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Comment by yawaworht1978 | Hacker News Reader

yawaworht1978

With the traffic and gravity that YouTube etc have, they're almost as powerful news broadcasting tools as the classic news media.

True, they're a private company and liable for some things, but they all try to squeeze out every last cent before a government intervention.

Banning content like crypto, anti vax, gambling etc is understandable, but all the people without a voice will think they are silenced because they know the truth.

If we as society accept that, we should not claim to be any better than china, Russia, Cuba, it's just a slightly different approach, the end result is the same, undesired content is deplatformed.

By the way, I am a rationalist and never believe conspiracy theories, but I do get a good laugh out of them at times and how the people use counter arguments helps me to think in more perspectives.

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The issue is that a few corporations control a majority of global human communications, and are accountable to no one for their decisions of what to censor/promote.

This is dangerous to democracy. If we do not subject them to the will of the people, they will eventually use this massive influence to make themselves immune to public scrutiny, and will one day be indistinguishable from an unelected branch of government.

Not regulating their own platforms is just as dangerous, as is being repeatedly demonstrated.

It's interesting that a TV manyfacturer or a HDMI cable manufacturer is not expected to be liable for the content that streams through their products. But when it comes to YouTube, they aren't treated as just a vessel but as an actual source of content. I think the distinction is just the capability of each entity.

When device manufacturers start preferentially favouring, or discriminating against, specific content, channels, or voices, I think you'll find they're similarly regulated. As televisions get "smarter", they are no longer passive carriers but active agents.

An HDMI cable is literally a dumb pipe, and the end-user controls both ends, fully.

(Whether or not they control what reaches the feed-end of that pipe is of course a different question.)

So the second-order effects of YouTube banning content, as you point out, are interesting and hard to predict. The question is should fear of second order effects prevent YouTube from taking action towards a desired first order effect?

For some context, prior to Youtube changing the algorithm, flat earth videos basically created the modern flat earth movement [1]. It's likely that this effect can go the other way, too.

I like to think that people are less drawn to conspiracy theories etc. when they are socially well-connected. The trouble about the pandemic is that there is a negative feedback loop: we have these socially isolating restrictions because there is a deadly virus, and one reason the virus remains unchecked is, in part because a subset of socially isolated people are drawn to misinformation.

[1] See the documentary In Search of A Flat Earth for more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44

> rationalist and never believe conspiracy theories

That’s irrational to NEVER believe them. How do you know what is or isn’t a conspiracy theory? Whether it was fact checked by our overlords?

Apologies, I should have been clearer, if something is ambiguous and a government acts dodgy, I don't dismiss it. Buy things like no planes on 911, flat earth, chakras , reptile overlords, magic and so forth, I am default sceptical.

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