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Comment by ColinHayhurst | Hacker News Reader

The video has now been restored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VidUXZjzNVk

Worth a watch.

Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI, and without human check?

MP says: “This is an outrageous attack on free speech. Throughout the pandemic we've seen blatant attempts by Big Tech to silence opposition voices challenging the conventional wisdom. This episode serves as a further example of the worrying trend of strangling free speech"

"My speech at conference was carefully researched, wholly accurate & backed up with the latest scientific evidence."

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

"The unambiguous attempt by YouTube to censor my speech is a warning."

"If YouTube is happy to attempt to silence elected Members of Parliament, then they are also happy to censor anyone uploading content to their services."

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The idea that a member of parliament should enjoy at least a a much freedom of speech over private media as the broader public actually deserves some challenge.

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’.

> the broadcasters are obliged to give equal time to his opponents

Um. This is not the rebuttal to the MP's position that you think it is.

It might not be intended to be the rebuttal you are assuming it is. I’m not saying that British law broadly sets a precedent of requiring equal treatment of contrasting political views. It absolutely does not - look at the UK newspaper opinion pages.

I am mainly responding to the ‘if they’ll do this to an MP they will do it to you’ syllogism, which seems to rest on the underlying assumption that an MP has at least the same speech rights (on a private website) as a member of the public - when in fact the ability of an MP to oblige a private company to carry their speech is expressly limited.

I am arguing that the fact he is an MP does not entitle him to special treatment and indeed historically brings his speech rights under greater scrutiny.

My point is mostly that MPs are not broadly entitled to use private platforms to speak unopposed, and in fact are more restricted by current law in that respect than people who are not MPs or parliamentary candidates.

> My point is mostly that MPs are not broadly entitled to use private platforms to speak unopposed

I don't read the MP's objection to YouTube as expressing the position that he has the right to speak unopposed.

I read the MP's position as objecting to the idea that his opponents have the right to speak unopposed.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

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

why don't they (govt) open a public video site for anyone to upload to, so they don't have to mess with private sites?

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

This particular government is very fond of opening cans of worms, but is always surprised and upset to find worms inside them.

It would make a lot of sense for the UK government to encourage UK-based PeerTube websites (and other federated social media such as Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, etc), and to make sure all UK government content is uploaded on such sites.

Then once they have done that, and these sites have lots of users and traction, mandate that Google, Facebook etc also federate using ActivityPub. If they don't, block their sites.

PeerTube doesn't scale when most of the user base nowadays is on mobile, with asymmetric connections that have data caps.

(which happens to be the real world)

UK Mobile Data for most is unlimited. A few will have a data cap but those will be unlikely to watch videos on mobile.

>UK Mobile Data for most is unlimited

I very much doubt this is the case given the number of tariffs with data caps

I just asked around (~100 people) and nobody I know has unlimited mobile data here in the UK. As you can get 120gb/month for £20 and unlimited for £40 on a 12 month sim only contract, I think not many people using more than 120GB/month so no good reason to pay double for it.

As anecdata, I cut my package back to 5GB at the start of the first lockdown as my mobil data usage went to nearly 0 since wifi at home and did not run out of data during the last year. I assume anybody who was able to do that done the same.

https://www.finder.com/uk/mobile-internet-statistics https://www.statista.com/forecasts/997904/mobile-data-plan-i...

If "for most is unlimited" you mean "most don't use up all their data", then yes. If you mean "most have unlimited data plans", then see links above.

EDIT: apologies for the statista link, it wasn't paywalling me when I first looked: it shows about 12% have unlimited data.

PeerTube doesn't scale with large number of users, period.

There's currently no way to horizontally scale an instance, so after an instance grows past a certain size it can't transcode uploaded videos fast enough. I love the project but if it can't utilize multiple compute instances to transcode video (or plug into a cloud platforms video transcoding offering), it's never going to grow past this blocker.

I suffered this problem 1 year ago and after raising issue in github I realized peertube wasn't designed from ground to be scaled horizontally. Not only upload video but harddisk is my concern like distributed storage is an after thought.

However I also acknowledge the authors are very open to ideas and they are really awesome. I guess some wizards who knows scaling related things need to be hired and it will costs a lot of money. AFAIK peertube generates money from donation so I don't think we should be harsh on them.

> There's currently no way to horizontally scale an instance, so after an instance grows past a certain size it can't transcode uploaded videos fast enough.

I wasn't aware of that -- fixing it would be a very necessary improvement to the codebase to make the software more useful on big sites.

> most of the user base nowadays is on mobile

I've never actually watched a video on a mobile device (I tried once and didn't have enough bandwidth).

If I'm at home or office, I have a desktop PC, and if I'm out and about I have better things to be doing with my time.

Why not just make them implement ActivityPub now? It will promote adversarial interoperability and give rise to more competition.

Now or later -- either works for me!

The youtube alternatives are becoming useful, I can watch most of the content I would otherwise watch on youtube on odysee, it even has a much better UX.

Th UK government is more interested in encouraging "safety tech" including age verification tech. There is no programme, fund, encouragement or anything of support for anyone doing something like a UK-based PeerTube. In their eyes this is not "innovation". I am very happy to stand corrected but speak from 30 years of mixed experiences.

I haven't checked but wasn't the Online safety bill the one which implied all kinds of age verification checks which either weren't feasible or, at a minimum, were a goldmine for identify fraud.

Many people watching this Bill take the view is that it is being used to slip back in age verification, as it attempted to do so, but failed in the Digital Economy Act 2017. In that Act, Part 3 was about a porn sites requiring an age verification proposal; not just declaring you age in some form but linking to some official data from which your age could be verified (like a credit card number). This section got dropped from the Act before it was passed and has led to a course case between the Govt and age verification companies. Now it looks like the Online Safety Bill is being used to repeal the Digital Economy Act 2017 and replace it with this new Act where the age verification requirement is slipped back in.

The Age Verification industry is lobbying hard to see their "investments" pay off this time, after being disappointed in 2017.

>why don't they (govt) open a public video site for anyone to upload to,

If governments tried to create publicly funded video website for anyone to upload to, it still won't accomplish what we'd hope for because governments always exercise their power censor. (See examples of UK BBC censorship.[1])

Look at the cognitive dissonance in the platitude: "Govnt must stop the erosion of free speech online."

The government-that-censors wants to force private businesses to not-censor?!? Inevitably, the government will force the business to censor something the government doesn't like which creates a contradiction!

[To downvoters: Does a government funded website that has uncensored "free speech" exist now? If not, why would it be realistic that it won't suffer the same pressures to censor that all previous government-controlled communication channels had? Let's not repeat platitudes about "free speech" but really dissect the mechanisms to enable censorship-resistant mass media. The mechanisms of implementation are the more difficult topic!]

EDIT reply to : >"I think op meant, that te government should make video.gov.tld webpage to post government videos there"

But the gp's phrase of "for _anyone_ to upload to" strongly implies user-generated content like Youtube uploaders instead of only the government employees uploading government videos.

Does the UK's BBC count as a government-sponsored website? They already have examples of hosting videos of parliament speeches. E.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-politics-58259509

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingd...

I think op meant, that the government should make video.gov.tld webpage to post government videos there, instead of posting them to youtube.

This is a good point. They could optimise the site to encourage more uploads instead of engagement. Then the government can mine the data for intelligence.

Turn spying on its citizens and data harvesting of their public info into a useful resource for the benefit of all.

>Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI, and without human check?

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

>How is that 'the best'.

Hence the quotes wrapping sentence.

>If you can't operate within the law you can't operate

That's demonstrably untrue. Look at the rise of Uber. If I started running an unlicensed taxi, they'd come down on me very hard and very quickly, but Uber had the resources to tie up enforcement until public opinion about their VC-subsidized "taxis" prevented any action.

>they'd come down on me very hard and very quickly

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but here in the Netherlands, it wouldn't have been the state that would come down 'hard'. (its the other cab drivers, physically assaulting you)

As a response to this kind of energy, we actually ended up liberizing our cab market a lot more before Uber came. And when Uber came here there was no good will for the existing established cab companies, because people considered them borderline mobsters.

Okay. So it wasn’t a mistake. Google like any other media company decided to exercise editorial control and let part A speak while muzzling party B.

Now what?

There is no consensus of what to do with political speech and media.

In some counties only the ruling government gets access. In some counties, only the leading parties have access and all must share time equally. In others, you only get the access that you can buy. In still others, no one gets access except under regulated conditions like a debate.

If Google takes a step back from the label of Big Tech and admits that YouTube is just another multinational media company… then what do they lose?

>There is no consensus of what to do with political speech and media.

There is though. The general consensus of free societies is that the democratically elected government regulates speech and not the market.

The problem is youtube/facbeook/instagram/linked-in perform functions that one would normally classify as 'public space'. Obviously that might need some level of policing, because some speech is criminal (like a threat of violence made to another person). But private companies shouldn't be forced to police.

I blame the lack of regulations much more than the for profit companies trying to make a profit (they are legally bound to pursuit profit by their stock holders).

The trouble is the US is allergic to do such a thing, and when another country starts regulation the companies of one of their biggest trade ally's...

So, please, uncle Sam. Can you please make sure the ToS of facebook and the like, is written by your congress. So that there is direct democratic influence on it? Even Facebook will like a lot better that way, because it actually allows them to stop pretending to be 'the facebook state' and can just go back to 'facebook, the for profit company'.

>Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI, and without human check?

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.

> Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI,

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.

AI can easily be turned off.

I agree and should have said "should we assume the best of intentions by humans". Delegating decisions on freedom of speech to AI is a flawed and dangerous path.

How about we blame the company regardless of the technology used? The result is the same.

Yeah it seems likely to me to be an overzealous AI decision, given the background noise of anti-vaccine disinformation on youtube these days I wouldn't be surprised if they've turned up their algorithms at the cost of more false and marginal positives

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)

Sadly that is not strange - if there are any technologically literate people advising our government on policy they're not being listened to.

> an overzealous AI decision

Then they simply shouldn't use AI algorithms to censor people.

> 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

It's not obvious to me that the UK government has any coherent idea of what it is trying to do.

Some would say the Bill is a symptom of Facebook Derangement Syndrome https://webdevlaw.uk/2020/12/09/facebook-derangement-syndrom... Based on those they are consulting with that seems justfied.

Should we be more forgiving of harm done by faulty algorithms than by negligent human beings? It was the company's choice to save money by automating a process that normally only human beings can do reliably. The consequences to the victim are the same regardless of the instrument used in the commission of the wrongdoing.

Given the quantity of video uploaded to youtube I'm not sure human moderation of any significant amount of it is even possible anymore. Humans are definitely better at handling many situations but are also prone to their own biases (e.g. there were facebook moderators a while back who would take down reported content they disagreed with for religious reasons), they are often not given enough time to reasonably review a report, and when exposed to the kind of videos being reported can experience serious mental health problems

Some of these could be dealt with by the companies investing more in moderation (make them employees/better pay/healthcare etc.), but if you want to moderate at the scale of youtube/facebook/etc. then I don't see how you could do it without some automated tools

"human moderation of any significant amount of it is even possible anymore."

Then maybe free video hosting is not a viable business, why should youtube destroy all competition and then complain that checking their uploads is not possoble?

Exactly. Perhaps if lots of little video hosting companies existed, this wouldn't be an issue. "Too big to do the right thing" seems like an even worse version of "Too big to fail".

The argument that these companies are too big and that creates bad incentives/lack of incentives to improve is one I'm much more sympathetic to. I'd be in favour of more smaller companies/communities although I don't think this would remove the need for automated tools (e.g. smallish reddit and discord communities often use bots and other tools to automate some moderation). And to make something like this a reality you'd probably need government intervention to overcome the network effect that these bigger platforms have

My personal belief is "that won't scale" is not a good reason for bypassing ethical or socially responsible behavior.

Exactly; there is no faulty algorithm without a human being behind it.

"I just closed my eyes, swung my fist repeatedly, and started walking! How should I have known you'd be standing there?"

> wholly accurate & backed up with the latest scientific evidence.

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.

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