to allow nazis and anti-vaxxers to spout off whatever they want during a global crisis.

Internet and electric companies don't have international political influence, nor major monopolies.

I'd rather have an honest discussion about dealing with a global crisis instead of having some asshole decide he's right and shut everyone else out - surely you can imagine the damage caused by a dictator who's wrong?

>moderate the content

Censor. The word you're looking for is censor.

> electric companies

You do know that those in many places are called "utilities" and they <<are>> nationalized, right?

Even when they aren't nationalized they are more often than not subject to _very_ stringent regulations.

> Why is it that only when media companies moderate the content available on their platform do we suddenly not care about property rights?

I can't speak for what you're paying attention to, but plenty of people are wary of big cats in corporations and big cats in government. You can be against both.

The real false narrative is that choosing team red or team blue is the only interesting question and then you can turn your skepticism off.

Youtube, Facebook and Twitter have been censoring content that nearly exclusively goes against left wing opinion narratives. At the top of Twitter right now are the DNC's "expert" opinion on whether the vaccine mandates are legal. They're shoving their political speech down everyones throat and censoring as many opposing views as they can get away with. But let's say that's legal for now.

If we take a equitable view of the situation, the vast majority of content that they're removing is simply being removed for wrong-think according to the DNC. This gives the Democratic party a leg up through overt censorship and information warfare of a sort they couldn't possibly have achieved through direct government action.

Whether that's legal or not is immaterial to me, they are stifling legal free speech of the de-facto public square, and those who cheer it on now won't be so happy in the future when the alignment of special interests shifts against them, I promise you it will happen and sooner than anyone thinks.

Google is a cancer on public discourse, how many fake media narratives have to collapse before people realize censorship of wrong-think is not a good idea for a healthy society?

Edit: Looks like Twitter finally removed their ridiculous propaganda from the trending section.

Not just their "expert" opinion, but whatever opinion is current this week. This is the same media machine that lied to us about masks, told us to be suspicious of a "Trump vaccine", and that covid was "just the flu". So logically the reasonable thing to do is censor everyone who disagrees, because then they'll be right.

> If YouTube is THAT essential to getting your views heard, you need to take a lesson from business - don't rely on anyone else for critical infrastructure.

No other platform offers a competitive audience.

Don’t rely on a competitive audience.

And do what, instead?

Stay and home and start knitting? If your job or your desire is to be in media, what's your proposed alternative?

Do something else.

That's no advice.

Why not? Don’t support a toxic ecosystem.

I completely agree that YouTube should absolutely be free to do this but they're obviously doing this because citizens and their own employees demand it. The movement away from free speech is caused by the growing number of people (including people in this very thread) who want YouTube to do this, YouTube acquiescing to their demands is just a symptom of this trend.

YouTube is the profit-driven canary in the coalmine. YouTube's business model naturally incentivizes more speech of all kinds. This crackdown indicates there is mounting pressure - from democratically elected governments, from HN commentators, from our friends and neighbors that regulate & patronize YouTube - to stop being tolerant of certain kinds of speech like antivax.

You don't get it because you agree with it. If it was your views being silenced you would suddenly remember how hard it is to create your own video platform that can compete with youtube (especially when the big tech monopolies will refuse services to you)

I disagree strongly with the action being taken here, but like your parent commenter, I don't get the consternation about their ability to take that action. I think that the first amendment guarantees both freedom of speech and of association to private entities, and that this is no more or less than a private entity exercising those exact rights.

If you want to nationalize all social media and force it to be a public square, that's fine, we can have that conversation. But that's not what people generally argue for, they instead expect private entities to be themselves subject to the requirements of the first amendment. But that isn't how it works. And I think that is a good thing, even when I disagree with the outcome.

"‘Skynet Is A Private Company, They Can Do What They Want,’ Says Man Getting Curb-Stomped By Terminator"

https://babylonbee.com/news/skynet-is-a-private-company-they...

I find it hilarious that in recent years, people on the left have started using the "don't like it? make your own! ;)" reply after it exclusively being a right-wing thing (e.g. telling people "don't like the USA? then leave"). Especially since both sentiments come from the same root: being out of a legitimate argument.

Except it isn’t… being a citizen isn’t the same as being a consumer, like you understand how much harder and more impactful it is to change the country you live in than the channel right? Yikes.

the same things are said about twitter or facebook, its absurd.

It’s especially troubling when someone does “make their own” and then get banished at the infrastructure (payments/hosting/app store) layer.

This is a lazy argument. You can do better.

> I genuinely don't get it.

At least you admit it.

> You are more than able to start your own company and let whatever you want on that site.

"If you don't like YouTube, build your own" is a really shitty take. It's very obvious the role that YouTube has right now and why massive censorship is a problem.

Do you also feel it’s wrong of YouTube to not allow porn? Feels like people are laser focused on anti vax content due to the political nature of it, while not really caring about all the other moderation they already do.

Porn is a great counter example to the idea social media companies have some all powerful control over public information. Nearly all of them ban porn, a form of absolutely protected speech, but behold, it’s easy to find porn.

The whole “death of free speech” argument is such nonsense

They need to ban all references to the vaccine, and then your analogy to porn would hold, and I would be fine with it.

Society is regressing back to a time where idea's like those in the Pre-Enlightenment era where prevalent, hopefully we do not regress all the way back to Dark Ages, where people will stoned and hanged for defying the church... In our time "the church" will likely be replaced with a new non-theistic religion of some kind, a Technocracy of "The Experts™" and "Authoritative Sources™" who are the ones that will tell us what "The Truth™" is today

> Society is regressing back to a time where idea's like those in the Pre-Enlightenment era where prevalent...

I agree, people are denying vaccines work, taking fluoride out of tap water, and saying that the earth is flat. It seems like there's something seriously wrong with our media ecosystem when ideas like this are flourishing. I don't know if banning these ideas is good/effective, but we need some way to incentivize the veracity of ideas and not just their "engagement". What that mechanism might be, I don't know.

>>It seems like there's something seriously wrong with our media ecosystem

I think that is a symptom of the problem not the root cause

>>I don't know if banning these ideas is good/effective

its not, never has been, in fact has been shown to make the idea's spread further and become more extreme as people enter into information echo chambers.

>but we need some way to incentivize the veracity of ideas

Why? in reality the root cause is decades and decades of coddling children and the removal of critical thinking education in favor of memorization education.

The root cause is the failure to teach people how to use critical thinking and logic to assess the validity of data and claims made by people.

The reality is that "Trust the Experts™" is an example of this and really does make the problem worse because people are taught to just trust an authority instead of being able to look at a claim or data set and deiced for themselves if that claim should be accepted. The problem become with the "authority" people trust is wrong, either because they are a charlatan, or just ignorant themselves. However because people have been training to alway trust authority they become locked into this unable to think for themselves.

The more we move to a model of messenger over message, credential over data, the worse this problem will become. The additon of punishments for those that dare to resist "authority" is also going to end badly when that authority is wrong. Keep in mind I have countless examples of authority being wrong I can cite, a big on is that for decades and during my childhood the USDA pushed the food pyramid we now know to be wrong. They were the experts and anyone that dared say "hey maybe all these carbs are bad" were shunned... Vegetable oils are a another where the experts it seems may be been very wrong.

The enlightenment in part was the removal of charismatic messengers in favor of data driven objective truth. It did not matter who the person was it matter what they were saying and if they could prove their claim. All individuals were the same. We have lost that in favor of personality, credentials and authority over data, and proof.

Why is the vaccine safe? "Because the CDC and FDA said so"... that is not a valid response to me. Show me the data, show me the studies, show me the proof... that is the valid response.

For what it's worth, the studies are open. Science is a fairly transparent process. If someone is interested in educating themselves & understanding these discussions, there really is no barrier.

Here's an 8-hour press release by the FDA [1]. If you want to understand the logic behind the decision-making, it is absolutely available. It's just boring to watch, I suppose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFph7-6t34M

But that is not the argument being used to censor people, the platforms are saying you can not disagree with the source, you can not have an opinion contrary to the source, be it WHO, CDC, or FDA

They are appealing to the authority not the data, and in doing so they are proclaiming these organizations are infallible and beyond question which we know is false.

Having looked at the data I made the choice for myself that the vaccine was safe for me to consume, I did not do this because the CDC said so, or because the FDA did. I did not do this because YT put a banner under a video proclaiming the CDC is an infallible god that can never be questioned

Why I'm flummoxed by your argument is that the "infallible God" seems to be the scientific consensus. If anything, the analogy works in the opposite direction. There are many people who choose not to engage with the scientific conversation and instead choose an alternate way of understanding the world, one which is not based on population studies or pharmacology. If there's an example of a respected scientific work that has been censored, then you could change my mind.

One does not have to go far, just look back to the beginning of the pandemic where many people were banned and silenced for pointing out

1. Preliminary research showing masks work contrary to the official positions of CDC and WHO

2. People talking about how masks may not be as effective as original research thought, after the CDC said masks where perfect in every-way and infallible god like barriers preventing all covid. Or talking about how masks may work but masking policies down (the AI could not tell the difference was was shutting down anyone that dared question masks or masking policy)

3. Talking about Lab Leak before it was recognized officially as a possibility by WHO and CDC

4. Any talks about treatments that are not the offical vaccines some of which do have studies showing effectiveness, and I am not talking about the "horse paste" though even banning for that is ridiculous people where banned for talking about mAb treatment before it became blessed by the CDC

5. People that were questioning and talking about actual research that was being done on surface spread, showing it was not as prevalent as "Authoritative sources". People where bleaching their groceries when they got home due to the insanity and if you called that out... BANNED you disagreed with the CDC

I have more than that if you would like? I could probally triple my list of examples

Censorship is always bad not matter what people believe the "greater good" is.

Interesting. I'm not very knowledgeable about that. The people that got banned, were they scientists, or laypeople? And, regardless of whether they turned out to be right, would you characterize their beliefs as science, or speculation?

Regardless about whether or not the censorship was justified, my point is that there is an avenue for legitimate scientific discussion, via open forums, that the anti-vax community largely doesn’t participate with. That’s in part because it is so technical, and the barrier to entry is so high. Maybe there is a larger discussion to be had about how to keep these kinds of organizations accountable, given that their decisions are so complex.

That's a funny analogy to make. Didn't the Enlightenment involve the promotion of expert knowledge, a heightened value of empirical truth?

The enlightenment involved the promotion of knowledge not "expert", it promoted the belief that a claim should be proven with data, it promoted that the best way to get to the actual truth is with robust inquiry, debate, trial and argumentation

To attempt to equate that with today "The Experts™" and "Authoritative Sources™" who instead of engaging in robust debate want to engage in robust censorship, these "Experts™" and "Authoritative Sources™" are more akin to Dark Ages Priests wanting to burn the heretic than they are of Enlightenment thinkers and scientists

I still don't understand your stance. Surely the public isn't barred from engaging in the scientific conversation if they have anything meaningful to say. It's just that that conversation is not very accessible because it is so technical. That was also the case in the Enlightenment: Science was practiced by those who had the time and resources to contribute substantiative knowledge. Speaking in broad strokes, the anti-vax movement strikes me as a counter-cultural movement, an "outsider art" to the mainstream scientific conversation. It's not that they can't engage with the science, it's that they reject that conversation altogether.

Yes our freedoms are being eroded. It’s a slippery slope. All that bullshit.

Come on. A private company doesn’t want to contribute to people dying. Oh and by the way don’t they have the right to do what they want? You want what, regulation to prohibit this?

Youtube doesn't give two shits about people dying. They care about not drawing the ire of advertisers or legislators.

Is it not their right to pursue profits? Do you want someone to regulate them?

It may be their right to pursue profits within the bounds of the law but that doesn't mean their actions along the way aren't distasteful.

Well then we can all furrow our brows and move on. If you simply find YT distasteful, don’t use it.

"You simply find DuPont distasteful don't use plastics".

"If you simply find the treatment of warehouse workers distasteful don't buy anything online"

Just because someone or something's actions are within the letter of the law doesn't mean they are exempt from criticism.

You didn't answer the question - Do you want someone to regulate them?

I didn't answer the question because it was a non-sequitur and it was obvious the question was being asked in bad faith to trip me up, like a cop who asks how many drinks you had after you just told him you hadn't had anything to drink.

I don't have a strong opinion on the matter. If someone were to do a good job regulating them and make the situation better I'd approve. If someone were to do a bad job and make things worse I'd disapprove.

So your solution is for someone else to come up with a solution which you would find satisfactory by criteria you are unwilling to provide?

Whether regulation should stop YT from doing this is a legitimate question. Nothing else will prevent it. Observe that the government telling a private company what they must host on their platform is potentially more dangerous than the government telling a private company to take down a piece of content (neither of these are happening here but if we entertain the notion of regulating YT then these are to be considered).

Break up YouTube into multiple companies, each only allowed to operate in one country. Then break up YouTube US into at least 5 more companies.

Monopolies are bad, mmmkay?

So as a denizen of the US I won’t be able to access Canadian YouTube?

That's for Canadian YouTube to decide in accordance with Canadian laws.

So you are advocating for every country to do what China is doing with their great firewall, or at least to have the ability to do so?

Why is this standard not applied to anti vax content? You find YouTube’s actions distasteful and you want them to stop. YouTube finds anti vax content distasteful and wants that to stop. YouTube either has the right to stop this type of content on their platform or they don’t.

Note that Google has billions of dollars and control of a huge amount of the world's data. Then note the reason the low standard is applied to anti-vax content is because they are about as close to being politically irrelevant as one can be.

They're struggling to even exercise basic human rights (freedom of movement, opinion, peaceful association, speech, etc, etc. There is probably a right for healthcare self-determination slipped in to the Universal Deceleration of Human Rights too it seems like the sort of thing they'd slip in). There is room to argue about whether the UDoHR applies here, but it is very notable that the anti-vaxers have nearly no power to have a quite reasonable interpretation stick.

Their opinions just don't matter. They appear to be on the verge of being confined to their homes while being widely condemned and socially ostracised. They are likely to be fired. Which is why it is so concerning that systematic oppression is being bought in to deal with them - this is Google crossing scary lines that didn't need to be crossed.

what standard? the differences between finding content distasteful and completely deleting said content are self-evident.

Yes. When truth is tied to money we enter a world of infinite bullshit.

When a private company with a market share of information as large as Youtube acts as an arbitrer of truth, regulation to prevent this would be nice, yes.

So you trust the government to decide what is true and what isn’t but not YouTube?

Or we can move beyond the concept of trust. How about not banning content you don't like?

Huh? That makes no sense.

There is no need for trusting anybody. The concept that we must trust the government or YouTube to determine truth is ridiculous. How about neither of them ban content they don’t like?

As individuals, we shouldn’t trust. We should verify.

OK great. So do you have a chemistry lab in your house to verify that the toothpaste you buy doesn’t contain heavy metals? Do you do your own testing of the meat you buy to ensure it doesn’t contain BGH, antibiotics, parasites? Do you manufacture your own water testing kits since you can’t trust sending samples to a lab? Do you manufacture your own computing devices since you can’t trust that others aren’t spying on you using your phone or laptop?

This is the kind of answer a 14 year old who hasn’t yet grasped the concept of not-absolutism would give. It’s absurd.

Except they aren’t acting as an arbiter of truth. They are just regulating their own platform. It’s not a secret that they are doing this.

I am now incredibly interested in what the term “market share of information” is, because that’s a brand new nonsense term I’m sure will spread like wildfire.

Should fox news be required to give equal time to liberal opinion hosts? It's the biggest cable news outlet.

Not to mention they have a near total monopoly on conservative viewership! How else can a liberal operator reach those people?

Wasn't the fairness doctrine made to enable that?

I'm sort of sympathetic to that argument except:

1. I think at the end of the day, the problem isn't "does YouTube have the right to do this?" it's "should YouTube be doing this, given their status?" For me even though they have the right to, I think it's just the wrong thing to do.

I personally am baffled by how the US as a society seems to be devaluing free speech principles in the private and public sphere due to some argument that it's needed to combat misinformation. This strategy never ends well, and it belies a lack of strength in promoting alternatives. The way to combat misinformation is with better information. Resorting to free speech restrictions is a sign of weakness in my opinion.

In the end I'd rather have YouTube (and other platforms) modeling a different approach.

2. I also think, regardless of how they got there, at some point a private business functions as a monopoly and should be treated as such. I'm not so sure how I feel about regulations along those lines, but I do think anti-monopoly legal response to this sort of behavior wouldn't be unreasonable. I'm not at all sympathetic to the GOP in general, but if they started coming down on YouTube for this kind of thing under anti-monopoly regulation umbrellas I think it wouldn't be irrational or unreasonable to me.

3. As a more immediate issue, I think this sort of thing always backfires. If you have a bunch of people thinking there's a conspiracy to shove untested vaccines down people's throats, and then you have a major media distributor like YouTube censoring all anti-vaccine discussion, what do you think they're going to conclude? I'm as pro-vaccine as someone can get, and think arguments against them are usually pretty absurd, but I have to say that this kind of thing starts to look like a conspiracy, even if it isn't one. Why give them ammunition? If you can't convince people the vaccine is a good thing, how do you think that shutting down discussion is somehow going to work better?

It's high time facebook, YouTube and Google get broken up like the Bell Corporation was (maybe even avoid some mistakes that were made with that company).

Regarding 3.: I think it will radicalize some but it will also stop the misinformation of many more people. Overall I think it will lead to lives saved.

One thing this became extremely visible was Brexit to me. There are really good arguments why not leaving the union is the better choice. I am critical of the EU, but not to a degree that I want to abolish it as I think reforms are possible. I am not from GB and think their critical stance was very important within the EU since it institutionally lacks a real opposition. Without that it is an inefficient and bureaucratic technocracy (those actually don't really get results at all).

People asked questions about immigration, sovereignty, participation. These are completely valid topics and asking was basically decried as Russian propaganda. Meanwhile classical EU proponents never even argued that it isn't a compromise of sovereignty and participation! Denying that was denying reality.

The thing is, if that is the wide spread stance on how to deal with "misinformation", the whole thing suddenly isn't worth it anymore and it is not even close. People just basically argue that they want a technocracy that treats them like children. This was the image the pro-Brexit group crafted.

It is similar to what vaccination proponents do. I don't know how to tell them that they are part of what makes vaccination unattractive to many. I wouldn't advocate to ban them of course.

> A private company doesn’t want to contribute to people dying.

And the best action they can take to that end is to ban all anti-vaccination conversation?

This trend in combination with the new wave of everything being a subscription really has me worried as a recent college grad who therefore does not own a home or have much in the way of savings. If you don’t own anything and your access to essential items is decided by some megacorp like Google or FB, you bet people will fall in line with the latest recreational outrage real fast. Connected cars with subscription features that show you ads even if you do own them (see the Ford Mach-E), and financial institutions buying up single-family homes to keep as many people as possible renting forever and never gaining equity in anything. The World Economic Forum came out and said it blatantly: “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.” That’s starting to read more like a command, not a prediction.

I can see the CEOs and politicians wanting to implement a Chinese-style 'social citizenship score' and if it falls below some level you get banned from all platforms and your travel rights are restricted, etc.

Oh boy. MSM is going to jam the importance of it down our throats. “Social citizen scores are necessary to save lives. Get your score now! Lottery for people who register early.”

But is free speech dependent on YouTube being a platform for complex discussions between knowledgeable people on a topic?

Maybe YouTube doesn’t want that role.

Maybe we can have a sci-debate website that does want these discussions, and maybe that site could tailor the feature set for exactly this purpose.

Maybe it would focus on citation and annotation features like thinkspot or Spotify or genius.

Maybe the site could have multiple ways to evaluate the reputation of someone making claims. Maybe it could have education, popularity, endorsements from other people with high reputation, and like three other dimensions of reputation measurements.

Maybe it could have tools to disclose conflicts of interest, the accuracy of past claims over time, and automatic linking to rebuttals.

Maybe YouTube just isn’t a fit for this information.

I'd agree that YouTube isn't designed for useful debate. That being the case, I'd rather see them say they won't allow discussion of vaccines at all, rather than promote one viewpoint and suppress all others. That seems like a less troubling way to handle a disputed topic: opt out, don't pontificate.

...and we're still in peacetime. Wait until you see what you're not allowed to post once that changes.

Freedom of speech doesn't mean other people have to listen or host what you say.

https://xkcd.com/1357/

I really like the /pol/ version of this where they just edited in if you were of a certain race how this comic would read. Needless to say, it's wrong and everyone who agrees with that comic is wrong.

To simplify the question. Do we like to allow the social media to take parts of the position from court?

Personally, I don't care what Youtube bans and believe they should just do whatever they like. I don't care because Youtube does not provide any essential service to society. The content they serve is entirely expendable. The same holds for Twitter and Facebook. You could close these content distribution sites tomorrow and nothing substantial would change. A few of their competitors would gain a larger user base and that's it. If you rely for your income on some of these media channels (like ad revenue), you have a bad business model.

Principally, however, there could be a quasi-monopoly that turns out so essential for society that they should be treated as a public utility with a right to access instead of a private company that can enforce whatever house rules they like within the boundaries of law. I just don't think YT (or FB or Twitter or Google...) are there yet and find it hilarious that butthurt Youtubers so grossly overestimate their own importance.

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