The extent of the "censorship" is getting ridiculous. It is an overreach of the platforms.
Yeah just go build your own platform they will say as if it had not been attempted numerous times only to be censored off every hosting/ payment/ app platforms they could use or hacked to have all the personal information of their users doxxed because they had "bad opinions." Even the ones that actually exist just become hiveminds of their own because they become populated by people who have been censored everywhere else, as if having every community devolve into hive minded safe spaces is actually desirable.
Was this really something that stopped any of the services?
>or hacked to have all the personal information of their users doxxed because they had "bad opinions."
Come on this is not fair. This was caused by these services choosing to hire low skilled developers. The guy building Parler didn't even understand the proper way to set up his authentication strategy nor did he really understand his database and its advantages/limitations. If anything, this should teach the other side to respect the effort that goes into developing these platforms(this disrespect for the skillset is something I see A LOT among the right wing youtubers I follow). They are so freaking proud to be not one of the "elites" by eschewing the desire for knowledge and a love of learning so much so that it bites them in the ass when they are booted off an existing platform and then realize this tech stuff is so hard.
>Even the ones that actually exist just become hiveminds of their own because they become populated by people who have been censored everywhere else, as if having every community devolve into hive minded safe spaces is actually desirable.
These platforms need to welcome the other side then, the ones doing the censoring.
If the problem is that people don't know how to talk to each other anymore, and that isn't solved by creating more insular communities.
There's a very obvious solution to this, and it involves government regulation.
Their network had nothing to pull people into. Parler didn't have that problem, in fact, I hear it was doing relatively well until they collapsed due to their own technical incompetence.
>Then in the case of censorship, you have to deal with being a persona non grata that socially conscious people and institutions won't touch, and that you need to build it in like a month before any political momentum gained dissipates and people move on.
Again it seems like we had evidence of a platform that managed to overcome this. Maybe I could have my memory wrong but Parler started off small, got promoted quietly by right wing people but was somewhat ready to organically grow as discontent grew among right wing people on existing platforms. Maybe it was just a honeypot all along (as some say) but it feels like they could have been an example that disproves your theory. The pieces were definitely there.
>Even if you manage to succeed after all that, and get adoption, all you have done is manage to create the same type of platform that censored you in the first place, with the only difference being that it is your hivemind of your own beliefs.
I wonder if liberal people went on Parler and confronted right wingers. I know they gladly ban people for doing the same on /r/Conservative but Parler being a "free speech" platform I wonder if they just let people be as they are.
Everyone is welcome, the ones doing the censoring just don't want to go there because they're happy in their cesspool.
This isn't even a call to violence or targeted harassment. It's the opinion of a man about election results.
So you agree YouTube is perfectly ok to remove content because it mentions 'the opinion of a man about election results.'?
And if Trump was to hypothetically win in 2024, would it be perfectly fine for YouTube to remove any content which is dissenting of Trump? I'm sure a dislike or negative comment would stop that...
There is nothing stopping Trump from creating his own video platform. He is supposedly a billionaire isn’t he?
It's true the large social platforms are privately owned and so they can censor to their hearts content, but given the obliquity and integration these largest platforms have in the social fabric, is that reasonable?
Should they at least have clear moderation policies? It's an issue that needs some hefty discussion and evaluation especially, as we're seeing in this thread, the outsized influence on and control of public discourse they have.
But, the issue that people are starting to react to is - are some platforms a natural monopoly?
Is it useful to have all user-generated public video clips be aggregated by one central provider? The answer seems like it’s yes.
If there’s only gonna be one platform, or it’s socially optimal to have one platform - is it right to give control of that to one entity into perpetuity?
That a political question.
No.
> Is it useful to have all user-generated public video clips be aggregated by one central provider? The answer seems like it’s yes.
The answer is no.
Vimeo exists. Facebook and Twitter both feature user-generated video content. I hear TikTok is a thing. In addition to these platforms basically anyone can self-host in 2022. Plenty of news outlets self-host.
> If there’s only gonna be one platform, or it’s socially optimal to have one platform - is it right to give control of that to one entity into perpetuity?
You have not made the case that there should be only one platform so the second part of your statement is irrelevant.
> That a political question.
Only for people who want to say things without suffering the consequences.
Given the state of cloud computing in 2022, there has never been a time that it has been easier to host your own video streaming, so it's not a natural monopoly either.
I’m not making a case for anything - I’m explaining the narrative behind a growing POV.
But I will say that YouTube is different than Facebook videos or TikTok. YouTube is meant to be a searchable video index across topics and time. It’s a video search engine and hosting service in one.
If I go to a restaurant and eat some food and complain that food tasted awful, I am not saying that the restaurant should be forced by the government to make good food nor am I saying that everyone is forced to eat at that restaurant. I'm simply saying that the product served to me was not good.
Similarly when someone complains about Youtube engaging in censorship, you should not interpret that to mean that Youtube is infringing on first amendment rights, or that everyone is forced to use Youtube... rather it's an argument that the product Youtube provides is not as good as it could otherwise be. People are welcome to have an opinion and discuss whether Youtube's policies improve its service or are detrimental to its service without it devolving into a discussion about legal rights and government enforcement.
You can disagree with a position about censorship and make good arguments that Youtube censoring certain content or being the arbiter of truth makes for a better product, just as you can disagree with someone about whether a restaurant serves good food... but don't change someone's argument about the quality of a product into an argument about someone being forced into something or having their rights violated since no one ever made any such claim.
Everyone already knows this... so instead of constantly bringing it up to make ourselves sound smart, let's instead actually discuss something more meaningful, such as whether the food served by the restaurant really is shitty? What reasons might a restaurant have for serving shitty food, do they perhaps gain financially from it? Would it be more effective to work with the restaurant to get them to stop serving shitty food, or would it be more effective to open up a restaurant next door that doesn't serve shitty food? What are the trade-offs?
Those are more interesting topics rather than pointing out the fact that a restaurant has the right to serve shitty food and you can't force them not to.
I think Youtube would be a better product and better serve their viewers and content creators if they didn't suspend The Hill for playing a clip of Donald Trump. My belief in this does not imply any use of force whatsoever.
You're not addressing why YouTube is blocking it or the state of it's own rights as a private platform, just making blanket moral statements about opinion.
The product is better if I am in control. YouTube ought to stay out of it. It does not know my intent. If it guesses wrong it should be criticized, just like a restaurant guessing at my food preferences and allergies.
This is a different argument.
You already have the agency of being in control, you can pick any platform to watch from. Youtube is exercising it's own right to censor, similar to how you want to censor for your kid, based on what you think is harmful.
1) Youtube hosts everything that's legal, no filters at all
2) Youtube decides what it does and doesn't host
3) Somethings are ok (e.g. news / fake news), others are not (porn). Who decides what's ok and not ok if it's not the legal system or youtube itself?
It is much more like 14th Amendment rights and the 1964 CRA enhancement of that. There are prohibitions on private organizations denying equal service based upon certain characteristics.
As Twitter, Youtube, Facebook are not actually broadcasters in any sense (what are they broadcasting?), their refusal to conduct business with others can't be cloaked in 1st amendment grounds. No one is forcing anyone to watch anything on any of these platforms.
The crux of this issue is political affiliation is not a protected class, and therefore it can be discriminated against. (And we do have non-immutable, changeable characteristics as protected classes.)
Any of 1) section 230 clarifications or changes, 2) expansions of protected classes under the 14th, or 3) monopoly regulatory power will make these prohibitions invalid.
There is a certain U.S. political party who has a persecution fetish that makes bad faith statements about their opinions needing to be protected, but I'll let you figure out which one it is.
And see, there's always a fine balance between private property rights and other rights. For example: you can't prevent people from a given ethnicity from shopping in your store, even though it is a private property and in many cases you can refuse service to a particular customer - just not for this reason. And this is perfectly okay, because private property rights aren't absolute.
There is nothing stopping Fox News/NewsMax/OAN from creating their own video hosting platform.
But regarding your question, I actually think that there's a serious dysfunction here in the way Fox News can legally spread lies that are very damaging to society with little to no legal consequence. They even alleged in a slander case that the Tucker Carlson show is actually just entertainment, and reasonable people can't expect it to be truthful - even though millions of people get their news primarily from Fox News, including Carlson talk shows, fully believing they are telling the truth.
And I see that YouTube is cracking down on a lot of the same misinformation that Fox News propagates (and sometimes, worse stuff), but my point is that this shouldn't be up to Google to decide what political talking points are or aren't allowed. YouTube functions as a public space in our daily lives, we express ourselves there, I don't think it's good for society for a single company decide this policy unilaterally.
On the other hand, it's good that platforms offer some kind of curation and differentiate themselves based on that. There are YouTube alternatives like Lbry in which practically everything is allowed, and I think both models are necessary.
Nothing to do with youtube’s first amendment right, only Section 230 privileges
Lets strip them down to shreds in the public square for not censoring fast enough! Woohoo
I must have missed the covenant to not enforce their patents that youtube extends to parties they've deplatformed and the indemnity they offer against the enforcement third party patent rights that they've obtained through cross licensing.
If you disagree with certain ideas, you have to fight it in the open. That's how we get a big tent with general consensus across key issues, and avoid parallel universes of polar opposite information. The end result of all this is just going to be a truly Balkanised / multipolar world, but instead of geographical boundaries, it's all going to be in the mind. Your neighbour and you could have totally different ideas about certain issues - because you are consuming and contributing to totally different sets of information. And that will lead to immense physical conflict in the future.
Very worrying times right now.
What if the dangerous outcome is what's happening right here in this thread, and the thousands of others like it here on HN and elsewhere? Right in front of our eyes every day but we cannot see it, because it is normal.
Also, I don't see how systematically scrubbing video recordings of a man who loves to say "I never said that" about things he has said on camera is a net gain to truth-telling.
[1] https://twitter.com/medvedevrussiae/status/14986197503347507...
The social media platforms can't prevent if Russia goes to war with NATO. Censoring the russian official won't do anything.
It's easy after the fact to lay blame, but interfering in discussion, even heated and wild, is an easy slope into censorship and tyranny.
No it won't, not in meaningful numbers. Most people don't want that kind of garbage in their feeds. If they did 4chan would be more popular than Twitter.
Most people don't want to have disgusting, antidemocratic viewpoints forced on them by social media. They want to not see that stuff.
If a platform is too large to be moderated effectively, there needs to be a discussion about what happens next, which indeed is either free-for-all, clear moderation policy or opaque random and easily biased decisions.
If the insurrection had been successful the best case scenario would be economic collapse and possibly civil war in the country where these platforms are based out of. It is likely that many states would reject the sovereignty of the federal government if it didn't honor the outcome of the election, and from there things would quickly spiral out of control.
The potential outcome from the end of democracy in the us would entail catastrophic risk for the companies based here.
It’s outrageously hypocritical that the Russian official’s account is alive today. They didn’t even slap a warning label on his tweet.
Twitter can't prevent this from happening by censoring a russian official.
The situation says more about the deep division and anxiety within society that made it possible than social media being a cause.