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Comment by foobarian | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if we would be better served with a NPR-like publicly funded platform for video hosting that puts a lot more resources into content moderation. The private platforms get away with the bare minimum by throwing black box AI at the problem which leads to problems like the anti-vax censorship chilling effects etc. There should be an easily reached human in the loop with transparent decisions, and levels of appeal which is much more expensive. Kinda like the court system with the jury-of-your-peers litmus test.

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If the state's going to host it, then their bar should be whether it's legal or not. If they want to put scary warnings around certain content or lock some of it behind age restriction, sure, fine. But if they are going to use public funds to host a government run publicly available video sharing platform, they should be very cautious about removing any content that doesn't violate actual laws. Free speech and all that, if anyone still remembers the concept.

Yes, exactly. And deciding legality should be done better than current automatic moderations that punish innocent content without a working appeals process.

Requiring that content be sourced from actual humans in good faith, and identifying people violating terms of service by spamming with puppet bots would be a good start. If the service is being operated by a national government, then you could require posters to prove residence or citizenship. But would anyone really want to use such a service? Could it possibly be even produced or operated efficiently? Once you put strict legal requirements on the operating entity it will get very slow, expensive, and user unfriendly.

The USA used to have a Fairness Doctrine. It required political viewpoints to have equal air time.

It made politics much more boring.

As it should be.

Er, politics in the period of 1949-1985 was not, generally, “more boring” than 1985 to present. The last few years maybe have achieved the undesirable level of not-boring that was generally the case through most of the 1950s, 1960s, and much of the 1970s, but certainly overall the post-Fairness Doctrine period was more boring than the Fairness Doctrine period. (The Neoliberal Consensus is probably a bigger factor than the FD on that, though; it’s pretty hard to attribute much of anything about the overall tenor of politics to the FD.)

Doesn't the state already ban nudity/language on public broadcast, film, and radio?

Specifics depend on the country. In the USA, over the air broadcast is restricted in content on the premise that broadcast spectrum is a limited public resource, and that you don't have much choice with what you see when you tune in. That argument gets pretty weak with point-to-point networks with nearly unlimited bandwidth, as I see it. An analogy might be the difference between ads with nudity on billboards (I believe that can be prohibited in the USA?) and ads with nudity in a print magazine going to a subscribership expecting such ads (protected by the 1A, including for mailing through the USPS).

Public libraries are perhaps another source of analogy. My local library system has some of the most vile and objectionable works ever printed on the shelves due to popular demand. Many public libraries in Canada and the USA are quite absolute about that with regards to free expression. For example: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/porn-library-ottawa-po... "Library patrons allowed to surf porn, Ottawa mom discovers"

Sadly, NPR is a bad example because they are hardly publicly funded and their content is pretty biased (I'm a moderate liberal and NPR definitely feels like it's left of me, even if they're typically more civil than other media outlets).

Agreed. NPR it VERY left biased and it's damn evident.

NPR censored coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop claiming it was not newsworthy. All platforms with any moderation will be censorious platforms by definition. You can always tweak the degree of censorship though with moderation.

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