It's scary how many of the systems we were worried about in China (e.g. social credit system, censorship, etc.) are basically being created now in the west through the proxy of critical companies blocking access and/or working together.
We have the internet, where you can rent or run your own server and storage and post your conspiracy theory videos.
I don't believe any entity should ever have the power to frame what is and is not acceptable to believe to such a large amount of the world, be it Google, Facebook or a government.
You haven't defined what "compete with it" actually means here.
> Google also controls the largest search platform
If it was only a search platform, this would hardly matter, because search engines are not hard to replace. But Google search is merely the entry point to a much larger system (notably, a vast online ad platform and data collection system), and that's a problem.
It doesn't matter whether they are shaping it politically or profitably or via AI for clicks. It isn't neutral and drowns out or outright eliminates competing views.
Pretty extreme view sending in the national guard, right? Except according to a poll around that time, 52% of Americans answered yes to "Do you approve or disapprove of sending in the U.S. military where there are violent protests?" So obviously that op-ed wasn't a fringe belief, but it was enough to end the career of the person responsible to bring it to print, in addition to apologies and a commitment to never do anything like that again.
Being critical of sometimes violent disruptive protests is a view that has been highly suppressed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bari_Weiss#2017%E2%80%932020:_...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protes...
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/52-americans-support-deployi...
By all means argue that they made her feel that it was not possible or sensible to try to do the job she wanted to do. But she resigned, and that's not the same thing.
Getting to zero after boosting doesn’t seem like censorship.
Her career is alive and well.
There's no evidence supporting price controls to be an effective way to fight inflation, as was shown to produce awful results in the 70s among many other eras, yet we have politicians pushing for that.
There's no evidence to support that nominal wages rising, but at a rate lower than inflation leads to people being better off, yet we have politicians pushing this.
I think Google should ban any videos promoting these effectively disproven and dangerous economic ideas.
Economic opinions are generally not that clear cut, requiring an awful lot of theoretical harness and qualifications to explain. Evidence is similar, you can quibble about a lot of things in economics.
Whether the election was stolen, well, where is a shred of evidence? It's not hard to define what we mean by stolen.
If you'll recall there was a multi year period of mass belief that the president colluded with Russians to steal the election. On the back of very little evidence, other than news heads talking about it and "he said, she said"
There was also a multi year investigation that found nothing, and actually was able to largely disprove documents that helped to kick off the speculation.
I believe we should mass purge all these videos proposing that the ex president colluded with Russians. We don't want the public to be misinformed.
Consider which regimes throughout history have used silencing political opposition the most, and whether you want to be aligned with them.
I certainly don't.
My preference is to leave all content up, but perhaps provide filters to users so they can choose to look at a bubble if they like. Or have an open standard for video data, on which anybody could build a UI layer.
Just saying, there's a clear double standard here. Saying the election was stolen due to collusion with Russians seems to be along awfully similar lines.
I'm happy to allow companies to do whatever they like, but the data needs to be decoupled from the UI then. Otherwise it's a natural monopoly.
I think history will see it that way, though it may take another decade or two.
This is simply untrue: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/us/politics/senate-intell...
Even a Republican-backed investigation found many links between Trump campaign advisors and Kremlin officials.
Just because Trump says he was "totally exonerated" for the soundbite doesn't mean anything.
Also, you can tie most government officials to Russia in some capacity. Everybody in politics is well connected.
It was a widely spread conspiracy theory with 0 evidence given a veil of credibility because many talking heads brought it up as if there were something tangible backing it.
Just because many people talked about and bought into it doesn't invalidate that it was a conspiracy theory
Nobody is claiming Trump is a genius. The Russian ties are all out there in the open. The only open question was whether they rise to a criminal level. Trump apparently thought they did when he panicked and fired James Comey to halt an investigation. I don’t think the connections were necessarily criminal, just un-American (that of cozying up to corrupt dictators while denigrating allies).
"Also, it's not a view worth keeping around. There's no evidence to support it and it's just used to justify violence and division."
So I listed some very dangerous economic views that have been proven to fail throughout history, and are widely agreed upon by economists.
So we should silence anybody promoting these views, following your logic. It's for the good of society
We should ban all videos proposing the ex president colluded with Russia too, as it was always a conspiracy theory with no evidence. No matter how much people wanted it to be true. Undermining the legitimacy of a validly elected president should be a silence-able offense. All the better if the party in power or their affiliates are the ones to do the silencing.
Maybe take into consideration which regimes throughout history have used silencing speech the most and whether you want to align with them.
But generally I don't expect holders of these views to acknowledge the hypocrisy of them, or how closely they align to the tactics of authoritarian regimes throughout history.
It’s sad that not everyone agrees with all the choices they make?
Doesn’t seem sad to me.
The alternative, where youtube cannot choose what content to host, seems sad to me.
You want to argue he did something illegal, should be in prison, should not be allowed to run? Fine, that's what the court system and respective political parties are for. But please don't tell me it's completely cool that tech CEOs get to decide who can and can't run. You may like the side they fall on this time, but how confident are you that you'll agree in the future? What if leadership changes? What do you think would happen when a politician has a credible shot of winning on a promise to break them up?
None of what you've described would prevent him from running. And in fact, thanks to Streisand Effect, much of it centers him in the public eye.
You can't buy that kind of publicity.
That's probably the moment they could face regulation. Individually, it's their platform to choose what they want to host or not.
The former guy got banned on all the services all at once. Even tiktok which he was not on. Hell, even grindr banned him.
There may not be direct coordination (maybe there is), but there's a signal and no one likes to make waves
They all took a different direction about the "pee tape":
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/opinion/comey-book-steele...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/magazine/nothing-proves-y...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/business/media/spooked-pr...
For more: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anytimes.com+trump+pee...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...
The complaint seems to be that the corruption he was probably involved in is slightly different than the corruption Trump was talking about. Which again, standard political fare but the crackdown on the story seems suspicious. If it had been Trump there is no way such a story would have been quietened down.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden#Investor_and_lobb...
> In the grand scheme of things is looks like a pretty routine case of potential corruption, but that being associated with the president's son like a big deal
If you're making the claim that simply being on a board of directors or part of a venture firm because of who you know or are related to is ipso facto corruption, unfortunately we're unlikely to ever rid ourselves of that short of random work assignments in some kind of scifi YA novel.
And, frankly, the reason these left-leaning outlets were suppressing the story was because to a lot of people the situation does meet the standard of ipso facto corruption. It seems clear that the people who were interacting with Hunter thought they were buying influence in the US political apparatus, probably the executive given his father's position; otherwise the decisions don't make a lot of sense. To a lot of people that basically is corruption. Although I doubt it is unusual in the US Congress if we poked around a little.
EDIT, was Russia-US war. My bad.
It came out in December that his taxes were being investigated and it was widely reported. Easy to see from the wikipedia article where there are multiple citations from major news outlets.
> It is materially interesting what business connections the US president has with (famous for being corrupt I might add) Ukraine.
What is interesting? You're playing connect the dots and taking possible tax issues from business in China and connecting it to made up stories about Burisma and saying "now prove me wrong". Again, the impetus is on the person making the argument to make an actual concrete claim. The Senate republicans already have you covered on the Ukraine part, of course (nothing).
> otherwise the decisions don't make a lot of sense
Henry Kissinger got a bunch of people to heavily invest in Theranos. You're going to need more substance than "why do rich white people keep failing upwards?" for a story here.
Which lends some rather solid credence to all the people back around the election who were saying this looks like fairly obvious corruption. I mean, the facts haven't really changed much, the only change is that the political establishment is OK with it being reported on in December. Anyone reading the initial story could have told you there was going to be an investigation.
Whether they'll find anything is an open question since the person who controls the executive is currently president - but it looks as shady as anything in US politics. There is little question that the big tech giants were making a political move when they took the story down on its first arrival, it would have swung votes and they didn't want that.
Not finding overwhelming evidence of money laundering can't be the story unless the original - silenced - accusations of corruption were also a story.
> Not finding overwhelming evidence of money laundering can't be the story unless the original - silenced - accusations of corruption were also a story.
Not finding evidence can't be the story because the original story (which is what had no evidence), er, was a story? Again, an accusation can't pull itself up by its bootstraps. There has to be a there, there.
Now you may not care. I certainly don't think it is the biggest issue, this sort of corruption is pretty small biscuits compared to the damage that US politicians of Biden's tenure typically manage to do. However, the fact that there was a vigorous campaign of censorship leading up to the election is extremely weird. Which is the polite phrase for "this was a partisan lie by omission because big tech is showing their cards and those cards are Democrat".
As I suspect you know, his point was that it’s sad that YouTube is making politically motivated censorship decisions, just like China would. While we all know that Silicon Valley leans left, I think that those of us who want good things for the world would like to believe that these companies can check their politics at the door when it comes to running platforms that serve people across the political spectrum. Sadly, that’s not the case.
If YouTube identified itself as a partisan platform where speech that is not left leaning is in danger of being curtailed (which is what it is), I wouldn’t have a problem with these actions. But it masquerades as a neutral platform that is open to all, in the same way that CNN, MSNBC, and Fox masquerade as news outlets. That is a threat to democracy, because it creates the impression that only content which aligns with the platform owner’s political ideology is newsworthy or acceptable for viewing, and anything else is fringe.
My desire to give companies rights diminishes with scale.
You have no shield against private oligopolies.
There needs to be an actual free market where people have a realistic set of alternatives.
Pointing out public versus private is IMO misidentifying the problem.
For starters, Google doesn't get to raise a private army or arrest The Hill for misuse of their services.
With enough size and political influence they could do it, it just hasn't been in fashion.
There is virtually no competition to youtube in the video streaming space (in terms of sheer reach and volume), so choices that youtube make have clear political implications on what voices get heard.
If you think it is a right that people should have, talk to your representative and get the government to create GovTube where anyone can post any type of conspiracy crap they desire.
Broadcasters are forced to do all kinds of stuff. In Canada they have to carry a certain percentage of Canadian content.
It's about having equal reach for different political opinions. If you completely remove one voice without any legal mandate to do so, you are just the same as a political tool.
There are far more than a dozen websites out there.
Last mile delivery by telephone and cable companies have government right of way monopolies.
YouTube can’t be watched without government grants.
And the Canadian (and other country) content laws apply to non-spectrum using channels.
But all this is silly. The phone company can’t decide to cancel my phone call because of what I’m saying. A law can stop YouTube.
A train line that is the sole means of commerce in and out of a town is a common carrier. There's no competitors really possible to enter into that market. For that train line to decide to not run certain cargo outside of safety concerns is to then control all the commerce with no reasonable competitor.
Literally right now I'm watching streaming video content hosted from some service other than YouTube. I probably spend less than an hour a week watching YouTube content. It's hardly the only rail line in town, nor is it the only way I can view video content. Now if the only viable ISP said "you can't connect to YouTube, if you don't like it sell your house and move to the next town over" then yeah that's a common carrier and shouldn't be allowed to do that.
DNS names aren't limited by the US government. There are lots of TLDs which are controlled by other governments. And largely they're pretty much managed by lots of different corporations. Either way, the government directly getting involved in taking over your domain name without any due process just to silence your speech probably does become a first amendment issue at least for US nationals. Either way, they're massively less limited than how many effective TV freqiencies or phone providers are in a given metro area.
(I don’t necessarily think it’d be the best idea for the most part though.)
Between the trio of media, tech, and government there's enormous control over what we hear and learn about. The filters they apply are powerful, yet inconsistent, and often populist, political, or irrational.
These 3 groups have this control, yet are incapable of using it to optimise for citizenry well-being.
For the same reasons that AT&T can't terminate your phone service if they hear you talking about something that's opposed to the political preferences of AT&T or its leadership. These companies have become the public square and the law needs to be updated to reflect that. If they have to become public utilities fine.
There's a big difference between a small company being coerced by the government into some action, versus the same action on a very small handful of multi-billion dollar companies that have a collective monopoly on our entire public and political discourse.
What's really bizarre is how the left is supposed to be opposed to, e.g. Citizens United, and the establishment neoliberal take is ultra-pro corporate rights and autonomy and 0 government intervention. IMHO thinking a few companies should be free to make a cooperative agreement and shut whoever they want out of communicating on these popular platforms is a radical right-wing position.
What they do have is a brand and a social network that surfaces, promotes, and moderates video content to drive engagement and ad views.
They’ve grown large by moderating and curating content but now that they’ve done so they should no longer be allowed to moderate and curate content? Makes no sense whatsoever.
You’re pronouncing youtube a “public square”, which should therefore be seized by the government… But what is this extremely strong claim based on? youtube is just one of an endless series of options for posting videos on the internet.
Of course they do. There are channels that can be removed that would instantly lose access to millions of monthly viewers that can't practically be replaced anywhere. They have a monopoly on that type of reach (the most important type), and especially when these platforms decide to blacklist in concert.
> now that they’ve done so they should no longer be allowed to moderate and curate content
Yes, because once your business decisions have the power to decide who gets elected President, for example, it's in a different class and has to be regulated differently than a corner flower shop. There are many examples of laws and regulations that apply to business based on size.
> what is this extremely strong claim based on? youtube is just one of an endless series of options for posting videos on the internet
Again, it's not one of endless, it is entirely unique -- for many channels, their reach on YouTube is not replaceable anywhere. That's like saying, AT&T can shut off your phone service for your political opinions because you can always go meet someone in person to talk. That's simply not how we've historically agreed to interpret the obligations of massive communications platforms, and there's a very good reason for that.
I don't want who gets to speak to the public decided by some faceless, unelected tech oligarchs. That's a dystopia. "They only get to decide if you easily get access to an audience of millions, you can always get an audience of 5" is a deeply flawed argument.
If I set up Paul's Video Hosting Service next week, and someone wants to post videos of kittens being tortured, I'm not hosting their videos. I'm not even hosting videos of a presidential candidate making certain pronouncements. No US court would agree that I should be forced to do so.
To whatever extent it is reasonable for YT to be forced to host any legal content, where's the boundary between the putative pvhs.com and youtube.com?
Utilities haven't been "seized" by the government because there are regulations on them. Telecoms haven't been seized by the government.
YouTube has monopoly level dominance in terms of engagement. Competitors can't gain market share because YouTube is already prevalent, and video is a "solved" problem. Consumer gets no benefit by using a different platform, and there is essentially no product feature that could be invented to make an alternative platform compelling enough to use over YouTube.
Instead of regulating YouTube, we could define an open database/protocol of video content and allow anybody to build a UI around the same set of content. In that way, there is no network effect gating people into a single platform. This is where things will likely trend in the longer run with social etc. And I would bet the free market will get to it eventually.
Then YouTube is just a web UI. And I guarantee you in this world there would be many other widely used sites, as there's no content/network effect lock.
Monopolies appear on the basis where it is effectively unreasonable to expect a competitor to form. E.g. railroads. Anybody can build their own railroad. Is it going to happen in practice? No, because cost to do so is prohibitively high.
A quick search[0] shows that YouTube dominates ~76% of the market. Do you really believe your own statement?
[0] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/online-video--12/youtu...
If you get enough traction, you’ll need to host a whole operation that can be managed by a full staff and serve millions of views every day. There’s now in the picture one or more platform providers, and payment processing that you depend on for your income.
A bunch of entities are now allowing you to have your soapbox, that can be swept away at any turn if you’re too much of a problem for any of them. No need to arrest you or kidnap you, “violate your rights”, they just cut your supplies.
You can't anonymously access information as almost everything is tied to you ID number. You can't buy things, chat, watch TV (smart tvs), or do most anything with any sense of privacy.
Living in China as a Chinese means living with a drastically different mindset when it comes to these sorts of things. It's hard to understand how it changes you unless you've lived there.
I’m not saying I’d live in China, but I feel we’re putting too much credit in our own system. Even comparing ourselves to China doesn’t feel productive, we all have our local issues and should probably focus on solving them.
Sacrifice another ~350k Americans and countless others around the globe from our refusal to stop misinformation, I sleep. Save some gamers' mock wounded pride; real stuff.
Never saw much misinformation on Twitch to be honest, but they are taking a more active role as of a few days ago: https://safety.twitch.tv/s/safety-news/detail?language=en_US...
If people banned from that is "censorship", then by that definition the whole world was censored 2 decades ago.
Not too many years ago no one had the ability to call anyone with a telephone. That service is provided by private companies in many countries. Is denying someone the ability to call their associates censorship?
Times change.
That becomes more problematic and debatable once infrastructure companies such as a DNS provider or a hosting company refuses to deal with some content given that you remove the ability to create your own soapbox.
My view is that it is functionally a public square, regardless of who owns it. Compare a protest on the side of a road in a company town.
A right to access to an audience, not a right to an audience.
The owner of an auditorium or hall is allowed to not give platform to anyone. They get to decide who gets heard.
You need to be able to cite a source, ideally a case or specific law, on such a claim because no one else I know holds to that definition. A link to a Wikipedia article about a different concept does not satisfy, because it does not cite a legal definition of free speech by US courts.
You've levied a pretty heavy claim with nothing but your word as evidence for it.
I remember thinking "oh yeah, that makes sense, they wouldn't view free speech in isolation but as a tool of the democratic process."
No. That's never been the case. Your room is open to all and people who want to listen aren't prevented from going into it.
However, I'm also not obligated to host you in a room I own. The government guarantees my freedom of association as well. You want to opine, do it in your own room, or do it in places owned by the public at large.
Your recollection of what you were supposedly thinking doesn't mean you didn't misread what was written either. If you want me to even consider your claim, you are going to need a source on it. Because, like I said, it's a heavy one.
Nope, you are misunderstanding something here. Removing what was considered "given" is what becomes perceived as censorship.
keyword here being _perceived_
So we don't have to use the word censorship but there is a lot of voting with feet going on that suggests some sort of speech suppression. The persistent banning of private opinions by American big tech is probably the major cause of that.
It's difficult when the backbone of the internet isn't available to you. For instance, AWS can be denied cutting off vital internet infrastructure we take for granted. Further payment processors like Visa can cut off access. Even banks could cut you off and even seize your funds if they got the directive.
You can spin your own service is a nice fiction we tell ourselves but with financing getting cut off it becomes impossible to build a service that reaches a lot of people without a lot of money and a disregard for profit.
In China maybe someone would come knocking on the door to take you away to jail. But in the US, we don't need to go that far. All it would take is the press secretary telling big tech they need to help fight "misinformation" and pointing them in the right direction.
Communication is even harder to block than torrent traffic. At least torrents have an unusual characteristic traffic pattern that could be checked for. Watching wrongthink videos over an encrypted connection doesn't even have that.
At the same time, don't expect everyone to provide access to their platform regardless of what someone does.
YouTube suspending accounts is the old guy yelling at kids to get off his lawn.
But when you have the white house openly call on a Swedish company to censor a popular podcaster, that's where I draw the line. Artists can pull their music, people can boycott, but the government shouldn't have their finger on the scale. That's exactly what the 1st amendment is about. If the state can declare something should be censored and it is (voluntarily though!) then it's no different than force. And when you exert that same pressure on upstream providers, you've essentially rebuilt the great firewall of China without any casualties.
Yeah, right up until we don't. Wishful thinking doesn't scale.
Note all the attempts in the article to paint them as "armed" and "extremists". There was no violence, no destruction of property. It was a legal demonstration until it was made illegal by invoking the Emergencies act. And this use of the law in my opinion was an abuse as it clearly is for terrorist threats. Not Canadian working class people peacefully demonstrating.
But I don’t see how that’s related to the discussion about YouTube suspending a channel.
Blocking a nation's highways and borders for weeks is not legal.
People screamed blue-bloody-murder when BLM and Occupy protesters chained themselves to barrels across interstates, disrupting traffic for an hour or two...but the Canadian government tolerates a complete shutdown of a border, along with near continuous public disturbance for weeks - before finally clearing the protesters, and that's somehow an example of oppression?
The Canadian truckers picked up the trash. I never saw a cleaner protest.
EDIT>> My mistake, censorship falls clearly under Orwell
But to actually answer your comment:
1. A company removing proven disinformation is quite far from what censorship is. Also not really something that would be considered dystopian.
2. I would disagree that Orwell work is about “censorship is bad”. His work is IMHO more about exploring risks caused by attempt to do population surveillance and control. Spreading lies and falsehood consistently to destroy any understanding of an actual situation, the way Trump does by lying about election fraud, is way closer to the Orwellian nightmare than YouTube removing that content.
From the article: > The Hill’s channel is unable to upload new videos for seven days, although its older videos can still be accessed.