UK MP speech about freedoms censored by YouTube

In the UK tradition, political speech in the private sphere is somewhat tightly regulated. As an MP he can’t buy advertising space on terrestrial TV; during election cycles if he is featured on TV the broadcasters are obliged to give equal time to his opponents; there are strictly limited amounts of time permitted for ‘party political broadcasts’ and they are allocated to all parties equally. So the precedent in UK law is not that MPs have unfettered access to broadcast their private speeches. Quite the opposite.

As a member of parliament he does enjoy parliamentary privilege, and the ability to put his views on the permanent public record of Hansard by delivering a speech in the Commons. That should give him quite enough of a soapbox.

It certainly doesn’t entitle him to oblige a private entity to carry his speech without comment - and any legal regime which required such a thing would be dangerously authoritarian.

When political campaigners show up at a radio station and demand to be put on the air, we don’t call that ‘normal exercise of free speech’, we call that ‘the first step in a coup’.

  > "Govnt must stop the erosion of free speech online. That starts with looking again at the wholly inadequate proposals in the Online Safety Bill”

forcing private entities to host things they dont want to sounds like a huge can of worms

How is that 'the best'. Only Silicon Valley thinks that is a valid legal excuse for anything. If you can't operate within the law you can't operate.

The US better start regulating their companies or you end up with a trade war due to the whole world including Europe just kicking these vendors out of the market entirely and permanently

Isn't that exactly the problem?

Social media platforms' business models depend on not being able to moderate all content. Examples like this are an inevitability of the concept.

Imo that would be the worst, because a human doing it can be corrected (more training, revised check-lists etc.), but afaik AI moderating in its current form is a black hole and it will remain a black hole for the foreseeable future.

What's strange however is them seeming to use this to try and 'strengthen' the online safety bill which in it's current form would already be damaging to free speech online (adds massive liability for illegal/'harmful' content if it isn't removed quickly so companies will most likely block more content as a result)

Much of the problem comes down to the fact that the "science" changes quite frequently. When new evidence appears, which updates our Bayesian Priors ( airborne vs aerosol/fomites, vaccine type effectiveness, delta variant transmittivity, ventilator usefulness, lab leak hypothesis, comorbidity statistics, etc ) the Powers That Be rely on the pre-update "science" to determine if censorship is warranted.

One can argue if censorship of "disinformation" is a societal good, and I won't litigate that general matter here, but it becomes a particular point of contention if what is classified as disinformation changes with every Lancet publication.

I assume blocking motorways is illegal already, yet the police are doing nothing, which is leading dangerously to vigilante justice as per some videos, which is only a question of time before it turns really violent.

Wtf is the UK government doing? Why do they need more powers when they don't use the current ones? Or is it for "other" types of protests? Shutting down motorways is fine.

Is it just because they really want to, compared to people with a more "live and let live" attitude?

"Everyone should" just doesn't work. It doesn't happen. The vast majority of people don't care, and the few who care are not going to change their habits and jump to a niche platform that maybe solves their problem. Network effects and the comfort of familiarity too big to ignore.

The institutions we set up to arbitrate truth - the courts - are already swamped beyond belief in many countries.

The problem is that our societal systems of governance have been designed hundreds of years past, when life was focused on a couple dozen kilometers around where one lived. Nowadays, with global instant communication and knowledge available to almost everyone, conflicts and disagreements achieve far, far more reach and impact - and our societal foundations have never been updated to reflect the new reality and its demands.

The US still votes on Tuesdays because of farmers commitments to church and market days in the 19th century (https://www.history.com/news/why-is-election-day-a-tuesday-i...), copyright as a concept dates back to the 1700s, and legal language is so full of Latin and other outdated language it is impossible to understand for normal citizens.

We are witnessing a break-up of society, especially between the old/Boomer generation and the young "digital natives". For us young people, we see the possibilities and dangers of technology - and we see that our societal infrastructure is horribly outdated and the old generation which is in power dragging their feet and doing everything they can to prevent progress.

The only places I can think of that Britain currently "hangs on to" against the will of the inhabitants are arguably Scotland and Northern Ireland, but in both those places about half the population want to continue to belong to the UK.

So it's not obvious to me who you're referring to here.

Propose one colony where the indigenous society was freer

The political systems of every one of those countries are freer today than they were before the British “visited”.

You're supposing that youtube_v1, youtube_v2, and youtube_v3 wouldn't all block you. They would, because all three companies would include a cohort of the same activist employees with the same censorious ideology all pushing to cancel the same people at the same time.

And why wouldn't we? That's the situation we have today. People banned from one major social media platform get banned from all major social media platforms pretty quickly. The state even encourages it.

Splitting tech companies won't do any good for censorship resistance on its own. We need common carrier requirements, not more heads on the censorship hydra.

Do you have a source for this? I am very far from knowledgeable about CRT but AFAIK what you've said there is just an incorrect right-wing talking point in the current anti-CRT fervour.

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

This new way of governance is not confined to social media but it also been used excessively during the Covid pandemic, instead of doing the hard work of passing legislation in a legislative body, governments are using back channels to pressure companies, NGOs, cities, etc to do their bidding, without any transparency or records.

It is obviously anti-democratic to its core.

Free speech is not absolute, government has the right to censor, however is has to do it properly by passing legislation, using courts and other transparent institutions.

Almost always when this debate is had, it's in the context of the US, where the First Amendment is a _hard_ stop against this sort of thing, but otherwise suggesting that the government have the final say over whatever you are allowed to say isn't historically a very popular suggestion.

Of course, in other jurisdictions, they can pass whatever laws they want, and platforms can choose to comply, comply only locally, withdraw, or pay whatever fines to keep going as they are.

So I'm not sure really what you're trying to say. You seem to be against safe harbour and laws that make them not liable. You argue that they should 'become liable at scale'. However you seem to be against their attempts to block content such regulations are likely to make them liable for.

Yes of course, I know perfectly well this is an inappropriate example. None of us want it to have been blocked. Probably nobody at Youtube actually wants to block it either, they're just applying their rules inappropriately. In fact it looks like it's already unblocked. But who gets to write the rules and objectively define what is or isn't appropriate?

If you want regulation and liability, edge cases like this are absolutely going to happen and we're going to have to find ways to manage that.